A few weeks ago, a boy died not far from where I live. He was twelve years old. Even before the local T.V. stations had confirmed his death, there were wild rumors that a child had gone missing. Some said that he had gone out to play during a storm and had been blown away. Those of us who saw one of the three tornadoes that struck southwestern Michigan on March 6, the Feast of Saint Colette of Corbie, had no trouble believing these stories. But the reports turned out to be false. The boy had died near home. He was cleaning his boots in the garage; there was a loud sound which neighbors mistook for lightning, and the roof collapsed. He was found by his parents. But there was a ghost of truth in the story that had been making the rounds on Friday evening at places like the Elks Club (which remained open for a fish fry despite losing power): the story, like something from folk legend, of the boy taken by the wind. “Moments before his death,” his parents said, he had “commented on how cool the wind looked.”

Three other people died during the recent storm, a man and two women. Their deaths were not widely discussed, and I had a harder time even learning their names. For obvious reasons, the death of a child attracts more attention. For reasons which are less clear, it also seems to inspire logomania. “I seen all that lumber and everything like that, and I thought, oh, lightning hit a tree and split it and everything, and then I thought, no, them’s too big of pieces,” a witness told a local reporter. A few days later a statement was released on social media by the superintendent of the school district, complete with a non-working link to the National Association of School Psychologists. A week later I found the obituary. It recorded the boy’s favorite foods (“Traverse City Cherry Fudge ice cream, TruFru Strawberries, Root Beer, Nerds Gummy Clusters, his Dad’s steak, his Grandma’s cheesy potatoes, and definitely his Mom’s apple pie”), toys (“remote control cars, boats, planes, and drones”), vacations (“Hawaii, Sweden, Norway, British Virgin Islands, Bahamas, Costa Rica, Grand Canyon, New York City, Steamboat Springs, Copper Mountain”), and modes of vehicular transport (“bicycles, scooters, EZ rollers, and gators . . . dirt bikes, ATVs, side-by-sides, and electric scooters”), as well as “his two main sports so far in life,” soccer and basketball. The obituary also directed funeralgoers to forego mourning dress on the grounds that the deceased “never found the discomfort of dress clothes to be warranted.” Instead, it advised wearing Jordan sneakers.

After reading this I wondered what I might have written about one of my own children. For about thirty seconds on that Friday afternoon, we found ourselves not more than a few hundred yards away from one of the tornadoes. It happened almost by accident. That morning my wife had gone to the Secretary of State office to update the registration on one of our vehicles, leaving our two youngest children with my maternal grandparents. The two older girls had come with me to my office, a former storefront in our little red-brick Victorian downtown. Most of the day was uneventful. The girls worked on their Latin while I plunked away at my Mac. When my wife arrived to pick up the girls, she suggested walking next door to the local bar, which had just re-opened. We could not have stayed for more than ten minutes. When we returned to my office, my dumb phone started making strange noises, and a kind of text box that I had never seen before appeared, warning us of a tornado. My first thought was that the device must have been malfunctioning. There was no tornado siren. But still we dutifully opened the door to the basement and went downstairs, where we waited for five or so minutes for the siren. Still under the impression that it must have been some kind of error, we decided to go back up. We had barely reached the top of the stairs when we heard the siren, at more or less exactly the moment that my wife’s iPhone received a message similar to the one on mine. This time we waited for ten minutes, even though the siren stopped almost immediately. We assumed that a tornado must have been spotted in another county. It was time for my wife to get the younger children from my grandparents. We came up the stairs again. I locked the door, and we headed for the car.

I do not recall anything unusual about the sky or the wind. I suppose that it must have been dark-ish and that the air was probably humid, but we cannot have noticed. If anything had seemed obviously amiss, our big girls, a talkative pair, would have mentioned it. Instead we walked the fifty or so feet up the street to where the car was parked and got in. At the corner, just in front of my office building, my wife made a right in the direction of the police station and turned right again to take the road that runs parallel to downtown in front of the park. There must have been thirty or so seconds of desultory chatter—probably jokes about the younger children coaxing sweets from my grandmother in the middle of Lent—before we heard the scream. It was a man’s voice, the loudest sound I have ever heard a human being make. At first it registered as something alien, totally unconnected with our surroundings. Then we saw what we had somehow missed: a great vertical blackness, a mid-afternoon fragment of sloshing night, a column of cold heat. I am still not exactly sure where the scream was coming from.

