A God With Whom I Am Not Familiar

A God With Whom I Am Not Familiar
Tim Wise

This is an open letter to the man sitting behind me at La Paz today, in Nashville, at lunchtime, in the Brooks Brothers shirt:

You don’t know me. But I know you.

I watched you as you held hands with your tablemates at the restaurant where we both ate this afternoon. I listened as you prayed, and thanked God for the food you were about to eat, and for your own safety, several hundred miles away from the unfolding catastrophe in New Orleans.

You blessed your chimichanga in the name of Jesus Christ, and then proceeded to spend the better part of your meal — and mine, since I was too near your table to avoid hearing every word — moralistically scolding the people of that devastated city, heaping scorn on them for not heeding the warnings to leave before disaster struck. Then you attacked them — all of them, without distinction, it seemed — for the behavior of a relative handful: those who have looted items like guns, or big-screen TVs.

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