Dust and Rain

Now, this may strike you as a peculiar sort of thing to say, but it is my firm hope that by the time this article appears in print, it will be virtually irrelevant. Not that I am not serious about these observations. I am indeed. It's Just that the conditions that spark this particular reflection are not something we hope to have to endure much longer.

Those conditions are, in a word, dust. And not just dust, but DUST. Huge rolling clouds of the stuff. Acres of it, all about fifty feet higher off the ground than it ought to be. North Dakota topsoil is a wonderful thing, but not on top of cars, houses, even trees. Actually, this morning it is not as bad as it has been. Some of the grey in the sky this morning is actually caused by clouds, real clouds. In fact, it's even raining a little bit, from time to time. Nothing spectacular, but enough to let you know that it is stall possible.

And that, really, brings me to the point. A couple of minutes ago I took a walk over to the church and found myself plowing through a type of weather that probably doesn't happen too many other places in the world. It was a mixture of rain and dust, at the same time. Now that, it would seem, really shouldn't happen. The two would seem to be incompatible. Rain coming down and dust blowing up should, somewhere about knee level, make mud. But it didn't. Somehow or other the two were managing to ignore one another, and so for a while at least, each went about doing what it does best, the rain wetting the ground, and making everybody happy, and the dust clogging the lungs and making everybody miserable.

Now, all of this may not seem like real meaty stuff, but when you stop to think about it, it has the makings of a classic moral conflict. Two sets of conditions, each naturally, inevitably, opposed to the other. For a while, the conditions seem to coexist, but it is obvious that they cannot forever. One or the other must gain the upper hand. Which will it be? Well, assuming the quality of persistence in all of this, my money will be on the rain every time. It simply has to be that way, it's just the nature of the stuff. Rain soaks up dust, settles it, changes its properties. There is no way around that.

And that is the basic difference between the two. If the dust is to win out, it must increase. The clouds have to get bigger and stronger, constantly, if they are to continue at all. The minute the dust swirls stop growing, they start dying. But that is not true for the rain. All the rain has to do is hang on. If it can increase, and grow stronger, fine, wonderful, so much the better. But the point is that it doesn't have to, in order to ultimately overcome. All it has to do is persist. For the rain, simply to keep going is to win. Rain can spend an awful long time looking like it is losing, but in fact it it not. It is quietly, patiently, perhaps even unnoticeably, settling the dust, changing it, overcoming it.

Well, if you happen to be in a philosophical mood while you are walking over to the church in the middle of rain and dust, it can be food for thought indeed. We all know that there are few if any un-mixed blessings in life. But perhaps we are not so sensitive to the fact that neither are there any unmixed curses. No matter what problems, what crosses we may have to bear in our lives, no matter what evil we may seem to have to endure, there is always a power at work, quietly, perhaps very quietly, changing the evil, settling it, overcoming it. And in order for us to bring that power into play, to assure its victory, all we, like the rain, need to do is hang on.

We have just passed through the Easter season, the time of the year that gives a name to that quiet power in our lives. It is Resurrection. Now, that power may not, most certainly will not, in fact, eliminate evil from our lives. Easter Sunday did not eliminate Good Friday. We will have to walk through a good many mixtures of rain and dust before we are finished. But it does indeed change the way we experience it. It gives us confidence in the outcome of any conflict that may for a while mark our lives. It teaches us that no cross is ever what it seems to be. It has no final victory, it can never be more than a temporary obstacle. It may not seem that way, but that really is not important. After all, resurrection never seems like resurrection till Easter. But it is such, long before Easter.

Well, enough of that. It's lunch time, and I've got to shovel a half acre of Pembina County off my plate. There's a sandwich under there somewhere, or at least there was an hour or so ago. So we gag and wheeze and cough our way through another cloud of dust. But look down. The ground is getting wet. Rain is a patient thing, and so are the people of the Resurrection.

From 1980 through 1982, Father Sandell served as Chaplain to the Bishop O'Reilly Council No. 3918,Grafton, North Dakota Chapter of the Knights of Columbus. "Scattered Thoughts" is a collection of essays based on columns originally written for the Chaplain's Corner, section of the Council's monthly newsletter.