“That Glassy Floods From Rugged Rocks Can Crush”

154993501

Walter Russell Mead meditates on the storm, nature and God. He quotes John Milton’s paraphrase of Psalm 114, which is quoted in this post's title:

Hurricane Sandy is many things; one of those things is a symbol. The day is coming for all of us when a storm enters our happy, busy lives and throws them into utter disarray. The job on which everything depends can disappear. That relationship that holds everything together can fall apart. The doctor can call and say the test results are not good. All of these things can happen to anybody; something like this will happen to us all. Somewhere in the future, each of us has an inescapable appointment with irresistible force. For each one of us, the waters will someday rise, the winds spin out of control, the roof will come off the house and the power will go out for good.

He believes that to "acknowledge and accept weakness is to ground our lives more firmly in truth":

To come to terms with the radical insecurity in which we all live is to find a different and more reliable kind of security. The joys and occupations of ordinary life aren’t all there is to existence, but neither are the great and all-destroying storms. There is a calm beyond the storm, and the same force that sends these storms into our lives offers a peace and security that no storm can destroy. As another one of the psalms puts it, "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning."

(Photo: Resident Kim Johnson inspects the area around her apartment building (L) which flooded and destroyed large sections of an old boardwalk, on October 30, 2012 in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Johnson fled the area when the water began to rise yesterday. The storm has claimed at least 16 lives in the United States, and has caused massive flooding accross much of the Atlantic seaboard. By Mario Tama/Getty Images)