Lightning

It’s the spring season here. Last night, we were graced by a little rain with the added bonus of some lightning and soft thunder. I heard a rumble in the distance and went out on my porch to take it in. Off to the south, I could see the lightning as it flickered across the sky. It seemed almost alive, as if it were its own entity, absorbed in its own interest. As if it had its own consciousness and, an awareness that I was watching from a distance. It’s voice of thunder telling me “not yet, not yet, I will visit you in time”. I was reminded a movie that I once watched where this Fire Marshall was interviewing a known arsonist. Of course, the interviewee was a bit nuts but he asked the investigator, who had been present at a particularly dangerous fire, “did it look at you”? That thought crossed my mind as I watched. Did it look at me? I guess it is human nature to try and rationalize powerful things that we really don’t understand. Maybe we do this so we can deal with them emotionally and psychologically in our humanness. Kind of like bringing them down to our level, though we see the power and grandeur of such things and inherently understand that they are beyond us, we seek a connection that we can deal with. That seems reasonable on the one hand, arrogant on the other. I suppose it could be our penchant for possession and control that drives this. I wonder, is that why we make so much effort to humanize God? In the Bible, Isaiah wrote “shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, what makest thou?”. We humans are so fragile and yet we don’t seem to realize it. There are so many powerful forces in our world, this earth, that we have absolutely no control over. This is just one of them. It really is pretty amazing stuff this natural phenomenon, lightning.

It’s interesting, don’t you think, how given any number of people there will be an equal number of differing perceptions about something like lightning. When I was a kid, the older people in my family would tell us children to be quiet and still during a lightning storm. It’s God’s work and voice in play and we needed to be still in reverence. Dean Koontz wrote a book named Lightning (which I read several times and thought was an excellent story) where the power of a lightning storm was used as a vehicle for time travel. Throughout history various peoples have accounted lightning to their own gods. According to Wikipedia, the Greeks felt that lightning represented Zeus. Supposedly when Zeus was at war with Cronus and the Titans, he released his brothers Hades and Poseidon along with the Cyclops and the Cyclops gave him the thunderbolt as a weapon. The symbology for a thunderbolt is evidently a zigzag with non-pointed ends and represents speed and power. Lightning and thunder has also been used as a means of divination and is called ceraunoscopy. Divining what, I’m not so sure of but I am confident that it would have been used to resolve most of the same human questions and problems that we experience today. In the Jewish religion a blessing is to be recited when seeing lightning, “He who does acts of creation”.

After doing some reading and research, I was pretty much amazed at the amount of information available about lightning. Of course, there is much scientific data that can be digested about it and a seemingly endless supply of resources to learn from. Honestly, I was struck by how ignorant I really am about this thing. I’ve always loved earth science but I guess this area must have escaped me. It forces me to consider just how many other aspects concerning the earth’s physical properties have also escaped my understanding. The most significant thing I can remember is a discussion in class about whether lightning strikes up or down. Considering the basic concept of electron flow in an electrical circuit, it would seem that electrons would flow from negative to positive. The lightning bolt should discharge from the earth, which appears to be negative or at ground potential, to a more positively charged cloud once there was an imbalance in the two charges, kind of like a capacitor. Yeah??? I think this is a very basic synopsis of what’s called “leader and return stroke” so I’d have to say that fundamentally, yeah it does but it really happens in both directions and most catastrophically in the cloud to ground sort. What I thought was interesting is the variety of different types of lightning and their descriptions. Take these names for instance: Cloud to ground (of course), Bead, Ribbon, Staccato, Forked, Sheet, Heat, Dry, and Ball lightning. There are even descriptive names like Sprites (taken from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream), Blue Jets and Elves which is really an acronym for Emissions of Light and Very Low Frequency Perturbations from Electromagnetic Pulse Sources. That really is a handful of words. I say just stick with Elves.

All in all, I enjoy the logic and science behind this sort of thing but in my heart am more akin to feelings of awe, mystery and the power behind it. To me, it’s like the mist in the mountains or the movement of the sea. Something I have no control over and am, by the very nature of it, force to accept as something beyond myself. Not something to worship, but still something to see as created by the one that deserves my worship. Lightning, like other natural events such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tidal waves, floods, the aurora borealis, etc, have a way of putting things in perspective for me. It helps remind me that I am human, that I am not invincible, that there is a higher power and that I need to be grateful for the existence that I have. I am always astonished by such events in that they always bring me a sense of relevance in this wide world. They bring a sense of place and occasionally, a little inspiration.

