By his spirit he hath garnished the heavens; his hand hath formed the crooked serpent. Lo, these are parts of his ways: but how little a portion is heard of him? but the thunder of his power who can understand?
                                                                                Job 26.13-14

                                                                    Weather in the country

    In the country the weather is indeed the great fact, linking us with powers that are daily beyond our controlling.  In the country one must "make hay while the sun shines," and, I suspect, something like that was soon current when the hunter-gatherers in these northern climes first turned their attention toward agriculture.  All the legends tell of a moment when, through some decisive spiritual influence, the settled life of the farmer began to replace that of the nomadic wanderers.  It was not always seen as a positive change (witness the story of Cain and Abel), but as the world grows older it also grows less flexible and what had once been a smooth continuum of easy motion  and little sense of the passage of time becomes more constrained and time becomes more and more dominant.  Anyone past middle age has direct experience of the process!  And gradually settlements spring up with fields around them and then some settlements grow bigger until small towns appear and then cities and then a situation like our own today, in which the mass of men live entirely divorced from the earth, supported ever more tenuously by farms that increasingly mimic industrial enterprises.
    We have been very fortunate to have been able to live in a corner of the world somewhat removed from the trends of the day.  "Yes, but you can't turn back the hands of the clock," goes
the stock response, as if it was ever a question of going backwards.  It is the popular image of modern culture that is truly "going backward," that is, leading man ever further and further away from his true home.  Even as he is tied more and more completely to a space, he becomes a spiritual wanderer in a spiritual wasteland, "in a dry land, where no water is."  There is no going forward that does not involve a turning,, a looking back to get one's bearings.  Sometimes the "veil" Isaiah describes as "covering the nations" seems very thin.

                                                            The Air and Sky Show Wonders
    In that old way of thinking we dismiss as "pre-scientific" fire and water, the elements which, with earth and air, make up the substance of the visible creation, are not entirely opposites as I trust they are when I dump a bucket of water on some embers that have escaped from our incinerator. The ancient Egyptians, for example, thought of the sun, that source of fire, as being kindled each morning from the waters at the edge of the world.
    The old way of seeing things, with its apparent simplicity, gave a reasonable and quite workable description of what it was that a man saw before him.  What it also did, as we often forget, was to connect everything that was around him with a larger world that did not appear directly.  In a way, his world-view was just like ours in that it appealed to the things that were not seen to explain the things that are seen.
    I have never seen an atom, and yet I can quite happily talk about atoms and molecules and list off at least some of the "elements" that make up the Periodic Table because the scientists who work with this kind of thing assure me that that is what lies behind the apparently solid surface of my gold ring or my steel hammer.
    But our fathers had their own experts, who, by dint of a discipline at least as arduous as that of modern scientists, were prepared to speak with authority about the invisible world that informed the whole of the visible world. It wasn't that they didn't know that gold was gold.  What they sought though, was not physical properties in ever increasing minuteness, but the spiritual properties of what they knew to be a created order, properties which, rightly understood, would lead them to the Author of that order.  The other day, that old way of seeing things seemed not old at all.  It was a day which began in water and ended in fiery thunderbolts.
    No fog on the mountain that morning, betokening a rainy day, and no fog in the valley, prophesying sun.  Our whole little world was wrapped in fog.  As an invisible sun presumably rose in an eastern sky the only effect was to intensify a greyness that was almost palpable.
    It was one of those mornings when this solid world which we take for granted suddenly dissolves and we grope our way as if transported into a world only then coming into being—as if we were walking on the waters of the first creation when objects had not yet entirely gained their substance, were still rather tentative.  There was not a breath of air.  As I walked to the barn our little world was like a familiar face, thought never to be forgotten, whose outlines have grown dim in the mind.   
    Gradually the fog thinned and withdrew into higher clouds as the day advanced, but the sky remained largely grey. Some time after the sun had set in a grey sky behind us and dusk was gathering in the valley and on all the hills, we walked up to the garden to move the soaker hose.
    "Look at that!" my wife exclaimed, pointing away to the east.  I looked, and there rising up in the sky was a huge dome-shaped thunder head, rising so high it was crowned with a skullcap of ice crystals.  Black at the bottom, it towered up beyond our evening into a day beyond our day, rose and purple and gold, luminous and majestic.  It looked as if all the mist of the morning was gathering in response to the Psalmist's words: "He bowed the heavens also, and came down: and darkness was under his feet.  And he rode upon a cherub, and did fly: yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind."
    Darkness, and light.  Water - and fire.  Even as we watched, from the very top of this vaporous mountain a bolt of lightning flashed to the ground.  Again and again bright streaks hurtled down from the very summit of the cloud as if hurled by a mighty arm.  So far away we never heard the thunder, the piled glory of that cloud seemed right before us. 
    A few moments later we had finished moving the soaker hose to another part of the garden and, when we looked again toward the east, the cloud was gone.  The world was grey again.  Night was falling.  But what a day it had been!  The Preacher was right: "As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child: even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all." 
    We had seen some clues though.                                                                                 10 September 1996

