I'm sitting at my lovely new "office," looking out my window that looks so much larger without a turtle tank in front of it, and watching the rain.
I love rain.
I love gentle, soaking rains that seep into thirsty fields. I love pounding, driving rains accompanied by ground-shaking thunder and blinding lightning. I love warm, misty rains you can walk in, your face upraised, knowing God is kissing you. I love icy cold rains that you run from, hunkered down, as fast as you can until you reach a cozy kitchen and a mug of hot chocolate.
I'm not sure why rain has such a hold over me. Perhaps it's from growing up on a farm where rain was life and the lack of it was, at worst, financial disaster and at best day upon day of lugging irrigation pipes 30-feet-long and six inches around, one on each shoulder across burning cornfields.
After that, the threat of "drought" never leaves you. And the relief from drought never fails to energize you. I can remember dancing in drought-breaking rains as a kid . . . with the grown-ups standing just inside the open barn doors, close enough to feel the spray, doing nothing but watching the drops and relishing the coolness in the air.
Maybe I also like the rain because, let's face it, too much sunshine can get to be just plain too much. Think desert. And when your soul is tired and grieving, it's nice to have the weather cooperate as if you were the heroine in a Charlotte Brontë novel.
For some reason, rain is romantic. (In the literary sense . . . although I guess it could be in the amorous sense as well. I rather missed out on the latter, but I have a good imagination!) Think of all the "rain" songs:
"Singing in the Rain" performed by Gene Kelly
"Who'll Stop the Rain" performed by Creedence Clearwater Revival
"Rockin' With the Rhythm of the Rain" performed by The Judds
"Rainy Days and Mondays" performed by The Carpenters
"Alabama Rain" written and performed by Jim Croce
"Kentucky Rain" performed by Elvis Presley
"I Love a Rainy Night" performed by Eddie Rabbitt
"Smoky Mountain Rain" performed by Ronnie Milsap
"Rain is a Good Thing" performed by Luke Bryan
"Rain, Rain, Go Away" performed by children everywhere
Yeah, I could keep going with this, but I am exposing far too much about my musical preferences and am afraid I will lose half of my audience if I keep it up! Have a good listen, and enjoy your next rainy night!
Part 1:
ReplyDeletePlease forgive your gadfly for his pertinacious buzzing, yet buzz he must if only to arouse you from your maudlin state of despair--maudlin not with the ferment of fruit or grain, but with the ferment of nostalgic longing which has dulled the edge of sober judgment. Even if you swat at your gadfly, and hit your mark, it is a small sacrifice if it draws you from the slough of despond. To awaken the Phoenix from her lulling slumber in the ash heap, even by stoking her fiery ire, would be a consolation akin to Elisha's bones resuscitating the dead.
If a thing of beauty is a joy forever, your love of rain is well worth indefinitely pondering in the heart. A longing for "times of refreshing," of "snow on Mount Zalmon," or the dew dropping on the Negev and Bashan is a blessed longing. Such thirst is at the heart of that life which draws deeply from "every word that proceeds from the mouth of God." The kiss of the rain and caress of the breeze are palpable reminders of His loving presence, calling us out of our rutted, churning thoughts to a hope substantially rooted, not only in interior faithfulness, but with God’s faithfulness, which “fills all things in all ways.”
Such reminders are indispensible in a life of sorrows, where the sojourner’s path leads through a burning desert, a place in which many promising mirages conceal dessicating deceit. Augustine's poetic description of such miserable confusion in City of God XIX, 8, and Bronte's description of the curated "freshness" of the petty, malicious, and deceitful schoolgirls of Rue Fosette, preparing for the fete in Vilette--their combined reflections recall that dream in which one is quaffing water, yet wakes to find himself more parched than ever.
How keen Bronte's insight, how great the wellspring which overflowed into her writing! How disguised her heroines (and heroes: especially The Professor), appearing as dull, vaporous grey clouds (Lucy's dress for the fete is grey), yet brimming over with the substantial refreshment one desperately seeks in a desert of charming deceit, predatory prettiness, and crushingly peevish envy. Just like the God who hides Himself, their vitality is hidden in the same cloak as the Nazarene, having "no beauty or majesty to attract" by outward pretension. Like Wisdom, they babble like a brook rather than roaring like the ocean.
