Rain
Once a sister-in-law visited us in New York City for a week. It rained the day she arrived and rained every day she was with us. As her plane lifted off from LaGuardia, the clouds broke. I was reading an old-fashioned paper in those days, the New York Sun, which gave meterological data on page two. So I could read: we had 16 inches of rain that week. The City’s average rainfall is 48 inches. One-third of our annual rain fell in that week.
I love all my sisters-in-law, and begged her not to take the rain personally.
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Here in Dallas it rained every day for six days. There was sun on Sunday, and sun on the next Sunday, but in between lots of wet. We had some local flooding, some leaks in our churches, and so forth. I was at a play on Tuesday night. At 7:30, when the show was to start, a voice spoke to us. She said that due to a technical difficulty, that evening’s performance had been canceled. We first thought it was a joke—maybe a twist in the plot. (The play was Frankenstein, after all; maybe Dr. Frankenstein had run into a technical difficulty.) But then the lights came up, and it was real.
Water had seeped in somewhere.
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Almost the first thing God made was the “firmament.” It is the sky, understood as a translucent stretched-out membrane that separates the waters above it from the waters below it. The firmament makes possible a space for air. Then God called for the dry land to appear—which means that the water below the firmament was pushed aside, or down, to make dry land possible.
The world, in Genesis chapter 1, is a little island of order in the midst of watery chaos. There are waters below, and there are waters above. The world’s whole situation is precarious.
When, some time later, God decided to start over, it happened by the earth being flooded. But it wasn’t just the waters above that came down on the earth. The waters below also swelled up.
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We don’t normally think about weather in theological terms. But it can, and perhaps should, remind us of how delicate creation is. We are surrounded on all sides by chaos. Our existence itself is so delicate, so precarious, so transiently beautiful.
I’m glad it stopped raining. But I’m also glad for the reminder.
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Out & About. From Thursday, March 1, through Sunday, March 4, I am giving the Muhlenberg Lenten Reflections at Calvary-St. George’s in New York City. The talks are at different times, in different locations; details here: https://www.calvarystgeorges.org/muhlenberg.
Wednesday, March 7, I will speak on “The Friend at the Last Supper” at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, 5100 Ross Ave., Dallas. The talk is at 7 p.m. You can come at 6:30 for a light supper (no registration required), or even at 6 p.m. for Stations of the Cross.