"O heavenly Father, who hast filled the world with beauty; Open, we beseech thee, our eyes to behold thy gracious hand in all thy works."  So begins an old prayer, "For joy in God's creation."  The modern world has lost its sense of both of joy and of beauty and especially of the world we live in as a part of God's creation.  Instead we have come to regard the world around us as a kind of blank with which we can do as we please, never mind the cost to those other creatures whose world this is as well.   Nevertheless the world is full of wonders, fragile though they may be, and the attentive can find in them indication of a spiritual beauty that draws the heart to the Source of all things. 

    Wonders appear as the seasons change. Friends of ours living down closer to Saint John have cardinals coming to their bird feeders on a regular basis. We have seen a cardinal twice in all our time here. My wife, who taught at the high school for a number of years, was off teaching the first time a cardinal showed up. I rather think she felt I should have done something to persuade it to settle down, at least until she got home. Fortunately, the next time a cardinal appeared here, only a few years ago, we were both home, and perhaps (I don’t remember for sure) she may have been the first to spot the bright flash of cardinal red, and so, so to speak, redress the balance.
    Alas, birds have their own agendas, and although cardinals have been creeping up the eastern seaboard for quite some time, they have yet to make more than sporadic forays into our area. And so, although we have gained some fame recently for keeping weather records, the world has been changing around us. Many changes in climate have rather dire implications but some bring memories to life.
    When I lived the first part of my life in Pennsylvania cardinals visited the feeders my father put up on a regular basis and in the spring, as the snows melted away and the grass turned green again, we would hear the sweet whistling call - “What cheer, what cheer, what cheer!” - as they worked out their territories and began to raise families.
    The cardinals were not the only creatures whose presence made an impression on my mind, even as a child who was not particularly interested in wildlife, living as we did in urban surroundings. Although my family lived in the western, more industrial, part of the state, I spent part of each summer with relatives in a small town in the farming district of the Lehigh Valley in the eastern part of the state. There I got to know families who worked small farms and something of their life. There were no huge machines working the land in those days. No fancy barns either. Each family had a small tractor, a stone barn built probably in the nineteenth century, and a lot of hard work to do by hand.
    I remember watching loose hay being loaded, pitchfork by pitchfork-full onto a wagon drawn by horses and I remember being told that the chap who stood on the wagon and arranged the load, would, when the time came to unload the wagon into the mow, unload it pitchfork by pitchfork and never find himself standing on the hay he was trying to move. When we moved down here and started to put in loose hay I realised what a great skill was involved in that apparently simple task.
    Summer evenings there in a small town in the middle of the richest farmland east of the great plains, my relatives would adjourn to the side porch and talk quietly of the events of the day, while I would be off to the back spaces around the barn where apple trees and cherries grew, and, as the dusk fell the fireflies would rise flashing from their daytime sanctuaries. The mysterious greenish-yellow gleams, here, there, and everywhere, in the cool stillness after the heat of the afternoon, were wondrous to me. Sometimes they hovered close to the ground, other evenings rising up and up over my head, predicting (so I was told) a continuation of fair weather.
    I looked forward to coming down here to the country and again seeing fireflies, but alas whether it was climate or one of the evil effects of budworm spraying, only occasionally did fireflies appear and then only in ones and twos.
    The last several years, though, the fireflies have returned to our fields in large numbers. Sloping down from right to left, the field behind the house makes an ideal spot to enjoy the wonder. Standing at an opening into the field about half way down the slope, we can see the points of light below us down to the low acre and above us up the field to the edge of the woods. Maybe now their presence enriches us because of the global warming which brings cardinals up this way as well. Maybe something else is responsible. In any case we make it a point, when the time comes to give the dog her last walk before bedtime, to make our way back to the night pasture and watch the shimmering fabric woven out of so many tiny lives spread itself over the field.
9 July 2013