Sturm und Drang
September 16, 2007
September 16, 2007
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Psalm 29, Luke 8:22-25
The sky is grey, and even before the wind builds, there may be a “calm before the storm” that crackles with anticipation – hope or dread depending on so many things. Has it been a dry spell? Is it a dangerous storm?? Do we feel safe? Sometimes that stillness is noticed in retrospect, particularly in storms of the interpersonal variety – where there may be no barometric low to tip us off that the weather is changing.
The stillness yields to stirring – to winds picking up and skies darkening. Some storms come with lots of warning, others with only minutes. And the really intense storms I’ve been around have been preceded in minutes or hours by really striking skies. I remember a Wisconsin storm one summer when I was visiting my aunt in Blue Mounds – the sky turned green before the storm, we lost power but heard a tremendous tumult in the darkness. The next day walking through the woods to the road, my cousins and I counted 28 trees uprooted.
Or the day of a major blizzard in Chicago on New Year’s Day in 1999 – the sky that morning reminded me of cobblestones, each stone-colored cloud rimmed with golden sunlight. I didn’t know a storm was coming – but the sky was quite amazing, and sure enough, it did portend something remarkable – 25 inches of snow that day.
Of course, when we think of storms, we usually think of disruptive weather that comes in from the sky – but natural crises can also include those that come from the land or water – an earthquake, a flood, or a tsunami.
And also, when we think of all these varieties of storms, we remember that some are well-predicted, with storm tracks that we can follow for days in advance watching satellite photos and radar. I used to even get radar images on my cell phone so I could watch the weather approach wherever I was.
But other storms come up suddenly, with little or no warning – we may hear that conditions are good for tornados, but they can develop quickly, not like hurricanes. And tornados, as well as a phenomena called a microburst, can move unpredictably, wreaking havoc done one block, and then changing direction. Houses next to one another can have dramatically different experiences. A few years ago in Indiana, a microburst came through our area, and although the homes on either side of us lost trees, and one neighbor’s tomato plants were entirely stripped of leaves by the winds, our yard and home were entirely untouched – a fork that someone had left on the table outside didn’t even blow off the table.
Dr. Robert Adler of the Goddard Space Center writes, “Storms connote suddenness – meaning that weather conditions are drastically different before, during and after the storm. Most of us have experienced an eerie silence before a storm strikes. Sometimes you'll hear the comment that ‘It came out of nowhere, and there wasn't a breath of air before all hell broke loose.’ On the other hand, with frontal storms, the weather may be tumultuous well before a line of thunderstorm approaches. Southwest winds ahead of an advancing cold front, for example, can be rather vigorous, even hours before cumulonimbus clouds begin to build.” So for Adler, what is distinctive about a storm is not the way it comes, or whether it was predicted, but the fact that in the storm, conditions are dramatically different than beforehand and afterwards.
Our Bible stories today tell the story of this kind of storm, and remind us how powerful the experience of a storm can be, and yet the psalm describes the storm itself as an experience of God while the Gospel reading describes the experience of the disciples turning to Jesus for safety from the storm.
We use the concept of storm metaphorically too – we describe an experience of tumultuous change or conflict as being “caught in a storm”. I think that Adler’s description of a storm – when conditions are drastically different before, during, and after an event – can be applied to other experiences as well. And comparisons between those non-meteorological events in our lives, our own experiences of stormy weather, and storms in the Bible can be quite apt.
What kinds of experiences can create storms in our lives? Perhaps a sudden medical diagnosis, or the loss of a job. An unexpected change in a relationship, or the development of conflict in a community – any of these can leave us with the same sense of being caught in dynamic events we don’t have control over like being in a powerful storm. And as our call to worship points out, storms can renew life and destroy life, can create suffering and loss, and in the wake of storms, can offer opportunities for new life, hope and comfort.
These kinds of storms can come without warning, preceded only by words such as:
• Your tests have come back, and….
• A decision has been made, and…
• I have something I need to talk with you about, and….
• There’s been an accident….
And suddenly, everything is different.
