The OLD Philosopher – John M. Miller
These thoughts began at 3:37 AM on Saturday, August 31, 2019. I woke up, and couldn’t get back to sleep. I shall say as I begin writing in these darkened hours, “What a difference a day makes.”
Five full days ago, my wife Lois, her sister Millie Ruhl, our dog Max and I left for a quick but also very refreshing visit to the mountains of western North Carolina. We stayed with close friends of nearly forty years, Jim and Louise Galan.
All three of the humans on that short sojourn agreed that it was as though we had been away for a wonderful two-week vacation in the span of a seven-hour road trip on Monday, a seven-hour road trip yesterday, and only three full days of luxuriating in the cool, glorious altitude of thirty-five hundred feet of Tarheel Appalachian altitude, compared to the hot, humid eight feet of Sandlapper altitude of Hilton Head Island on coastal South Carolina.
Max did not divulge his thoughts on our mini-vacation. However, as a result of being tossed around on the back seat for two hours on mountain roads, he did express one visible reaction by upchucking in the car once, and then twice on our recently-cleaned-as-good-as-new carpets when we got home.
When we left Glenville, NC at 6:50 AM yesterday, the Weather Channel said that Hurricane Dorian was going to hit somewhere near the middle of the east coast of Florida, travel slowly into the middle of the state, and then either continue west into the Gulf of Mexico, or perhaps veer slightly north into southwestern Georgia. That meant that Hilton Head would not be affected by the storm at all, or at least not very much. Therefore we returned to the island confident, re-invigorated, and sure we had nothing to worry about.
By the time we got home, the Weather Channel was no longer sticking to their story. However, we were not apprised of that intelligence until after we went to Happy Hour at the Seabrook, because we didn’t even bother to watch the Weather Channel when we returned to what we assumed was our safe little enclave by the sea.
We were told that the hurricane would make landfall somewhere around Cape Canaveral, and then move slightly inland, or maybe turn 90+ degrees to the north, skirting the shoreline. Then perhaps it might turn to the northeast, or, in other words, toward Savannah and Hilton Head Island.
Last evening, on ESPN, I watched the Wisconsin Badgers thrash the Bulls of the University of South Florida, for whom I felt genuine pity, 49-0. I also glanced fairly frequently at the Weather Channel. Things appeared to be looking increasingly ominous for us along the southeast coast of the USA, whereas only fifteen hours earlier it looked as though we would be spared and millions of Floridians would get the full and probably total brunt of Dorian.
When I turned off the light at 11:38 PM, life felt very different from how it had appeared at 6:50 AM. I was glad my team won the football game, but I felt we personally might have been better off to have remained in the relative tranquility of western North Carolina for a few more days.
Now, while it still dark outside, I have not yet glimpsed the weather on the Weather Channel. (The announcers on that channel love hurricanes. Hurricanes are all they talk about when one is approaching the USA from anywhere and is going anywhere. It is only in such instances that I ever watch the Weather Channel, because, I have always figured, the weather will be what the weather will be, so what difference does it make?)
Nevertheless, I am prompted to inscribe my musings on this very rapid turn of cyclonic events. More than heat, cold, rain, drought, the glacial unfolding of climate change, or even tornadoes, of which we are inflicted by almost none in our immediate environs, hurricanes have a way of commanding the attention of everyone who might be personally become engulfed by one.
Hurricanes, or typhoons, or cyclones (the monikers depend on the oceans over which they originate) are, by nature, rather unpredictable. Usually they go in the direction the meteorologists say they shall go, but sometimes they behave erratically, which the meteorologists also always warn us they might do. In that respect major weather events are somewhat like people; who knows what ultimately they will do?
Presumably we won’t know until sometime on Wednesday, or Tuesday, or Thursday, whether Dorian shall make a concentrated visit to our sandpile in the sea. We won’t know whether we shall be ordered to evacuate inland until tomorrow or Monday. What a difference a couple of days make.
Thursday evening we went to bed thinking we would be spared this particular hurricane’s fury, and now, early on Saturday morning, we are confronted by the potential reality that apathetic Dorian may have decided to turn our way. What a fickle fellow he is turning out to be!
When major upper air disturbances over water threaten to smite land anywhere on earth, millions of people begin fervently to pray. Many of them are perennial pray-ers, and it comes naturally to them to turn to God in such a moment. Many others pray almost never, but in the face of a potential major disaster, they pound on heaven’s gates (if that is where God truly resides) with heartfelt, heavy requests.
In my opinion, those who regularly turn to God, petitioning Him on behalf of themselves or other people or worthy causes, may be inclined to ask God to re-direct cyclonic storms out to sea so that they do not strike any land anywhere, harmlessly dissipating over cooler waters in cooler latitudes. Others, who are more demanding in their orisons, may request that the Almighty Creator should protect them, the pray-ers, by diverting a hurricane or typhoon elsewhere. That is understandable, if also somehow unacceptably self-centered.
Years ago the Rev. Dr. Pat Robertson, he of decidedly conservative theology, politics, and judicial leanings, prayed that God would nudge a hurricane which seemingly was headed for Virginia Beach, Virginia, where he lived, and send it in a slightly more northeasterly direction toward New York City and Long Island, where what he believed millions of godless liberals lived. And that is exactly what happened.
Dr. Robertson’s prayer may have been answered, but if so, it was not God who answered it, nor was it the weather gods. Weather does what weather does, and all the prayers in the world will never determine what we want the weather to do or not do. Farmers all over the world for millennia have prayed for better weather. I would probably join them, were I one of them, since they depend so much on the weather. However, praying for particular kinds of weather is a subconscious misspending of emotional and spiritual energy. Weather just happens, regardless of what we think it should do.
