Thanks be to God for the Rain
You sent a gracious rain, O God, upon your inheritance; *
you refreshed the land when it was weary.
—Psalm 68:9
Thanks be to God for the rain!
Did you know the Book of Common Prayer actually has a prayer for rain? We don’t need it today, but it goes like this (p. 828):
O God, heavenly Father, who by thy Son Jesus Christ hast promised to all those who seek thy kingdom and its righteousness all things necessary to sustain their life: Send us, we entreat thee, in this time of need, such moderate rain and showers, that we may receive the fruits of the earth, to our comfort and to thy honor; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
You can tell by all the ‘thees’ and ‘thys’ that this prayer predates Pete Delkus and the News 8 Weather Center. It comes out of a time when the spiritual life was more deeply connected to the natural world.
In fact, for almost all of human history, divine favor and nourishing rain have been much more tightly connected in people’s minds than they are today. Personally, I don’t usually think of the weather in spiritual terms. I think of the weather in terms like “a region of high pressure stalled over Texas creating a heat dome.” I hate heat domes. But I don’t do a lot of rain dances, you know? Our ability to explain the weather meteorologically doesn’t mean God doesn’t act — but it does make it more obvious to us all that Hurricane Polo is involved.
Though we’re right about the meteorology, we have also lost something. We’ve gained a scientific truth but lost a spiritual truth. Watching the rain gather in pools and hearing it pound on the roof has taken a pressure off my soul today, lifted my spirit, filled me with gratitude to God. I can feel there’s something more to this making of mud than meteorology. For us humans, formed out of the mud of the earth, rain is a gift of God – a gracious rain. Let us, weary of the heat and drought, be refreshed and turn to the Lord in praise today. We can be glad for the science that explains it, and glad too for spirits that can absorb the rain as if they were hardened, cracked and thirsty North Texas clay.
In Christ,
Fr. Andrew