Other storms have been seen on the horizon, brewing for awhile – we saw the signs or symptoms, and knew what might emerge, but we couldn’t or didn’t find a way out of the storm. Whether it’s anticipated or not, whether it was something we could avoid or not – the storms in our lives can be as frightening as a powerful hurricane or tornado. People can be hurt very badly, lives can be lost, relationships end, or change.
Sometimes, after the storm, things return to normal. Other times, a new normal eventually emerges. But during and after the storm, not only are circumstances different, but we are too. In the midst of it all, sometimes we have the experience described in today’s liturgy – we are asking “Where is God in all this?” Or we might be asking, “How do I connect with God in all this?” I was about the same age as the boys and girls who received the Bibles today when my mother told me one night after I had woken up with nightmares that often people turn to the Psalms when they find themselves afraid or lonely. And that helped me to know that the Bible was a way for me to connect with the experiences of other people. As we seek to understand where God is in our own lives, sometimes it can be helpful to read about people very like us a long time ago who also tried to understand God, and sometimes were faithful, and other times not very faithful at all. But God was always with them, reaching out to them, whether they could find God or not.
Sometimes doubts themselves are the storm – a faith that has been meaningful for years all of a sudden fails to satisfy; we find ourselves with questions that we never had before, or we find ourselves without feelings that we felt were essential to our faith experience. And whether our doubts are the storm itself, or a result of the storm, we may wonder whether God has created the storm, or whether God’s world is one in which certain conditions often combine to result in storms. And doubts are a part of the journey for almost everyone who takes God seriously – that is another message from the Bible.
Often in the storm, we find ourselves afraid for our own survival – perhaps we do not fear that we will die, but we are afraid that life as we have known it will be forever changed…and often it is. And sometimes the losses are real: a friendship never heals, our finances are truly damaged, our body is never the same, or the one we loved is really gone. Life contains loss from its very beginning – every step forward contains loss as well as opportunity. When a new sibling is born, the first child loses the privacy with parents; when a child goes to school, the days of home being the whole world is lost; when we graduate, we lose the community of our high school or college; when we marry, we lose the freedom of being a solitary individual; when we commit to a new job or community commitment or a child, we lose the freedom to spend our time entirely as we wanted; and if life carries us forward into older age, we find ourselves with little losses all along the way – we lose a little hearing, a little pep, a little firmness, and perhaps the ability to wake up without pain. So change and loss accompanies life all along the way, even when there are no storms. And we often yearn for an earlier time or place, whether or not it’s been disrupted by a storm.
And sometimes in those yearnings, we turn to God – hoping that God’s love, God’s strength, God’s care, can make everything right again. We turn to God in the storms, we turn to God after the storms – and yet, even in those occasions when life after the storm is very like life before the storm, we are not the same. And that is even more true for people of faith – faith is no protection against change. Because while I can promise you utterly confidently that God will never leave you…I also have to tell you that God will never leave you the same. You may be stronger, you may be more aware that life is not as safe as you had hoped, you may be in tune with other peoples’ pain, you may have a certain emptiness, you may walk with a limp, you may have less money, you may have less certainty. Because we don’t get to go back. After a storm, either life is different, or we are different, or both. But the message of Easter, the resurrection of Jesus, tells us that life continues, even when it changes, and that God is able to make a new way, even when we can see no way.
There’s been a book published recently in which Mother Teresa’s letters to her spiritual directors are revealed. And in them, we learn that the woman who many people thought of as being so close to God, actually was tormented by her own lack of experiencing a feeling of God’s presence that she had felt earlier in her life. The pain of that loss was huge for her, and it created many doubts – doubts about her own faithfulness, about the rightness of the path she had taken, and yes, doubts about God. And some people have been shaken by these revelations, and others of us have found comfort in knowing that other faithful people are faithful in the absence of felt experiences of God. And over time, Mother Teresa made a kind of peace with the absence of experiencing God, and with the yearning she continued to feel for God. But there were often times when she experienced great despair as well. She found that loss created by the storm continued almost the entire rest of her life, as did her yearning for the earlier experience. And yet, look at the impact that she has had on the faith of others – and now, knowing the storms that she experienced, some of her words are even more meaningful; words like: “In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.” And we understand that words like “Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty” come from her own loneliness – which in her case drove her to ease the loneliness of others. And perhaps her own experience of God’s silence is what led her to say, “We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls.”
