Rain pt. 2

So, time for another post. Don't worry, Easter is coming up, and then I'll have enough thoughts for two or three notes. Anyway, I wanted to continue my thoughts on rain. I talked about C.S. Lewis in my last post, and now I want to talk about G.K Chesterton.

If you have not read G.K. Chesterton, you should. If you have read him, but have not read his Orthodoxy, you should. Period. No arguing. Unfortunately, I don't have Orthodoxy here in front of me, so I might get a few things wrong, but here it goes.

It's difficult for me to explain what I want to say about Chesterton and the rain, especially without the book here in front of me. Basically, I want to repeat my assertion from my last post, that rain is, at its core, water falling from the sky. In my last post I said that the physical causes of rain do not detract from the original, divine cause of the rain, which the Israelite people recognized instantly and we have lost sight of. What I want to say now is that rain is a miracle.

In Orthodoxy, Chesterton says that when we are small, we view everything with wonder. We are thrilled by the fact that an apple is red and we are amazed that grass is green. The reason for this wonder is that we have not grown bored with it, we do not see a necessary correlation between apples and red, or grass and green–and indeed, Chesterton says, there is no necessary correlation. As we grow older, we lose this sense of wonder, and in an attempt to regain it we tell stories of apples that are golden, and grass that is blue, or red, or all the colors of the rainbow. Chesterton says that he attempts to look at things not as if they are how they are because that is how they must be (I know it's confusing, stay with me), but as if they are how they are because of some crazy, miraculous occurrence. And indeed, that is how the world actually is.

I can't say this as well as Chesterton can. When I say it, it sounds dumb. So I apologize, and once again urge you to read Orthodoxy. And so, in an attempt to tie this back to my original topic, rain, I want to say... rain is water falling from the sky. We have grown so used to this that we don't care, we find it boring and unnexciting, but I think that the only thing that makes water falling from the sky less miraculous than candy or anything else falling from the sky is that the former happens more often. Water only falls from the sky because God has decided that it should. This whole world only operates the way it does because God has decreed "Let it be so." Given that, I think there is cause for excitement in the fact that apples are red. The green-ness of grass is something amazing. And water falling from the sky is crazy-awesome. I don't want to lose sight of that.