Canter Bridge

With their feet newly planted on dry ground, the survivors of the biblical flood story learn from YHWH himself that the experience will never be repeated. Indeed, dependable regularity will mark the future rather than the systematic dismantling of creation that brought the floodwaters surging up from below and pounding down as incessant rain.

As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest, cold and heat,
summer and winter, day and night,
shall not cease.

So reads the versed section of twin divine promises not to wipe the earth free of living creatures as he had done in the wake of humanity’s filling up the earth with nothing but bloodshed and violence. The rainbow is identified as YHWH’s covenantal sign that such destruction is not to be feared when the rains come down.

It is too easy, particularly where we have grown accustomed to civilization and its institutional stability, to forget how real the threat of chaos is and has been to most human beings. It is a simple matter to make the mistaken assessment that life’s regularity is a simple fact on the ground rather than a generous provision, a given—perhaps—rather than a gift.

So does entitlement replace gratitude as our default temperamental posture.

The Genesis material reminds us from creation and through to the flood story that chaos is creation’s great enemy and that stability, regularity, and predictability are a divine achievement executed on behalf of YHWH’s creation and then given over to it as gift. One can plant in a regularized environment with a fair expectation that the seasons will bring harvest, if not this year than the next. One can bear children and raise them up to face a future when one will have passed on, confident that the wisdom with which we attempt to shape their lives will be relevant—that is, it will work—in a future in which we ourselves are likely to be but a memory. Indeed, one can do science in such a regularized world, where caprice is not sovereign.

These are not small moves in humankind’s epic struggle not to fall prey to killing chaos.

One is urged, here, to consider the rainbow, then to give thanks that tomorrow will be rather like today.