Many people miss an awful lot of wonderful opportunities to build a good life because they can’t see any way back to the life they knew – and they are unwilling to bear the absence of that. The disciples experienced the power of God in Jesus Christ in amazing and powerful ways, such as the day he stilled a storm. And after his death and resurrection, they had moments of wondering how to move forward without him in their midst. And yet, in the act of moving forward anyway, they found themselves experiencing God powerfully in different ways.
After a storm, whether it’s a natural disaster, or a different kind of crisis, whether we found God powerfully active in the storm, or quietly present in its aftermath, we find ourselves wanting to go back to our normal lives – but we can’t go back. We can only go forward to a new normal, one that may be richer than before even when there have been significant losses. I can promise that there are some among us today who are sensing a storm on the horizon, some who are in the midst of storms, and others who are trying to put life back together after a storm. Storms are a part of every life.
There was a literary style known as Sturm und drang, which according to Wikipedia is German for “storm and stress,” although they point out a more accurate sense of the words might be “storm and longing”. Goethe is perhaps the greatest writer of this type, which stresses the unease of people in modern society, and human longing for a more profound experience. Storms do come paired with longing. If the storms in our lives lead us to seek God with a deeper yearning, then like storms in nature, there is new life coming out of the power and tumult, even when there may also be loss, grief, and great difficulty. And like Mother Teresa, even when we are not experiencing a sense of God’s presence in the midst of our struggles, in our seeking we may bear God to others. Like the psalmist, we may find God powerfully present in the storms; or like the disciples we may seek God as a refuge during the storms. And whether the storms leave us with a sense of God’s presence, or painfully aware of the absence of feeling God, we can know that God is present in the storms and afterwards, in the tumult, and in the healing that comes afterwards. God is indeed present through it all, ready to lead us to new life. Amen.
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Psalm 29, Luke 8:22-25
The sky is grey, and even before the wind builds, there may be a “calm before the storm” that crackles with anticipation – hope or dread depending on so many things. Has it been a dry spell? Is it a dangerous storm?? Do we feel safe? Sometimes that stillness is noticed in retrospect, particularly in storms of the interpersonal variety – where there may be no barometric low to tip us off that the weather is changing.
The stillness yields to stirring – to winds picking up and skies darkening. Some storms come with lots of warning, others with only minutes. And the really intense storms I’ve been around have been preceded in minutes or hours by really striking skies. I remember a Wisconsin storm one summer when I was visiting my aunt in Blue Mounds – the sky turned green before the storm, we lost power but heard a tremendous tumult in the darkness. The next day walking through the woods to the road, my cousins and I counted 28 trees uprooted.
Or the day of a major blizzard in Chicago on New Year’s Day in 1999 – the sky that morning reminded me of cobblestones, each stone-colored cloud rimmed with golden sunlight. I didn’t know a storm was coming – but the sky was quite amazing, and sure enough, it did portend something remarkable – 25 inches of snow that day.
Of course, when we think of storms, we usually think of disruptive weather that comes in from the sky – but natural crises can also include those that come from the land or water – an earthquake, a flood, or a tsunami.
And also, when we think of all these varieties of storms, we remember that some are well-predicted, with storm tracks that we can follow for days in advance watching satellite photos and radar. I used to even get radar images on my cell phone so I could watch the weather approach wherever I was.
But other storms come up suddenly, with little or no warning – we may hear that conditions are good for tornados, but they can develop quickly, not like hurricanes. And tornados, as well as a phenomena called a microburst, can move unpredictably, wreaking havoc done one block, and then changing direction. Houses next to one another can have dramatically different experiences. A few years ago in Indiana, a microburst came through our area, and although the homes on either side of us lost trees, and one neighbor’s tomato plants were entirely stripped of leaves by the winds, our yard and home were entirely untouched – a fork that someone had left on the table outside didn’t even blow off the table.