Incomprehensible Loss

Nearly every day of my life, my youngest daughter calls me on the phone to ask how my day was and to say she loves me. How wonderful and faithful is that? When my cell phone rang the other day on my drive home and it said “mom’s cell” on the caller ID I immediately asked, when I pushed the green button, “child, why are you calling me on your mom’s phone”. The response wasn’t what I expected. “Because it is the mom”, the voice replied. Now my former spouse and I do talk to each other on occasion and since we got past the three year mark in this divorce, it has mostly been open, warm and connected. This day however, she was crying and distraught. You see she is a midwife and delivers babies, primarily in the home of expectant moms. I can’t tell you how many she has delivered but there are hundreds of children, alive on this earth today, that were caught with her hands. I know from living in that world for so long that midwifery is a very personal thing. Most of the time there is real bonding between her and the pregnant mom. It isn’t just a business relationship. It’s a very human and intimate thing. From a bystanders perspective it’s really quite amazing. I think it’s kind of like a love relationship, that of family and home. As if those who touch us, and those we touch, teach us and help us to grow into who we are. Somehow, being close to the birth of a child always seemed to make me feel better as a person. It’s as if the experience is pure joy, a renewal of life that seems to make us whole.

Though we chatted briefly, it didn’t take long for her to say that she just needed someone to talk to. She was on the way back to her house and was thinking about the loss that one of her families had just experienced. A child that she delivered had died and she had just left the funeral. I know she was grieving for the baby and the parents and that was a part of what she was feeling but her primary concern was for how the service was handled by the men of the family’s church. Now this isn’t my former spouse’s church. She doesn’t attend any kind of Christian services. She is, in fact, a pagan by her own profession. When we were married, we lived our lives as Christians but once that marriage relationship ended, she almost immediately renounced Christ and declared to all concerned her distain for Christian values. From her perspective, the Christian faith is cruel. How could a God of love threaten His people with the prospect of hell? How could a God of love allow a two year old child to die such a sudden, tragic and apparently painful death?

During the service, one of the men stood up to speak. From what I was told, he basically had a cavalier attitude about the whole thing and said that at least now the parents wouldn’t have to deal with another rebellious teenager. Then he mentioned that the child’s death was the hand of God, moving with the purpose of bringing others to Christ. Listening to her on the phone, I have no doubt those were his words. If it had been me, I want to believe that I would have chosen to say something different. I would have said something that would have brought the child’s beauty and brightness and joy back to remembrance, if only for a bit. I would have recalled how she had brought happiness and love to the family and how sorely she will be missed. I would have tried to console the parents and other children of that family with the knowledge that the little girl was with the Lord and that she is at peace and happy. Taking in the words of my former spouse, it was obvious to me that she felt angry with the man because of his apparent insensitivity and manipulation of the dire circumstances to try and proselytize those in attendance to the service. To me, the adults that were there are most probably intelligent enough, sensitive enough and aware enough of the precepts offered by Christianity to know that the choice is theirs. God offers salvation through grace to any that will accept it. The choice belongs to each individual.

In time, I asked her about the circumstances of the accident. It seems the mom was away on some errand and the dad was there at the home with the children. From what I understand, this two year old little girl was in the front yard playing with a nine year old neighbor. The two children wandered over to a neighbor’s driveway and the small child was standing behind an automobile when a seventeen year old ran out of the house and jumped into the car, put it into reverse and started to back out of the drive. He, or she, didn’t look to see if the drive was clear. Do any of us, most of the time? I felt immediate sorrow for that teenager. How must that child be handling the fact that he (or she) ran over a little baby? My first reaction was “where was the dad”? “Why had the dad allowed his two year old out of his sight for even a moment”? I felt an initial surge of anger that he had faltered in his physical responsibility as a father. Then, a moment later, I realized that it could have happened to me just as easily. I don’t know how many times I told one of my other children “watch your sister while I’m on the phone, in the bathroom, getting this pasta off the stove”. It can happen in an instant. Maybe it is God’s will. Maybe there is some greater purpose that He has in store. We can’t know the mind of God and the bible says, that He says, “my ways are not your ways”.

I’ve seen this sort of thing happen before in my life. A young child dies, the parents can’t forgive themselves or, assign blame one to the other. The marriage deteriorates and divorce follows. I reminded my former spouse of one incident in particular that she did remember. I tried to console her. I told her that even though it seems cruel that such a bright young light had been extinguished on the earth, God is still in control. The child’s soul, the very essence of who she was on the earth, still lives. I encouraged her to intervene if possible with this man and woman and help them understand that though this tragic thing has happened, they need not let it tear them apart. It could end in guilt and divorce but it could also be a force to hold them together. It can serve as something that will provide the glue which will hold them together for the rest of their lives. Strength and love from this tragedy is just as valid as anger and separation.

Truthfully, this is a sad story. I just hope the family survives. They have my prayers.