Spiritual Empowerment
Rain: The natural order of human experience
by Randal Mishoe
UCC pastor, counselor, Jungian analyst
Charlotte, N.C.
(Editor's note: Mishoe offers some pesonal reflections on the 2024 consequential election in his latest blog.)
RAIN. We take it for granted until there's too little or too much. And seldom is it just right. In my neighborhood, rain serves as a topic of conversation, a shared experience of life when there mightn't be any other topic to share safely or easily.
Simple enough and perhaps even serving as an escape from having to talk about other more troublesome things, "rain" serves as an extension of friendship, but also an unspoken sharing of our common vulnerability. We speak this vulnerability in veiled and cautious ways: "Sure could use a good rain," "how's your garden doing this year?" or "Don't know what we're gonna do if we don't get more rain"!
And, then, the other side of not having enough rain also hangs over our heads like a prospective catastrophe. We may get too much rain, our rivers may overflow, tropical storms and hurricane sweep down upon us and wash away our houses, our livelihoods, our life-long savings, and a destruction of our security in the natural world. ...
However, there is another "natural order." This is the natural ordering of human existence around five "needs." These are:
THE NEED TO BELONG
THE NEED TO MATTER
THE NEED TO FEEL SAFE
THE NEED TO LOVE AND BE LOVED
THE NEED TO HOPE
These needs form the natural order of human existence in order for us to live and thrive. ...
Moving toward the meaning-full idea of rain, we not only hold the symbolic "idea" of rain, but we experience the "feeling" of rain, and even further, we sense the social action of rain. And that is what? That is to confront the order of things when that order has become unnatural.
This "unnatural" order of life is what we are experiencing now in our social/political world when
destruction of our democratic ideals is not challenged
dictatorships are admired
authoritarianism replaces due process for all people
the use of our military forces are prepared to gather "undesirable" persons for incarceration, execution, or banishment from our country
members of another political party are considered as demonic
any or all of the above may be accepted if they are good for business and profit-making
In such a society as described above, the five needs of human existence cannot be fulfilled....
A girl's apple seeds hold hope in the aftermath of Helene
... as shared (with permission) in a sermon on October 13 by Rev. Terry Moore-Painter, part-time Interim Pastor at High Country United Church of Christ, Vilas, N.C.
Last Monday I had the chance to visit at a member’s home, and I had a wonderful conversation with a beautiful 8 year old girl. Now I had taken a bag of apples to share. And the young girl ate three or four of them. I’m thinking, "What is this? I know you like apples. That’s a lot of apples to eat." But I suspect that it wasn’t it, just because she likes to eat apples. You see, apples were part of her dream. The apples represented for her a glimpse of the future beyond the flood that had damaged much of her home. She showed me a plastic bag that she got out of the refrigerator and in it she put a damp paper towel and all those apples she had eaten and others before, she had put them [the seeds] on top of those damp paper towels and folded them up and she said, “I’m going to sprout these seeds and plant them and maybe they’ll grow into apple trees." And she said this with a hopeful smile on her face.
And she also told me that during the storm, she had seen a cabin float down Cove Creek right in front of her house, and she said that she even got a picture of it. If she continues to live on that beautiful property, she will be the sixth generation in her family to live there. And as I sat with her, my mind wandered to a day years from now when the young girl is telling her children and maybe even her grandchildren about the flood of 2024, that carried a house down the creek in front of her family’s bridge, and that destroyed that bridge and filled her basement with mud. And I can imagine her future as I’m sure she can, including apple trees that she planted during that flood, and maybe even an orchard of apple trees. And she was doing -- on that day -- what we all must do. She was already imagining a different future. May she and her children will be our guides.