Isaac in the Rain

Hurricane Isaac has dissipated, spreading its generous rain over wide swaths of the south and central states. Welcome rain in many drought-ridden places. Not so welcome along the lower plains of the Gulf Coast.

There are many smiles of relief that damage was nowhere near that inflicted by Katrina seven years ago. Isaac confounded the forecasters whose anxious predictions it seemed to enjoy foiling. Should we expect anything less from a storm whose name in Hebrew (Yishaq) means "s/he laughs"?

But back to all that rain. There is something in rain that brings a smile to my face, a laugh to my belly. It has to do with a Hindu-like parable about rain. It has to do with God's love, with the God who is love.

Christians and Bhakti Hindus, and Jews and Muslims, all in their own ways, believe that God is love, Infinite Love.

We all have an idea of what love means. We've loved someone, or been loved. But Infinite Love? What does that mean? How does it feel? How even to begin to comprehend it? How can we extrapolate to infinity from a limited personal experience of loving or being loved?

Perhaps this parable will help. Imagine each drop of water to be in and of itself a symbol, an expression of God's Infinite Love. Infinite Love compounded and compressed into the millions of molecules that make up one tiny drop of water. Imagined this way, interpreted as an efficacious symbol, each drop of water becomes a holy event for the one who contemplates its simple beauty~holy water.

Then take a walk in the rain. Remember, each drop in and of itself is an expression of the Infinite Love that is God. But this profligate, extravagant God sends how many billion drops of water on us in just a summer's afternoon shower? Each drop that wets our hand or face or head is a splash of infinite, mysterious passion from the center of Being. One's walk in the rain becomes an immersion in infinities of symbolic love.

And a hurricane? Such a storm is a fearsome, awesome expression of Divine Love in countless beating, driving drops, each an expression of Infinite Love, love so fierce it pulls us into its fury.

Infinite Love is not to be ignored or trifled with. It is not just a summer shower. We do well to heed the warnings and withdraw inland to safer ground where we stand a chance of surviving the divine fury that is Infinite Love.

One danger in Christian faith is to domesticate God: to think that we can name and contain the divine essence in a system of dogmatic cisterns and ecclesial pipelines that deliver grace on demand at the twist of a sacramental faucet. Divine Love in its furious infinity can never be contained. Like the engineers in New Orleans who struggled to channel and control Isaac's deluge with their sophisticated pumps, we are always on the verge of being submerged in the torrents of God's jealous love.

Hence the "fear and trembling" so often mentioned in scripture.

But it is a fear and trembling before Infinite Love. We just need to remember that God's Love is not our invention, not under our control, and far beyond our imagination, though imagine it we must.

From the mysterious center of the Divine Storm, within the eye of the hurricane, emerges God's smile, God's belly laugh at our attempts to control or comprehend Infinite Love. Yishaq.