Nothing New Under the Sun

September 24, 2020 | Fr. Michael Brunner O.S.B.
 

A Reading from the Book of Ecclesiastes (1:2-11)

Vanity of vanities, says Qoheleth, vanity of vanities!  All things are vanity! What profit has man from all the labor which he toils at under the sun? One generation passes and another comes, but the world forever stays. The sun rises and the sun goes down; then it presses on to the place where it rises. Blowing now toward the south, then toward the north, the wind turns again and again, resuming its rounds. All rivers go to the sea, yet never does the sea become full. To the place where they go, the rivers keep on going. All speech is labored; there is nothing one can say. The eye is not satisfied with seeing nor is the ear satisfied with hearing. What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun. Even the thing of which we say, “See, this is new!” has already existed in the ages that preceded us. There is no remembrance of the men of old; nor of those to come will there be any remembrance among those who come after them.
The Word of the Lord

Nothing is new under the sun. This is one of my favorite parts of my favorite Book in the Bible. It puts things into perspective. Another good perspective is provided by one of my favorite websites, the National Hurricane Center. I checked last night and right now there are no hurricanes, tropical storms or depressions in the Atlantic Ocean. That’s maybe the calm before the storm. The peak of the hurricane season is October, and we’ve run out of names already. Somehow, they do seem very personal. We don’t name them “Tree Smasher”, “Father of Winds” or “Water Terror”; we give them nice human names: Wilma, Sandy, Irma, Harvey – gentle names. Their effect on us is quite personal but not gentle at all.

In 1972, two weeks after the Watergate burglary, I went through the remains of hurricane Agnes in Washington DC. It was one of those storms that stayed put and it dumped tons of rain on Washington, causing massive flooding (including my hotel.) I watched through my front window as neighbors’ cars washed down the street. In the hurricane season of 1979, I went through Hurricane David. I rode out the storm in an oceanfront hotel, where we had moved all the guests into an upper interior ballroom. Fortunately, the storm took a last-minute turn away from a direct hit on Miami Beach. Still the damage to the beach, homes and boats was significant. What impressed me most was the suddenness with which the storm appeared out of a clear blue sky. Thank God for modern accurate weather forecasts. My return to Saint Louis from my sabbatical in late October 2012 coincided with the landfall of superstorm Sandy. I left Rochester NY on the day Sandy arrived. Although Rochester is 360 miles northwest of New York City, Sandy’s wind and rain was there. By the time I got to Cleveland the rain had subsided. The next day was still heavily overcast all the way to Indianapolis. The following day the sun broke through in the middle of Illinois.

As well as to life, a powerful storm adds a lot to a story too, similar to the appearance of eclipses in literature. The authors of Mutiny on the Bounty, Charles Nordoff and James Norman Hall, wrote a novel “The Hurricane,” the Classic comic book version of which fascinated me as a child. And for a really great story with great acting, just watch the dark 1948 move directed by John Huston and starring Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson and Lauren Bacall. Key Largo, which also stars a hurricane. In 2017, category 4 Hurricane Irma was not gentle to Key Largo, significantly worse than the one in the movie.

Millions of lives have been drastically affected by the hurricanes of this year, and some lives ended. Although they no longer strike as a deadly surprise out of a clear blue sky, like happened here in Rhode Island in 1938,  planning for a hurricane can’t do much more than give you a head start to get out of harm’s way. These hurricanes give us an idea of the terror of storms felt by the people of the Bible, who were definitely a landed people. For them, the sea was a metaphor for the primordial abyss, something to be avoided. Even those apostles, fishermen caught in a storm on the tiny sea of Galilee, were desperately afraid of what appeared to be imminent destruction. It was no small thing that Jesus calmed the winds and water. The Book of Proverbs in chapter 1 makes the point. “Because you disdained all my counsel, and my reproof you ignored – I, in my turn, will laugh at your doom; will mock when terror overtakes you; When terror comes upon you like a storm, and your doom approaches like a whirlwind; when distress and anguish befall you.” To the writer, the storm was a manifestation of God’s anger. We don’t believe that today, although some fundamentalists do. Rather storms are a manifestation of God’s power residing in the normal processes of nature. The works of the human race (towers of Babel, if you will) get in the way of such – volcanoes, storms, earthquakes, floods. It is still humbling for us, we who so much like to control things. But ultimately we are not in control. If we don’t come to that conclusion ourselves, that is the message given to us of all our scripture, and everyone else’s scripture too. The conclusion of the Book of Job has Job face to face with God looking for an answer to human suffering. The Lord answers Job out of a storm and sets him straight; It’s not for you to know…you can’t handle the answer. And neither can we.

There was a wonderful meme running around cyberspace. “You said you liked storms, so I let you in. Turns out you can only handle a little rain, and I am a hurricane.” Whatever the author meant by those words, they can be understood coming from God’s lips. God is a refuge from the storms of life, but he is another kind of storm Himself, a storm that strips us of our self-importance and self-centeredness if we enter into a real, genuine relationship with Him. The processes that He uses for each of us are different and inscrutable. But they will work.

We do have to worry about hurricanes in Rhode Island, which we don’t worry about in St Louis; but then we don’t have to worry about tornadoes here, which are a big worry in St Louis. San Francisco has earthquakes. Hawai’i has tsunamis. There’s nowhere to hide from nature or God. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote the poem “The Rainy Day”:
Behind whatever storms raging in our individual lives, the sun is still shining in the clear blue sky of God’s unfailing love. And if we think about it, there are many more sunny days in our lives, so many that we take them for granted. But these days of our lives here on storm prone earth are not permanent; they are not the reason we live. As Iago might say, a house swept away is ultimately just trash, some “thing,” regardless of how much it means to us. Our days on earth, these storms and the opportunities they give us to help those suffering and in need, are just the preparation for our real and unending happiness. So let’s prepare well.