Rain, rain and more rain! Is it time to build an ark? The
last time I checked my name wasn’t Noah, and the thought of being cooped up
with all those animals is definitely unappealing to say the least!
Yet perhaps the rain teaches a lesson we can all learn. The famed
monastic and theologian Thomas Merton gives us a different picture and understanding
of the rain. In his work Raids on the Unspeakable he writes:
“I came up
here from the monastery last night, sloshing through the cornfield, said
Vespers, and put some oatmeal on the Coleman stove for supper. It boiled over
while I was listening to the rain...The night became very dark. The rain
surrounded the whole cabin with its enormous virginal myth, a whole world of
meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor. Think of it: all that speech pouring
down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead
leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with
water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside! What a
thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this
wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting
speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges,
and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!
Nobody
started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this
rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.”
I believe it is time to stop worrying when the rain will stop,
and begin to listen to its holy and majestic voice. By doing so we may just
hear the still, quiet voice of God speaking through the pitter-patter of his
divine creation.
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