Praying for Victims of Wildfires in Los Angeles
Posted by On January 7, 2025, a series of destructive wildfires ignited in Los Angeles county, spreading quickly due to high winds and exceedingly dry conditions on the ground. At one point, first responders were fighting five fires at once. As of January 31, the two largest fires had been almost contained after burning 23,500 acres (the Palisades Fire) and 14,000 acres (the Eaton Fire.)
Last weekend, I drove up to Altadena, where the Eaton fire tore through densely populated neighborhoods and businesses. The National Guard perimeter finally had been taken down, and it felt important to see the destruction of a neighborhood I love.
The friend who accompanied me said, “It looks like a graveyard.” He was not being figurative. The landscape looked like old graveyards: mostly flattened reminders of what was, dramatically punctuated by towering stone structures, like the gravestones of the rich and powerful.
These were chimneys.
They became guideposts, ways of distinguishing one plot from another. I drove by the house I used to live in, or I think I did. It had no chimney, so it was harder to tell.
I stopped by the side of the road to inspect some hardened flows of molten metal. These too were everywhere. I wondered what they had been. One now looked like a parrot, another like a supplicating alien. I pocketed the alien. All prayers are needed right now.
Then I looked up. Hanging from a blackened tree in the foreground was a birdhouse. It was the only structure that survived on that lot. It looked to be in perfect condition against the curling stucco and rubble in the background.
That was just one image that made no sense. There were many:
A cluster of businesses that looked unharmed flanked by buildings that had been consumed.
A single, tidy little house painted a cheerful purple, with no neighbors left for blocks on end.
On one lot, everything had burned except a children’s rope swing with red, blue, and yellow handholds, still dangling in the wind and ready for play.
This whole experience — from the sudden explosion of fire, to watching my city burn, and finally seeing the worst of the destruction firsthand — has reminded me that one of the forces in this world is chaos.
I don’t want to lose sight of the climate change factors that made the fires so destructive. And it is important to hold onto whatever meaning we can create together as we mourn.
But I also do not want to make it all mean something. Because it was the randomness of chaos that left one purple house and one rope swing. Chaos ignored a bird’s house and consumed a human’s. Chaos left one business standing and not another.
In the wake of such destruction, acknowledging chaos can be a comfort. It lifts the burden of meaning where no meaning can be found, only created after-the-fact.
Here are some prayers to say in the face of circumstances we cannot control or understand:
A Prayer about Climate Change and Wildfires
A Prayer for a Sober View of Disaster
A Prayer for Comfort after Disasters