It is probably an enormous overall blessing that nature is more dispassionately objective about itself than any of us is. When nature does what we think it should do, we may be subliminally grateful to God for those multitudinous happy occasions. On the other hand, when natural disasters of any sort descend upon us, we wonder how God can allow that to happen. The words “happy” or “happen” or “happenstance” all may imply to us an element of divine blessing, but uncertainty is nonetheless the essence of whatever happenstances come along to make us happy.
As a result of having recently progressed into the beginning of my ninth decade, I have become convinced in my advanced age that God does absolutely nothing to tinker with weather or climate or geological eruptions or any other such colossal and inscrutable matters. God created the universe and nature. Once that occurred (and it is still occurring in outer space as well as in the space beneath our feet), it all operates on the basis of what medieval scholars called “natural law.” I shall not address what that term might mean in this brief essay, but suffice it to say that the God who created nature should never be considered synonymous with nature. Thus our prayers cannot move Him to deter or defer what autonomous nature is delegated to do by means of its own internally-determined Department of Cosmic Affairs.
Meteorologists have insisted that climate change will not increase the number of major oceanic weather disturbances, but that it will likely make many hurricanes and typhoons much more powerful. To date in 2019, the USA has been affected by only one large tropical storm, and it dumped several inches of rain on Louisiana and elsewhere in the central and northeastern United States. Dorian will likely be at least a Category Four if not Five hurricane when it reaches land somewhere on the southeastern coast of the USA.
What we may deduce from these observations is that humans may affect weather, but we cannot determine weather - - - at least not yet to any significant degree. Technology may have a growing effect on what weather does in any given place, but few if any of us will live long enough to see that come to full fruition.
Millions of Americans throughout the southeastern United States are now anxiously waiting to see where Dorian in his erratic irascibility decides to go. As those of us in these parts hunker down with our eyes glued to the Weather Channel, we are reminded once again that there are forces beyond us which may have a potentially and perhaps actually deep influence on us, but over which we are completely powerless.
Put into its proper perspective, that realization should be humbling, instructive, and even inspiring. It is humbling, because it tells us we can only respond to a hurricane; we cannot alter its path or its level of destruction. It is instructive, because as intelligent as we may suppose ourselves to be, there are some things totally beyond our capacity to influence or control, and we have no choice but to sit back and watch them do whatever they shall do. It is also inspiring, or at least potentially inspiring, because we may be led to trust in a power (God) who is infinitely greater than ourselves at a time of especially heightened human uncertainty and anxiety.
I choose to believe that God hears all our prayers, and that He is both sympathetic and empathetic to whatever it is we pray about. He feels for us, on our behalf, and He feels with us; He feels what we feel.
Theoretically, God could change the weather. After all, He is omniscient (all-powerful) - - - isn’t He? But in creating nature, God created the weather, among many other factors, to be independent of His direction or control.
What does this mean? It means that some of us shall be affected by hurricanes, but most of us will not. It means that even most of those who might be damaged by hurricanes won’t be damaged by every particular hurricane.
This also means that some will be afflicted by certain forms of illness and others will not, some will find themselves subjected to serious of fatal accidents but most will not, and so on. Nature is sometimes “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson aptly described it, but most of us much prefer to think of nature in terms of a slow walk on the beach in a beautiful sunrise or gazing raptly across purple mountains at sunset.
In the meantime, it is now 11 AM on Saturday morning, and the National Hurricane Center has given us their latest Dorian update via the Weather Channel. They predict that Dorian will in all likelihood come ashore somewhere between Cape Canaveral and Jacksonville, and that it may – or may not – turn north-northeast to parallel the Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina coastlines. Its cone, the wide expanse at the leading edge of the storm, is growing ever wider. Thus Savannah, Hilton Head Island, Charleston, Myrtle Beach, and perhaps the Outer Banks shall almost certainly feel the strong effects of Dorian’s wind and rain, and there likely shall be flooding. The degree of any of these onslaughts is currently unknown and unknowable.
By coincidence, five weeks ago I preached a sermon entitled How Should We Prepare for Hilton Head’s Death? It was about how climate change shall almost certainly render Hilton Head Island uninhabitable within a century or so.
In that sermon I devoted two brief paragraphs to hurricanes. Three years ago Hurricane Matthew did far more damage to this island than any previous hurricane for over a century. I opined in the sermon that were we to get a Matthew every five or ten years, our island might be largely abandoned sooner rather than later. Matthew was a Category Two, but its eye was just five miles east of Hilton Head. If the eye of Dorian comes directly over us as a Category Four, sooner may be sooner than I ever imagined.
Now, assuming Dorian shall force us to evacuate the island, Loie, Millie, Max and I need to try to make arrangements for where we shall go. We shall surely not drive all the way back to western North Carolina. Max might refuse to get into the car. Such is the uncertainty of life in the Zone of the Hurricanes.
Through it all, I trust that God reigns, that God is good, and that whatever comes, we shall survive. In the very unlikely event that, along with Scarlett and Rhett, we and all we have known and loved for the past few decades shall be gone with the wind, I believe that God shall still reign, and that He shall still be good. No hurricane will corner me into supposing that God is one iota less beneficent than He was before Dorian had even become an inkling in the eye of a low-pressure ridge somewhere near the Cape Verde Islands off the west coast of Africa two or three weeks ago.
Stuff happens, but God is greater than and wiser than and more powerful than anything that shall ever happen. Hallelujah; Praise God!
John Miller is Pastor of The Chapel Without Walls on Hilton Head Island, SC. More of his writings may be viewed at www.chapelwithoutwalls.org.