Being safe and warm and dry, clean and well-fed and fairly comfortable, knowing that my kids were safe and that neighbours were watching my house--these things should have made me feel blessed and grateful, because for so many people in my town and in dozens of other communities that weekend, things were a whole lot worse. I tried blessed-and-grateful, but all I could manage was exhaustion. And overlying the exhaustion lay a deep, strong, lively anger, which I was having a hell of a time managing as I sat in the bright suburban church.

We'd found shelter with a friend in one of the glossy new communities that have sprung up at the city's fringes. Call it Newbury. The storm had barely touched it--a few minor local power outages, a few damaged trees. But most of the power lines in Newbury are buried, and it has few trees, none mature. Newbury was doing very nicely, thank you; its big handsome shopping mall--the best in the city, some say--was busy with people looking for January bargains.

Meanwhile, between the city and the St. Lawrence River, not one light shone. All of Cornwall was dark; three million without power in Montreal; 80 percent of Kingston. The hydro crews fought weather and exhaustion to re-string the lines, and the lines snapped almost as fast as they could fix them. The army was out, bless them, helping wherever they could. But it was bad, very bad, out there.

God help the dairy farmers, trying to milk and water and feed their herds, and dumping the milk because the processing plants were down. God help the sugarbush and orchard operators, hearing their trees groan and crack and scream as the ice tore them apart. God help my neighbours, finding ways from one day to another to stay warm and cook meals without power or heat. God help the families with small children trying to make do in the shelters. God help the elderly, forced from their homes or sitting alone in the cold and dark. God help Montreal, the great city gone dark. None of that seemed to matter much in Newbury. Newbury was fine.

The psalm did me in--dear God, did we really need "The voice of the Lord strips the forest bare"? But I got myself under control for the sermon, which was very well done--well preached, well thought out, good theology, and not the least mention of the devastation out there. The storm-hit areas did get a brief mention in the prayers of the people. And that was it.

I found myself raging inwardly: they don't care, it's not their problem. Oh, I'm no better; I don't ache for hundreds killed in floods in China; why should I expect Newbury to care for my town? But we're not half a world away. We're less than an hour. We work together in offices; we share the same newspaper; we bump elbows in shops and museums. Newbury could help. These people have money (Newbury is prosperous), they have warm houses, they have cars; they could be offering shelter. They could be taking hot food out to the workers. They could be offering to help clean up come spring, when the worst of the work will start. But no --they have their busy lives. They aren't interested. Newbury's like that; people don't make eye contact much. When I'd been introduced as someone from the devastated area, people had mumbled and turned away, embarrassed. They keep to themselves in Newbury.

I wanted to call down God's judgment on Newbury; I wanted that bright, prosperous, smug, uncaring smirk wiped off Newbury's fat face. I wanted Newbury afflicted with boils, hemorrhoids, herpes simplex, and tax audits. I sat in that bright, prosperous ultra-modern Anglican church hating, it, hating everyone in it, all the people who were singing of God's love and murmuring about cedars of Lebanon being broken, while my kind, plain, good town suffered and the trees of rural Eastern Ontario--maples, pine, cedars, birch, aspen, poplar, oak--snapped, broken in their millions.

I knew I was being unreasonable. There was no harm in these people, no malice--maybe a certain want of imagination or empathy, but that's so common it's hardly worth getting one's knickers in a twist about. I could not know what was in their minds and hearts, or what efforts some of them might be making that I didn't know about; maybe they were sending large donations of cash. My anger really had more to do with my own fear and sense of helplessness than with anything Newbury had actually done or left undone. I was hating Newbury for not being home, and that's hardly Newbury's fault.

But that didn't help the anger, although it stopped me from standing up in the midst of the congregation and yelling at the top of my lungs. I found myself in my imagination sitting on God's lap, a helpless four-year-old, beating my impotent fists on God's chest and crying with the fitful noisy gusts of an exhausted child in a tantrum. Funny--I'd always known that it was technically okay to be angry with God; God's shoulders are broad, and God knows where the anger is coming from. But this was the first time I'd actually tried it.

Then, in my vision, my anger snapped like the one of the limbs on my own beloved maples, and I found myself leaning up against God's chest, so tired my bones ached. I wanted to dig my face into the hollow of God's shoulder, to feel God's hand on my hair, to rest and be comforted and cry quietly. And, for a moment or two, I did feel that.

Newbury is God's to judge, not mine, and I must trust God to do the looking after, just as I must trust God with my beloved trees and the cat that went missing (black Dynamite) and the milk cows and the elderly and all the other things I couldn't do a damned thing about. Yours, God, not mine; I am helpless, but for Your help.

We rose for the offertory. I only put a dollar in the plate. I wasn't enraged any more, but I figured Newbury has a whole lot more money than I do. If they're all right while we aren't, they can at least look after themselves.