Pastor's Column September 2005

Sturm und Drang
by Rev. K Karpen

My first year at college, I took courses in German Literature, US Foreign Policy and Adolescent Development. It was probably an early sign that I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. The three did have one thing in common: they each had a section titled: Sturm und Drang.

Sturm und Drang is usually translated 'storm and stress,' with an eye to alliteration rather than accuracy. The expression, as it's borrowed from German into English, signifies upheaval, disorder, turbulence, and agitation.

I've been thinking a lot about Sturm und Drang over the past week and a half. In the aftermath of Katrina, our eyes and minds have been filled again and again with images of upheaval, turbulence, disorder and agitation. Just when we think we've seen it all, we are made aware of some new horror, some further testament to bungling incompetence, or even, sometimes, some unexpected evidence of the extremes of human compassion.

Watching the footage of Hurricane Katrina was enough to remind us of the power of a storm. But watching and hearing about the horrors of its aftermath give us whole new layers of meaning for Sturm und Drang.

Sturm is storm, surely, but maybe a better translation for Drang is 'pressure.' The storm is long past. But the pressure? I'm still feeling that. The pressure to respond. The pressure to make it right. The pressure to reach out. The pressure to change. At first I thought it was coming from me: a sort of vicarious survivor's guilt. Now I know it's coming from God.

That kind of pressure makes me want to press back. Makes me want to say, 'Come on, I'm far away. This one is for someone else.' But it doesn't do any good. I know most of you are feeling that same pressure, and having the same trouble getting it to go away. Emails and calls come through here with great ideas: flood buckets, making health kits, reaching out to our members from the Gulf coast; housing survivors who want to come to NYC; connecting with students from Tulane who are coming to study at Columbia and other nearby schools; sending cards and pictures from our kids; sending a work team. And those are just the ideas from the last half-hour.

Others of you are feeling the pressure to press for change. Prophetic pressure. God is nudging you to question the priorities of our government, our culture, our society and our church.

If anything good is to come out of Katrina, we need to pay attention to both kinds of pressure. Sturm is inevitable. We won't make it through life without storms. The question for us is what we do about the Drang.