Heavy Weather

Hurricane season is now upon us. We in these disunited States have already endured a spring offensive of monstrous tornado-breeding thunderstorms, sweeping in waves eastward across the land. Depicted on the terrifying animated maps of the Weather Channel the storms resembled broad-fronted blitzkriegs on war charts. The channel treated us again and again to jumpy, rain-spotted videos that pan across jumbles of SUVs and pick-ups, crushed and flatten like beer cans after the bash, all nicely backdroped by heaps of gigantic splinters—the local shopping mall. One of these malls was less than fifteen miles from my mother’s home in tidewater Virginia.

I don’t own a TV, but I still like the Weather Channel. I’m not alone in harboring a long-standing fascination with tornados and hurricanes, as well as floods and tsunamis, windstorms and wildfires, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. This fascination, I’m convinced, is a rudimentary manifestation of our innate attraction to God. When you come down to it, all these displays of natural power are a form of revelation. Instinctively, we are drawn to those disclosures of the indomitable higher power which compels us to recognize how very small, weak and helpless we truly are.

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