In Which I Confine my Remarks to the Weather

Last updated on: November 15, 2018 at 9:56 am by Anne Kennedy

In Which I Confine my Remarks to the Weather 2018-11-15T09:56:56-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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There seems to be a great snow storm headed our way, probably because we and our parents and our grandparents have sinned. It is only November, as you might know, and by my calculations—which involve me not taking into account all the years that it snows early—we should have a dusting in December and then lots and lots of piles of the stuff from January all the way through to May. That’s how it works. I don’t have emotional space for snow in November.

I was driving along the other day, mourning the loss the leaves, the heaviness of the gray sky, and trying to spiritually justify to myself my own obsession with the weather. It began with the fact that I have a sort of impression that the weather ought to live out at the periphery of my life, as if it is not that important, occupying the place of the back up conversation you have after you have exhausted everything of greater importance, or have nothing in common with someone and so must retreat into the outer margins of “stuff that doesn’t really matter.”

Whereas, in reality, I think about the weather all the time, and with powerful emotion attached to each and every flickering thought. I remark on it when I arise, when I look at my phone, when I dolefully stare into the depths of my wardrobe, when I look out of the window, when I plunk into my school chair, when I do the laundry and the dishes, when I am forced into the out of doors, when I crawl, heavily laden, into my car, and when I lie down again at night. You probably think, from the tenor of my blogging, that I think about Jesus all the time. But that is not true. I am always thinking about the weather.

But also Jesus, though, because I am curious to know how the person who doesn’t believe in God deals with the emotional onslaught of the daily weather. If you can’t blame an omniscient and omnipotent God, how do you go on? There has to be some reason, besides “science,” for the kind of weather that blows over my icy brow every day. It can’t be chance. It cannot be the vagaries of a coincidentally encountered universe.

No, one of the main ways that God engages with humanity is through the weather. So few of us are reading the Bible, and when we are reading it we are completely misunderstanding what it says and what it is for. And, because of the comforting technology of our screens and our appliances, we are able to craft whole worlds for ourselves that nurture and feed what we know about ourselves already. All that remains of reality, of that objective verity against which we crash with no true volitional power, is the weather app signaling to us the way that our lives are going to go day by day. We cannot make it change. We cannot make it stop. We are powerless before its whimsy.

I realize I am committing climate change heresy. I will bring down the ire of the world upon my head. So be it. To prove my point I will go out and shake my fist at the sky and cry out for the snow not to come, for the fires in California to stop, for the wind to cease blowing, for the currents in the depths of sea to turn around and go the other way, for the sun to get to itself more spots so that the whole human project can warm up just a tiny bit.

And I will also mutter to myself bitterly that the Almighty must have it in for me. If God is love, as I’ve been told, then why doesn’t he give us each the weather we want? You want the gender and the partner of your choice, I want the rain and snow to stop falling from the sky for a few minutes. If you think God shouldn’t give me what I want, why do you think he should violate his own character to give you what you want? And there you are—I have confined my remarks to the weather.

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