Clergy and lay professionals in the hurricane-ravaged Gulf Coast region are in most cases at least as wounded as those for whom they are caring. As a gesture of “support, refreshment and renewal,” a consortium of Episcopal Church organizations sponsored these professionals and their families to attend a conference titled “Weathering the Storms,” held Jan. 4-7 at the Marriott World Center in Orlando, Fla.

Hurricane Katrina was one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history, leaving more than 90,000 square miles of near total devastation behind. In Mississippi, six churches and nine clergy homes were lost, and in the parishes affected 30 to 100 percent of members lost everything. In Louisiana, 27 of 51 churches have been severely damaged. Seven were flooded and have been or will be razed. Areas in the dioceses of the Central Gulf Coast, Southwest Florida, Texas and Western Louisiana also were affected.

The conference participants—three bishops, 67 priests and deacons, 21 diocesan lay professionals, 60 spouses and 56 children—have sacrificially sought to provide comfort to their shattered communities and parishes. Recognizing that the physical and psychological results of so much unrelieved suffering would be overwhelming for anyone, Weathering the Storm organizers paid all expenses. Conference organizers included the Church Pension Group, CREDO Institute, Episcopal Relief and Development, the Presiding Bishop’s office, and the Office of the Bishop Suffragan for Chaplaincies.

Workshops, called “conversation groups,” helped give the adults specific assistance with finance, insurance, vocation, emotional and physical health, legal issues, and spiritual life questions. There were individual consultations available from the 57 faculty and staff as well as parallel programs for children and teens, including a trip to Disney World. Most of all, there was worship and prayer.

Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold spoke to the group of the sometimes painful slowness and uncertainty borne by people on a journey, whether out of Egypt to the promised land, on the road to Emmaus, or to a rebuilt home in New Orleans.

“I am so amazed at how much you have done under the most terrible of circumstances,” Bishop Griswold said. “It is amazing how, stripped of so much, how so much grace and love and beauty can shine through.”

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