Nov 18, 2021 |
The Whelming Flood
| The Rev. Philip DeVaul
The Whelming Flood
"When the great Flood came, it was immediate and incomprehensible. There was no way to prepare for it, no way to avoid or deflect it. The water burst forth from below and above, and all in a moment everything changed. It didn’t matter what you believed about God or yourself, it didn’t matter how you voted or if you acknowledged it was happening or not – in a moment the world changed. In a moment life, or at least life as anyone understood it, was gone forever.
We tend to judge ourselves for not fully grasping what is currently happening to us. We are reticent simply to acknowledge the relentlessly overwhelming reality of our times. We have an unspoken belief that if we would just keep on the sunny side of life, we might wake up tomorrow to find it was all just a figment, and we could get back to whatever normal was. Or maybe if we just read enough think-pieces or listened to enough podcasts we could understand our way out of this moment.
You cannot understand your way out of this moment. This powerful, painful time is part of your story now, part of our shared story, and we cannot outsmart it anymore than Noah could outsmart the flood. Sure, he built a boat, but he still had to make it through the months of the flood, and he did not emerge from the ark the same as when he went in."