There was a stopped car ahead of us on the bridge. With an expletive I implored my wife to speed up and go around. I cannot account for my impressions of the drive home. I do not even think it was ever explicitly announced that we were going that way instead of toward my grandparents’ house, which is outside of town. A few blocks from us I saw a man walking, looking dumbly at his phone, and my wife told me to roll down the passenger side window, but the locking mechanism was on and by the time this was even a thought that I could articulate over the sounds of the girls—screaming but also somehow simultaneously reciting the Saint Michael prayer—we were at the house and my girls were running inside shouting backwards queries about their coats and the rabbit upstairs. Before I could answer they had already made their way to the basement, where I told them that the bunny would be fine. We were down there for twenty or so minutes; from the windows the sky looked orange-black, but I noticed it only intermittently between jokes about all the boxes of books. The power flashed on and off. We did not hear another siren.

Finally, when the sky seemed clear from the basement windows, I went upstairs and looked out the back door. The sun appeared to be shining with an almost lunatic brightness. It was freakishly hot. Stepping into the backyard I saw that the darkness had moved far away on the horizon. There was no sign of any storm. I returned and told my wife and the girls that it was safe to come back upstairs. While my wife resumed her mission to collect the other children, I took the girls for a walk. We found ourselves drawn almost instinctively toward the spot behind my office where we had seen the black shape. In the strange unseasonal light it must have been easy to miss all the flashing red; and even the sirens must have been blocked out by the sheer idiotic force. Finally we crossed the railroad tracks to the south side of town and saw rows of houses with damaged roofs and collapsed fronts, downed power lines, a park where every tree had been uprooted but an old pavilion (long considered unsafe) was curiously intact. At the park I spent some time pulling random objects—boards, shingles, huge pieces of styrofoam—out of the river.

For us that was more or less the storm. Unlike thousands of others in our town and in the surrounding counties, we never lost electricity for more than a few minutes at a time. In the days immediately following the tornado, the roads in town seemed busier than I had ever seen them, especially the one that leads past my office to the neighborhood that had been hit the worst. But eventually people got sick of surveying the destruction. For most of them the tornado had been an opportunity to share, like, and comment on videos. A week and a half later, by Saint Patrick’s Day, tornado talk had mostly subsided, even though the governor had declared a state of emergency, and we still had no idea why the siren had not been going off when the tornado actually arrived.

Otherwise the only real sense in which our own household has been affected by the storm is the shuttering of what is technically our parish church. The tornado, we learned, had touched down out by the highway, where a number of buildings had been destroyed, before taking a kind of zigzagging path toward the church, which it must have reached not long—perhaps only a minute after—we had seen it. From the outside the structure of the church appears sound; but we were told that the roof could collapse at any moment. The gymnasium, though—a vestige of the old parish school, which now has fewer than twenty students and is now mainly used for rummage and bake sales and an annual fundraising dinner—is a ruin. A priest of the diocese sent me a picture of the interior which has been making the rounds: There is something odd about seeing an indoor basketball court covered in rain, especially when you already associate it with stiff chairs and white tablecloths and underpriced novelty drinks. After the storm parishioners were told to stay home; professional crews paid for by insurance would be handling all of the cleanup. But the suits must have been recalcitrant, because later I heard that they were seeking volunteers after all. It is unclear when the gym will be torn down and when the roof will be replaced, but it will almost certainly not be before Pentecost. But because my family does not attend Mass at our parish, all of this has simply meant that we will have to find another place to attend confession on Saturday afternoons.

Recently I learned that immediately after the storm a message had appeared on the diocesan website’s homepage reporting that church staff had been able to “shelter in place”; after directing parishioners to an online Mass directory, it invited readers to “offer this prayer (courtesy of Catholic Charities USA)”:

God of hope and mercy, we lift up to you all victims of natural disasters and those responding with assistance and aid. Protect all who are in any form of danger; provide practical help to those in need; strengthen the weary, console the grieving, heal the suffering; and bless those engaged in disaster relief efforts with safety and courage. Help all people of good will respond with compassion and generous hearts. Amen.

I found myself reading through the statement and the prayer several times, but it is easy to imagine why others might not have given them a second thought. By now we are all so used to seeing dioceses—and indeed all institutions, from corporations to symphony orchestras to the National Football League—use this kind of language that it hardly makes an impression. For some reason I am always drawn to pseudo-technical nonsense phrases such as “shelter in place,” which has become the COVID-era equivalent of “first responder” and “war-fighter.” While it is difficult to imagine where people in a rectory or church office would “shelter” except “in place,” no one except me really expects Church officials to express themselves non-pleonastically.

