letter from America
At time of writing, Hurricanes Helene and Milton have had significant impact on parts of America.
The regularity of natural events like this (the ubiquitous insurance moniker ‘Acts of God’) is surprising for those who grew up in the more placid weather patterns of the UK. Yes, hurricanes can hit there too – I remember the one that (as the joke was) turned leafy Sevenoaks into ‘One oak’. I actually slept through that hurricane, awakening to the sound of other teenagers rushing around with hilarity at the mild effects of broken glass and the like where our dormitories were.
But in America the weather comes with a vengeance, and with surprising, to me at least, frequency. Also at time of writing, there’s another hurricane on its way about to blast through bits of Florida. I don’t live in hurricane country, but I do live vaguely near tornado country, and there are tornadoes that hit Chicagoland on occasion. One knocked off one of the steeples of the church where I serve. Afterwards, with all the media fanfare that this created, I sanguinely wondered out loud that if I had known that having a bit of the church knocked down was the way for our church to get on national news, I might have spent our marketing dollars in a different way.
At any rate, it happens here. There are tornadoes with some frequency. There are hurricanes, unnerving in their ability to destroy all in their path. When we first moved to America we could not believe that the rain (not a storm, and certainly not a hurricane, just the rain) could fall with such violence. We’d seen such things on TV but had assumed it was exaggerated for effect. But, oh no, when it rains in New Haven, CT, where we were at the time, you can be soaked to the skin in no time at all. None of the gentle drizzle that I was used to.
This has all got me thinking. What effect does this – this more extreme weather pattern – have on the mission of the church, and the feelings of the people in the country? It is often said that America is a land of extremes: the extraordinary Olympic athlete and the morbidly obese; the astonishingly wealthy and the unbelievably impoverished; the stunningly educated and the borderline illiterate. It is at least interesting to me that the country itself is a country of extreme weather too. Perhaps I reach for connections, but no less an authority than Montesquieu in his seminal L’Esprit Des Lois thought similarly. Climate, context, yes even weather, does have an impact on us embodied souls.
My prayer as America goes through another cycle of hurricanes is for the people affected, and for those trying to help them, and also that this might point all involved to a Higher Help that is needed above all. Somehow when medical bills can so pile up that they might leave you penniless and bankrupt, and where a tornado might literally lift the roof off your house, when a hurricane has done its worse, it feels easier (is that the right word?) to cast an eye to a Higher Help, and yes even look to Heaven.
By contrast, I wonder whether the mild climate, and the (yes, I know) creaking NHS, but still the NHS, can give us a tendency not to self-reliance, but to a more mild response to the ephemeral, the spiritual, and the ineffable. Different, not wrong, but with different calls on our focus, and challenge required. May God, in whichever climatic context, take our eyes off the mere here and now and cast them up to Him.
