April Showers

Remember the old couplet?


April showers
Bring May flowers.


It is raining in Missouri this morning. I'm recalling another line, this one from an old Sunday school song we were taught at Zion's Evangelical and Reformed Church in Reading, PA. It's a faint memory from when I was a very young child. I think it was actually during the Truman administration (another Missouri connection). Just did a Google search and could not find the lyrics, so bear with this really primitive recollection:


The rain comes down with a pitter-patter-pit,
Showing God's great love...

One of the assigned books for the masters' level course I'm teaching in the May Intersession here at Unity Institute ("Readings in Western Spirituality: Two Novels and a Musical") will be James Michner's epic tale of a tell in Israel, The Source. Re-reading this book after a quarter century has brought new insights about how our ancestors probably lived. Domestication of grain began the long march to the comforts of suburbia, because it was only after food supplies could be regulated that ordinary people had the opportunity to pause, reflect, create, write, and inspire each other to greater heights.

But without the crops, disaster follower. There were no government bail-out programs, or at least not until Joseph temporarily took over the Welfare program in Egypt. Everything was dependent on fecundity and climate. It is no accident that the oldest deities of humanity are gods of storm and sky, goddesses of earth and fertility.

The little snippet from that long-ago Sunday school class owes its wellsprings to the tribal shaman who offered smoky tributes to maintain the harmonious balance between earth and the heavens. Without the rain, the crops die, and so do the people.

Prosperity thinking is not based on offerings to unknown gods, but on the kind of trust which inspired our ancestors to abandon nomadic hunting and gathering and to settle by their fields with confidence that the natural cycle of life would allow them to prosper. Or at least to eat next winter. It was a dangerous, bold turnining point, the domestication of grain. No wonder so many religious ceremonies celebrate food and the harvest. The great line from the best-beloeved Thanksgiving hymn, "Come, Ye Thankful People, Come" has lost its power in an age iof 24-hour shoppettes and Wal-Mart Super-Centers:

All is safely gathered in,
'Ere the winter storms begin.

We have now the power to change the climate by recklessness, and woe be unto us if we do not remember how hard-won have been the pleasures of civilized life in complex civilizations bulit on stable grain production and predictable cycles of weather.

It is raining in Missouri. Pitter-patter-pit. Showing God's great love...