Last night it rained. It is raining still. My heart is glad for the earth here in Southern California to drink deeply having been parched for so long. Right outside my window, the rain and the wind are having their way with a lemon tree whose fruit hang generous with lemons the size of tennis balls. I hit the pause button on my music to listen to the revelry of the rain. Bruce Cockburn, Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison I can listen to any day. But here in this time and in this place, rain is rare. So I am listening to what it has to say, and celebrating its visitation, playfulness, recklessness, and greening power.

I love the sound of rain as much as I love the feel of it. And I love the feel of it and miss it since moving to California in the mid 1990’s. I remember, in the wee hours one morning in my college days skipping home alcohol-free in the middle of the street in the middle of a torrential downpour in Parkland, Washington with my roommate Erik Rowberg like concert-goers still giddy with music. Rain has a way of bringing out the child in us or the outlaw or the fool who has the audacity to throw caution to the wind and in those days I rarely threw caution to the wind except on the basketball court where I played with reckless abandon.

Rain also has the capacity to awaken and draw out the contemplative in us about which Thomas Merton wrote so eloquently. Today is the anniversary of Thomas Merton’s birth. He would be 101. One of my favorite writings of Merton’s is “Rain and the Rhinoceros” which is found in his collection of writings titled Raids on the Unspeakable. More than a review, it is a social commentary, a prophetic indictment, and a contemplative riff on the Italian playwrite Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros first performed in 1958. The play exposes the increasing inclination to rush through life, to ascribe value only to that which is useful or deemed necessary, the cheapening of language, and the dangers of the herd mentality, what Ionesco calls rhinoceritis. In this year of a Presidential election, I hope to come back to Merton’s riff on Ionesco’s play as it seems to be sadly but prophetically relevant.

Today, let me simply offer a few words on Merton’s experience of rain and his instructive response to it. As most of you know, Merton, a Trappist monk for 27 years, received permission to spend what became the last three years of his life in a hermitage in the woods of Kentucky a mile or so from the main monastery buildings. Writing in December of 1964 with an eye to themes lifted up in Ionesco’s play, Merton begins his essay by extoling the superfluity of rain, its generosity, honesty, and spontaneity. He points out that it’s inherent value is in its complete freedom and total lack of value according to the utilitarian mindset Ionesco is panning. He writes:

Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By “they” I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.[1]

Sitting in the dark, Merton listens and enters into the liturgy of the rain that is invisible to the eye. The monk is one who trusts what is not visible and knows what he doesn’t know. As the rain “fills the woods with its immense and confused sound” and falls on the roof of his hermitage and its porch “with insistent and controlled rhythms,” Merton reflects:

And I listen, because it reminds me again and again that the whole world runs by rhythms I have not yet learned to recognize, rhythms that are not those of the engineer.[2]

Humbly, in the dark of unknowing and to the speech of the rain, he listens for free to the festival:

Think of it: all that speech pouring down, selling nothing, judging nobody, drenching the thick mulch of dead leaves, soaking the trees, filling the gullies and crannies of the wood with water, washing out the places where men have stripped the hillside! What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows . . . . It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.[3]

For the earth in regions of drought, for those of you living there, I wish for you the gratuity of rain, the festival that it is, the life and simple joy it brings. For those of you blessed with precipitation, regularly wetted by grace, I wish for you to awaken or reawaken to its rhythm, to be still enough to catch a note of its secret speech that alludes to a festival not of our making. For those of you bombarded or endangered by what falls out of the sky, I wish for you safety, and for a time when you can hear the song of rain again and smile, appreciating its meaninglessness, and intuiting how indispensable it is, how real, how free.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT AND ACTION:

1. Listen to the rain.
2. Enjoy it. After all, it’s a festival.

[1] Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable, New York: New Directions, 1966, 9.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid., 10.