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Windstorms and Wildfires: Finding Christ Among Devastation

Windstorms and Wildfires: Finding Christ Among Devastation

Last updated on: January 17, 2025 at 3:53 am by Verónica A. Gutiérrez

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Windstorms and Wildfires: Finding Christ Among Devastation 2025-01-17T03:53:04-04:00 Verónica A. Gutiérrez

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

As I sit down in the local library to write this post, I can see the ocean extending beyond the tree tops and red tiled roofs of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Following the curve of the coast, I can see beach towns, most notably a collection of tall white buildings that must be Santa Monica, where I lived when I moved to SoCal in 2004. But then the buildings stop. Sweeping my eyes to the left there is an eerie emptiness, for little remains of the 21-mile coastal stretch of Malibu. Further along the Pacific Coast Highway, even less remains of Pacific Palisades. Places I know well are no longer.

View of the devastated coast line from a library on the Palos Verdes Peninsula on January 16, 2025

Map showing how the curve of the Malibu coast is visible from the Palos Verdes Peninsula

Forgive me if my post is disjointed, but I have been in such distress since the fires broke out. I’m grateful that aside from dangerous air quality when the fires first erupted – when flames were visible from the Peninsula – my family has not been in danger. Even so, with fires erupting all around us with zero containment, homes burning on live television because fire hydrants had no water, and Santa Ana winds producing hurricane-force winds causing what meteorologists dubbed “fire-canes,” I felt myself slipping into a panic. All I could do was cry. Receiving an erroneous evacuation warning did not help.

Flames engulfing Pacific Palisades, as seen from the Palos Verdes Peninsula hours after the fires erupted on January 7, 2025

What did I do? First, I asked my husband to hold me until I stopped shaking. Then, strangely enough, I took charge of my health. Sealed inside due to dangerous levels of smoke outside, I reached into the back of my closet and pulled out a folder of printed guidelines I had used during lockdown to slim down. Documenting what I eat, following a regimented workout plan, and seeing the inches melt away over the past week has given me enough control to function. That and prayer, of course.

Firestorm: “The Palisades Fire ravages a neighborhood amid high winds in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2025. AP Image.”

Rather than focus on the devastation, I’d like to use this post to share a few stories of hope. I’ll start with a story with deep personal significance.

I learned about the fires when my husband texted at 2pm on January 7 to say that a dear friend – godfather to our youngest son – was under evacuation orders in Pacific Palisades. Not wanting to alarm my children, I kept our play date with a school friend, playing basketball with my daughter until dusk. Back at home we turned on the news and saw firestorms raging across Pacific Palisades as the Eaton fire devoured Altadena, and several other smaller fires spread rapidly. My husband and I checked the fire maps late into the night, hoping our friend’s home would be spared; hearing on the news that the “alphabet streets” in Pacific Palisades had all burned, we realized his house was gone. I began praying that the Catholic church a few blocks away would survive.

It did not.

I was watching live news coverage the next afternoon, Wednesday, January 8, when a newscaster announced that the archdiocese had just confirmed that Corpus Christi church had burned. I called my husband, who has known the pastor for 42 years, and sobbed with him over the phone. This beautiful church where we attended Mass every year to celebrate my husband’s birthday before walking over to our dear friend’s home to spend the afternoon. They were both gone.

At the dining room table halfheartedly preparing a lecture a few days later, my husband texted me joyful news: Fire captain makes way through ruins of incinerated church to find tabernacle intact. Corpus Christi church burned, but the tabernacle, and the Blessed Sacrament inside it, survived! What a beautiful reminder that though our churches might be destroyed, though everything around us may burn, God will always be with us.

While writing this post, I learned that the church’s stainless-steel Stations of the Cross also survived: Twisted Steel. Charred Bricks. Exploded Windows. What Remains Unscathed? ‘A Miracle.’ The article mentions three other symbols of hope: sacred Torah scrolls saved from the flames in Pasadena, the bell tower of a Baptist church in Altadena standing as a beacon, and a sculpture aptly named “Broken but Together” surviving the blaze in Pacific Palisades.

One afternoon, my children came home from school telling me all sorts of stories about how courage and faith were getting people through the wildfires. A 95-tear-old man saved his own home and those of his neighbors with a garden hose. Holy images had been left on porches and those homes survived even through the neighborhood burned. A family sang to Mama María, my children told me, amidst the rubble of their burned home. You may have heard this story, because it’s gone viral.

Early the next morning, my sister texted a link to the story and video of a family singing Regina Caeli: Los Angeles family sings hymn to Mary amid rubble of their burned home. To my astonishment, I realized I know this family! I went to college with Peter Halpin and one of his cousins, and I worked with someone who married one of the daughters. It’s difficult not to weep when hearing the Halpins sing as the camera pans to expose the charred remains of their neighborhood. Even Bette Midler reposted this story as a symbol of hope.

“The story of Peter and Jackie Halpin, along with their entire family of six adult children, has moved many hearts online. (photo: Go Fund Me / Halpin Family)”

I began to wonder: Am I sufficiently detached from earthly goods to sing in the midst of destruction? Could I be happy in the face of so much loss?

This morning on my way to Azusa, I listened to Harvard professor and best-selling author Arthur Brooks discuss the Science of Happiness. As I drove past the still smoldering Eaton Fire, barely discernible as a small cloud of smoke in the foothills on an otherwise glorious winter morning, Brooks described a trip to the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, the world’s most famous museum of Chinese arts and artifacts. Seeing a jade sculpture of village life, he asked his guide, a philosopher of Chinese and Western art, to discuss how this piece differed philosophically from art produced in the West. The guide explained that Westerners perceive of art as something made from nothing, an empty canvas filled with brush strokes, whereas the East perceives of art as already existing, an object, like jade, waiting for someone to take away the parts that aren’t art and reveal what is hidden inside.

Brooks says the guide “blew his mind” when he equated this attitude with the Western idea of success, of beginning with an empty canvas of life and filling it with brushstrokes, rather than chipping away and chipping away until revealing your true self, as in the East. In response, Brooks advised his listeners to find ways to chip away at the superfluous things in life and focus on the small, beautiful things, which will lead to satisfaction, an element of happiness.

The little things: like a tabernacle buried in debris, a bell tower left standing, a beloved surviving image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, prompting song?

Unable to articulate what it feels like to be living through these ongoing wildfires, I’m grateful that someone at the New York Times has. I’ll leave you with this article: United by Disaster, L.A. Mourns. More than a week after the wildfires ignited, the hazy numbness described by many looks a lot like grieving.

Christian life

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Verónica A. Gutiérrez

Wildfires

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