Far more interesting is the text of the prayer itself. There is a sense in which it can hardly be called a prayer. (Try to imagine someone on his knees devoutly uttering the words “disaster relief efforts.”) Like the pseudo-petitions attached to your bishop’s annual appeal letter or the “prayers of the faithful” in the New Rite, it sinks under the weight of jargon. Everything that ought to be vivid—the terrible power of storms, floods, fires, and so on—is reduced to a kind of vague abstraction, and even the invocation of “the weary,” “the suffering,” and “the grieving,” which seems to suggest something almost recognizable as prayer language, is a kind of pious afterthought that follows the official bloodless designation of “victims of natural disasters.” But the oddest thing here, surely, is the second petition: “provide practical help.” The idea of addressing those words to God strikes me as odd in ways I find it almost impossible to describe.

Without trying to break a butterfly on a wheel, I would like to suggest that it is worth thinking more about prayers like this one and where they come from. They are not simply a matter of bad taste or (a well-known bugbear) “poor formation,” nor are they the result of (another one) the hypothetical cowedness or failure of nerve which the faithful reflexively attribute to bishops. I think it more likely that they are the expression of attitudes which most of us share, albeit half-consciously, a basic and more or less all-pervading orientation toward the world. And so they are probably inevitable.

We have prayers like this, I think, for the very simple reason that most of us—regardless of what we would like to tell ourselves—find what until the day before yesterday would have been more or less universally understood as the idiomatic and experiential norms of the Christian religion alien to our experience. In the past, when most men and women were inured to what we would now regard as an “early” death preceded by periods of starvation, cold, hard work, grinding poverty, the ever-present threat of violence or the possibility of exposure to the ruthless elements, even the bare fact of survival was considered ipso facto evidence of the loving arm of Providence. Today our baseline is not survival; it is a level of prosperity unimaginable by the denizens of eighteenth-century Versailles. Any departure from this order of prosperity registers as a severe privation. The idea that a storm, for example, might reflect not merely God’s permissive will—creation groaning and travailing in pain and all that Pauline jazz—but His wrath is foreign to almost all educated Christians. “Fire and hail, snow and vapours, wind and storm, fulfilling his word”; “the Lord hath his way in the whirlwind and in the storm”: While it would be an exaggeration to say no one really believes this, it would not be a very gross one. To the extent that it survives at all, it takes the form of a crude occasionalism. But the species of televangelist for whom every shaft of lightning or financial windfall is a direct and unmistakable sign of heavenly disapprobation or (as the case may be) favor is a dying breed. For the rest of us, the workings of nature are neutral and opaque, even when they appear at their most insensately brutal.

I am not writing a theodicy. (If I were, my instincts would probably incline in the direction of Ivan Karamazov.) The question of why God permits what we now call “natural disasters” is beyond the scope of this essay. Instead, I am simply interested in pointing out that weather is one of any number of commonplaces toward which we have a profoundly different relationship than our ancestors.

I am not a very skilled explicator of Holy Writ. My reading of Scripture is not naïve, but it is probably somewhat closer to the way the New Critics read Shakespeare than to what most commentators are up to. Perhaps for that reason I find my attention drawn to many things so obvious that theologians interested in more abstruse questions are likely to miss. Perhaps the most obvious of these is how much of the Bible is “about” what for lack of a better word I shall simply call “the world.” By this I mean that it is concerned with things like agriculture, weather, birds, trees, flowers, warfare, and so on, both at the level of narrative and in terms of its imagery. More so than any other book, one can regard it simply as a picture, given in simple and beautiful language, of the eternal verities of human existence: “The earth mourneth and fadeth away”; “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow!”; “Who is she that cometh forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army set in array?” Perhaps its most characteristic expression is the resigned Hesiodic simplicity of the Psalms:

He bringeth forth grass for the cattle, and green herb for the service of men that he may bring food out of the earth, and wine that maketh glad the heart of man; and oil to make him a cheerful countenance, and bread to strengthen man’s heart.

