in the furnace of this afternoon

These are hot days. The earth cracks open in a prayer for rain. Every day the wounds gape a little wider. Sometimes deprivation ensures that when the blessing comes, it will reach the deep, dark places inside us. Sometimes it engenders a desperate neediness, a greedy draining of the blessing that stops even a drop of goodness from spilling over us to run back to the river. These are the two parables the earth confesses under my feet while I scythe hay in the furnace of this afternoon. I need them both.

It is to me an unfortunate irony that after hundreds of years of the prophets tying drought to holy judgement that today, in a climate crisis for which we are demonstrably to blame, we have lost the imagination to hear God's word in this drought, telling us some things we'd rather not hear about ourselves. That so many of my co-religionists are at the forefront of denying the signs of the times is painfully sad.

At least it has gotten oppressively hot enough that the city newscasters no longer broadcast an outlook of uninterrupted sunshine as if it were a proclamation of good news.