We may have been to the moon—if not personally, collectively—but we still don’t control the weather down here.It’s probably not news that the eastern part of the country has been getting a lot of rain lately.One of the factors that led me to write Weathering the Psalms was the overwhelming tendency for humans to attribute weather to the divine.It used to be that we couldn’t reach the sky, so placing deities there seemed a safe bet.Now that we’ve shot through the thin membrane of atmosphere that swaddles our planet, we’ve discovered beyond a cold, dark space liberally sprinkled with stars and planets but mostly full of dark matter.The deity we thought lived beyond the sky somehow wasn’t anywhere our probes flew and recorded.
Still, down here on the surface, we live with the realities of weather and still think of it in terms of punishment and pleasure.When we don’t get enough rain, God is destroying us with drought.Too much rain, and the Almighty is washing us away with flood.The true variable in all of this is, obviously, human perception.Sure, animals experience the weather too, and they sometimes look to be as disgusted as humans when it snows too early or too late, or when the rain just won’t stop.I have to wonder if somewhere in their animals brains there’s the seed of an idea that the bird, or squirrel, or woodchuck in the sky is angry at them for some unspecified faunal sin.
While heading to the store yesterday, after weather reports assured us the rain was finally over for the day, the skies told a different story.The vistas around here are never what they were in the midwest—or what they are in Big Sky country—but the approaching storm was pretty obvious.An opaque drapery of precipitation was coming our way and although a rainbow would cheekily show up afterward, knowing that we’d been caught away from home with our windows open felt like punishment for something.Perhaps the hubris of buying a house when all I really require is a corner in which to write.Somewhere in my reptilian brain I translated a natural event into a supernatural one.When we got home to discover the storm had gone north of us, it felt like redemption.I spied the birds sheltering in shadows from the sun’s heat.Were they thinking it was some kind of divine avian displeasure, and hoping for some rain to cool things off for a bit?If so, was our religion correct, or was theirs?