Dr. Robert Adler of the Goddard Space Center writes, “Storms connote suddenness – meaning that weather conditions are drastically different before, during and after the storm. Most of us have experienced an eerie silence before a storm strikes. Sometimes you'll hear the comment that ‘It came out of nowhere, and there wasn't a breath of air before all hell broke loose.’ On the other hand, with frontal storms, the weather may be tumultuous well before a line of thunderstorm approaches. Southwest winds ahead of an advancing cold front, for example, can be rather vigorous, even hours before cumulonimbus clouds begin to build.” So for Adler, what is distinctive about a storm is not the way it comes, or whether it was predicted, but the fact that in the storm, conditions are dramatically different than beforehand and afterwards.
Our Bible stories today tell the story of this kind of storm, and remind us how powerful the experience of a storm can be, and yet the psalm describes the storm itself as an experience of God while the Gospel reading describes the experience of the disciples turning to Jesus for safety from the storm.
We use the concept of storm metaphorically too – we describe an experience of tumultuous change or conflict as being “caught in a storm”. I think that Adler’s description of a storm – when conditions are drastically different before, during, and after an event – can be applied to other experiences as well. And comparisons between those non-meteorological events in our lives, our own experiences of stormy weather, and storms in the Bible can be quite apt.
What kinds of experiences can create storms in our lives? Perhaps a sudden medical diagnosis, or the loss of a job. An unexpected change in a relationship, or the development of conflict in a community – any of these can leave us with the same sense of being caught in dynamic events we don’t have control over like being in a powerful storm. And as our call to worship points out, storms can renew life and destroy life, can create suffering and loss, and in the wake of storms, can offer opportunities for new life, hope and comfort.
These kinds of storms can come without warning, preceded only by words such as:
• Your tests have come back, and….
• A decision has been made, and…
• I have something I need to talk with you about, and….
• There’s been an accident….
And suddenly, everything is different.
Other storms have been seen on the horizon, brewing for awhile – we saw the signs or symptoms, and knew what might emerge, but we couldn’t or didn’t find a way out of the storm. Whether it’s anticipated or not, whether it was something we could avoid or not – the storms in our lives can be as frightening as a powerful hurricane or tornado. People can be hurt very badly, lives can be lost, relationships end, or change.
Sometimes, after the storm, things return to normal. Other times, a new normal eventually emerges. But during and after the storm, not only are circumstances different, but we are too. In the midst of it all, sometimes we have the experience described in today’s liturgy – we are asking “Where is God in all this?” Or we might be asking, “How do I connect with God in all this?” I was about the same age as the boys and girls who received the Bibles today when my mother told me one night after I had woken up with nightmares that often people turn to the Psalms when they find themselves afraid or lonely. And that helped me to know that the Bible was a way for me to connect with the experiences of other people. As we seek to understand where God is in our own lives, sometimes it can be helpful to read about people very like us a long time ago who also tried to understand God, and sometimes were faithful, and other times not very faithful at all. But God was always with them, reaching out to them, whether they could find God or not.
Sometimes doubts themselves are the storm – a faith that has been meaningful for years all of a sudden fails to satisfy; we find ourselves with questions that we never had before, or we find ourselves without feelings that we felt were essential to our faith experience. And whether our doubts are the storm itself, or a result of the storm, we may wonder whether God has created the storm, or whether God’s world is one in which certain conditions often combine to result in storms. And doubts are a part of the journey for almost everyone who takes God seriously – that is another message from the Bible.
Often in the storm, we find ourselves afraid for our own survival – perhaps we do not fear that we will die, but we are afraid that life as we have known it will be forever changed…and often it is. And sometimes the losses are real: a friendship never heals, our finances are truly damaged, our body is never the same, or the one we loved is really gone. Life contains loss from its very beginning – every step forward contains loss as well as opportunity. When a new sibling is born, the first child loses the privacy with parents; when a child goes to school, the days of home being the whole world is lost; when we graduate, we lose the community of our high school or college; when we marry, we lose the freedom of being a solitary individual; when we commit to a new job or community commitment or a child, we lose the freedom to spend our time entirely as we wanted; and if life carries us forward into older age, we find ourselves with little losses all along the way – we lose a little hearing, a little pep, a little firmness, and perhaps the ability to wake up without pain. So change and loss accompanies life all along the way, even when there are no storms. And we often yearn for an earlier time or place, whether or not it’s been disrupted by a storm.
