Lately, I’ve been fixated on guttering. We have a lot of unguttered or badly guttered buildings. When rain falls on impervious surfaces and is not guttered or sloped away, it pools up and erodes old foundations.
Water may seem innocuous. Innocent. But it is the (almost) universal solvent. According to the Khan Academy, “Water is key to the vast majority of cellular chemical reactions essential to life. Water molecules are polar, with partial positive charges on the hydrogens, a partial negative charge on the oxygen, and a bent overall structure.”
A bent structure may sound unattractive or dangerous, but in fact, it’s the magic that allows the embodiment of both the negative and the positive to coexist and dissolve nearly anything.
But even with the threat of dissolution, rain is not the essential problem. Too many impenetrable surfaces are.
Thus: guttering. The precious rainwater is renamed runoff and routed to centralized locations such as sewers or storage tanks. This creates the potential for stagnation or downstream flooding.
As humans, we long for shelter from the storm. Impenetrability is tempting. It’s hard to be vulnerable, receptive, and thankful; harder still to lovingly accept rejection and scorn.
But we live in a world where the Coauthors and the Dancers cause the rain to fall on the just and unjust. The sun shines on the kindly folk as well as the cruel, selfish fools.
Many of us feel quite indignant about this. We seek justice but often end up plotting revenge. This storyline has no happy ending. In fact, it has no ending at all. Revenge is self-perpetuating.
Bullies, tyrants, and other impervious souls have developed gutters that shunt kindness and forgiveness off as if they were wastewater. The resulting pools putrefy due to the contaminants they’ve picked up, testifying to the toxicity of fear.
Watching sacrifices go down the drain or get routed to a holding tank where good intentions become sludge is painful.
Even so, the stubbornly resilient make plans (that will no doubt go awry) and dig deep into linty pockets to offer the widow’s mite.
The Holy Role-Models of Resilience are chaotic, redundant, and flighty. They live in the gutters and fix broken toys. And while wildfires rage, they shelter frightened families under scorched wings.
It sometimes seems that Creation has grown weary of us, and the exhausted Dancers have lost the beat. I honestly don’t know.
But in this briefest of moments, some of us have the great good fortune of being lilies of the field, hoping no one sprays us with a broad leaf herbicide as we turn our open faces to the cleansing rain and rejoice when sunlight breaks through.
Short visits with an honest God 