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.

Rain

So, haven't done a post in more than a week, time to get back to it. I was driving home last Friday, thinking about the rain that Biola had recently experienced, and also about C.S. Lewis and G.K Chesterton, and this note is the result of that train of thought.

I love the rain. If I'm walking to class in the rain, I won't put my hood up just because it feels like I'm missing out on the experience of the rain. As I was walking in the rain (and thinking about it later), I realized something- rain is water falling from the sky. Separate this from all scientific explanations and physical causes we've discovered, and try and see rain in the way that we used to see it–water falling from the sky. It's no wonder that in O.T. times, rain was clearly seen as an act of God. We, however, know better; we (by which I mean, people other than myself who know sciency stuff) know that this rain is the natural result of naturally occurring phenomena, like cold fronts and high pressure systems and stuff like that. The question I was thinking about on my way home was this: do these physical causes of an event make it any less an act of God?

This is where C.S. Lewis comes in. In his Screwtape Letters, he says, via the demon Screwtape, that if a prayer (for instance, a prayer about the weather) is answered, the human who prayed will undoubtedly be able to see some of the physical causes which led to this answered prayer, and therefore arrives at the conclusion that "it would have happened anyway." I think that this bears consideration. Do we do this? Do we ever make the mistake of thinking that, merely because we can see what physically caused an event to happen, that the event occurred independently of God? We shouldn't. Lewis says of this particular instance (the weather) that men's prayers today are one of innumerable coordinates by which God harmonizes the weather of tomorrow. Included in his explanation is a bunch of crazy-awesome stuff about eternity and time and the relationship between the two, which isn't really necessary to dwell on for this note.

Back to the point. Isn't that crazy? The point of this, and how it relates back to my original thoughts of rain, is that rain is water falling from the sky, an instance that was easily recognized by O.T. people as a miracle, an act of God. They were right in this recognition. It is we, with all of our knowledge, who are ignorant, and confuse the physical cause with the ultimate cause. Matthew 5:45 tells us that God sends the rain on the righteous and the wicked; the physical causes we have discovered and learned to recognize do not change this. And I thank God for sending the rain to all, because I am most definitely not righteous. And rain is something to be thankful for.