And sometimes in those yearnings, we turn to God – hoping that God’s love, God’s strength, God’s care, can make everything right again. We turn to God in the storms, we turn to God after the storms – and yet, even in those occasions when life after the storm is very like life before the storm, we are not the same. And that is even more true for people of faith – faith is no protection against change. Because while I can promise you utterly confidently that God will never leave you…I also have to tell you that God will never leave you the same. You may be stronger, you may be more aware that life is not as safe as you had hoped, you may be in tune with other peoples’ pain, you may have a certain emptiness, you may walk with a limp, you may have less money, you may have less certainty. Because we don’t get to go back. After a storm, either life is different, or we are different, or both. But the message of Easter, the resurrection of Jesus, tells us that life continues, even when it changes, and that God is able to make a new way, even when we can see no way.
There’s been a book published recently in which Mother Teresa’s letters to her spiritual directors are revealed. And in them, we learn that the woman who many people thought of as being so close to God, actually was tormented by her own lack of experiencing a feeling of God’s presence that she had felt earlier in her life. The pain of that loss was huge for her, and it created many doubts – doubts about her own faithfulness, about the rightness of the path she had taken, and yes, doubts about God. And some people have been shaken by these revelations, and others of us have found comfort in knowing that other faithful people are faithful in the absence of felt experiences of God. And over time, Mother Teresa made a kind of peace with the absence of experiencing God, and with the yearning she continued to feel for God. But there were often times when she experienced great despair as well. She found that loss created by the storm continued almost the entire rest of her life, as did her yearning for the earlier experience. And yet, look at the impact that she has had on the faith of others – and now, knowing the storms that she experienced, some of her words are even more meaningful; words like: “In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love.” And we understand that words like “Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty” come from her own loneliness – which in her case drove her to ease the loneliness of others. And perhaps her own experience of God’s silence is what led her to say, “We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence... We need silence to be able to touch souls.”
Many people miss an awful lot of wonderful opportunities to build a good life because they can’t see any way back to the life they knew – and they are unwilling to bear the absence of that. The disciples experienced the power of God in Jesus Christ in amazing and powerful ways, such as the day he stilled a storm. And after his death and resurrection, they had moments of wondering how to move forward without him in their midst. And yet, in the act of moving forward anyway, they found themselves experiencing God powerfully in different ways.
After a storm, whether it’s a natural disaster, or a different kind of crisis, whether we found God powerfully active in the storm, or quietly present in its aftermath, we find ourselves wanting to go back to our normal lives – but we can’t go back. We can only go forward to a new normal, one that may be richer than before even when there have been significant losses. I can promise that there are some among us today who are sensing a storm on the horizon, some who are in the midst of storms, and others who are trying to put life back together after a storm. Storms are a part of every life.
There was a literary style known as Sturm und drang, which according to Wikipedia is German for “storm and stress,” although they point out a more accurate sense of the words might be “storm and longing”. Goethe is perhaps the greatest writer of this type, which stresses the unease of people in modern society, and human longing for a more profound experience. Storms do come paired with longing. If the storms in our lives lead us to seek God with a deeper yearning, then like storms in nature, there is new life coming out of the power and tumult, even when there may also be loss, grief, and great difficulty. And like Mother Teresa, even when we are not experiencing a sense of God’s presence in the midst of our struggles, in our seeking we may bear God to others. Like the psalmist, we may find God powerfully present in the storms; or like the disciples we may seek God as a refuge during the storms. And whether the storms leave us with a sense of God’s presence, or painfully aware of the absence of feeling God, we can know that God is present in the storms and afterwards, in the tumult, and in the healing that comes afterwards. God is indeed present through it all, ready to lead us to new life. Amen.