I am not a singer of trabadour songs; I detest and deride, with Shakespeare, those petty, flirtatious sonnets to Rosalind which litter the sylvan sacredness with their vanities. Yet I would respond to your despondency and contracting despair, and offer a cup of cold water: I do see, in you, the wonderfully cloaked refreshment of a Bronte'an cloud, which holds, in "sagging skin," greying hair, faltering voice, and tear-washed and weary visage, the substance of life-giving rain and wellspring of life. This is what Bronte thirsted for in all her thoughts and writing. In you is the ironic reversal of the mirage: an inward renewing rain veiled in outwardly fading dust. In this, all your alleged physical flaws become endearing and beautiful to those with eyes to see and ears to hear.
Though I still gauge myself but a child in awe of Bronte's insight and wisdom, yet in a glimpse, I see there is more beauty to you, when covered in your daughter's vomit or the dust and sweat of the farm, than there is to a host of mannequins who curate their plastic carcasses, covering their hollow deadness with cosmetics and perfumes.
Part 2:
ReplyDeleteSuch beauty is rare. Many who are outwardly fading do not share it: their grey cloaks often conceal peevishness and malice-- dark clouds of invidious resentment. Being such waterless mists as Jude describes, they repudiate the self-abnegating and ingenuous humility of a Bronte heroine, and seize upon the quarellsome, choking blackness of the cyclone. I am unsure whether Bronte recognizes these, though perhaps I do not yet follow all her subtle thoughts. Yet my eyes and bones burn with the acrid smoke of such an one: how bitter the choking smoke that billows above burning sand! One feels the need to call for Lazarus and a draught of water for relief from such an hell!
Of course, the Bronte heroine knows the thrill of the storm just as did Elijah in his race through the rain, and Moses and the people in their seabed-walk through pelting rain and fiery shafts of lightning, hurled at their close, proud pursuers. I know I have run afoul of your storm like a careless ship (having incited it by my own blustery blunder), but storms, distinct from dessicating cyclones, still bring rain. The mortification of such turmoil is not without its despair, yet it is "better to be poor than a liar," better to wait out the storm for a still small whisper of a pearl, than to surrender to alluring charm or sardonic "practicality" of swine and dogs.
I sense you oft come to the border of invidiousness, and sometimes wander to the slough of the mannequins. Yet such is not the way that befits you, and your resistance, if imperfect, is refreshing. Neither bitterness, nor coquettishness can trace the shape of your heart, and I adjure you to guard your heart against both envy, and the self-reducing resignation which weakly surrenders to the broad way of worldly allurements aimed to "awaken love before it desires." True beauty has no need to resort to peevish resentment or flirtatious prettiness, just as rain and wellspring have no need of smoke or mirage.
I say all this, not from expectation, but for exhortation and encouragement, lest you be discouraged by circumstances which are wildly incongruous with the beauty God has endowed you with, a beauty that continues to unfold like an orchid in a trash heap.
Even if I were forever relegated to observe at a distance, and for but few fleeting moments...to consider such beauty is to bathe in eternity's showering of the deserts of time: wonderful spear-like drops which pierce through sky and raiment, with paradoxically salubrious inconvenience, demanding: "must give us pause;" demanding me to ponder in my heart that "there lives the dearest freshness deep down things;" calling me out of the desert of this Babylon and its deceitful mirages and burning smoke, into showers of abundance, even if they seem as minute and far away as Elijah's tiny cloud. By such knowledge, faith still retains hold of the substance of verdant life even when one's steps are perenially guided through the desolating bitterness of the Valley of Bacah.
How good the call to ponder a beauty beyond what I could think or imagine, even if clothed in faulty mortality for now, and staid at far remove. To behold and understand it will require all of this life, and endless time, to articulate, embody, and embrace. Oh to have eyes that see and ears that hear! Oh to never again mistake sand for water, nor blackening smoke for rainclouds, but to seek and have found even a few fleeting drops of refreshing honesty in a burning desert of deceit.