Two thousand years ago this pastoral vision would have been more or less mutually intelligible to Jews, pagans, and the first Christians. The Psalms were not a series of picturesque metaphors that called the attention of readers (or listeners) to the intelligibility and beneficence of the created order; they were, among other things, a description of the actual world in which nearly everyone lived, a world which it did not require any great effort of the imagination to see as ordered and hierarchical. Even men and women who had not themselves tended cattle, harvested crops, pressed grapes or olives, or ground wheat into flour would have regarded them as familiar activities, a part of everyday life. This was true in a basic phenomenological sense—what they saw and heard and smelled and felt and tasted—but it was also the case at the slightly more abstract level of the economic organization of society. “Supply chains,” as we would now call them, were already becoming complex in the urban parts of the empire, but even to city dwellers accustomed to a diet of imported grain they were far less mysterious than they are for most of us today. The Bible embodied the truth of its world; it offered a picture of life that was as recognizable, and as rhetorically credible, as anything in the pagan literature of antiquity. One did not need to be a shepherd to understand what it meant for the Lord to be one. Oil, wine, bread, and figs were not “poetical” subjects; they were not anachronistic bric-a-brac, nor (more importantly) did they form an undifferentiated heap somewhere around the edge of ordinary experience as much of the natural world does for us now. Their essence, their practical import, and their symbolic potential were of a piece.

After the Church expanded beyond the ancient Mediterranean, the words of Scripture were chanted, memorized, commented upon, and debated by people for whom the chariot and the desert rose were no doubt somewhat exotic. An English Benedictine monk of the eleventh century had probably not seen a lion. Most Americans even thirty years ago had never tasted a pomegranate. No one now knows what plant was sprinkled with the blood of a bird to cleanse the house of a leper, but the “hyssop” of Leviticus and Psalm L was almost certainly not the shrub now commonly referred to by that name but rather a species of oregano. But the legibility of the Bible did not depend upon detailed knowledge of the flora and fauna of the ancient Near East. Its language was infinitely portable; it retained its power not stubbornly but effortlessly; its absorption not only into theology but liturgy, painting, music, and architecture made it known even to the illiterate. Sometimes it was fortuitously misunderstood—hence Moses’ horns, and the charming anachronisms of the medieval mystery plays, with their recognizably local stereotypes, and the adaptation of the Nativity to the climate of Northern Europe (and later the northern United States).

This remarkable idiomatic flexibility was undoubtedly a source of its strength. But this strength has its limits, and it is hard not to think that in the last century they have begun to show. Never mind the identity of hyssop; for most of us, agriculture and animal husbandry have become invisible. Creation itself has been largely absorbed into what we call “the built environment.” War is no longer fought on horseback or with weapons wielded by the heavenly host; shipwreck is not a familiar danger. Weather and the change of seasons scarcely affect our diet. The language of reaping and threshing, of planting and harvest, no longer arises from our experience of the world. It cannot function metaphorically because it no longer names anything we know. These images do not shape our expectations or illuminate our lives.

For this reason what Kenneth Burke would have called the “imagistic procedures” of Scripture no longer prepare us for revelation. They are simply one more difficulty to be overcome or else ignored. This, one suspects, is the real reason why so many people do not object to banal translations of Scripture; for most of us the Bible has already been reduced to a series of (largely ethical) abstractions and a handful of neat apothegms. And if Scripture itself functions this way, it is a short step to praying in the same deracinated, functionalist idiom.

I see no way around this problem. How should we answer it? I can think of three distinct possibilities. (Here I am bracketing the irrelevant question of whether a small number of homesteaders or other back-to-the-land types might have found a way around the problem altogether—even if they have discovered the lost lane-end into heaven, which I doubt, the problem would still exist for the rest of us.) The most obvious solution is simply not to expect a series of discrete texts written in the ancient Near East between the sixteenth century B.C. and the first century A.D. by a wide array of authors to conform to our experience of the world, much less to submit readily to our attempts to impose upon them an artificial cohesiveness made possible by an ever-shifting range of competing hermeneutical and conceptual schemes. In other words, we admit that the Bible is not really the Word of God. This would certainly cut the Gordian knot.

Another, slightly less gloomy possibility is to say that we have simply “oversold” Scripture by expecting it to do things that God and the Church have never claimed for it. Its inspired status has nothing to do with its former incidental legibility or the once-implicit world picture upon which it rested. We are better off not ignoring it exactly but accepting its status as a kind of remote inheritance, a great treasure whose value we cannot hope to assess or even to understand because it is not of this world. The Word of the Lord is there to be incensed and solemnly chanted, not to be read, much less understood. The world around us can go on becoming something far more dystopian than it already is, but we can cling to the hieratic language of Scripture in the Mass—like the Buddhist priests who continued to preside over the ritual operation of ancient hydraulic works long after their practical import had been forgotten.

The undesirability—and for Catholics the blatant impermissibility—of my first solution goes without saying. The second one is logically possible, but probably also a dead end. The third is premised upon something which is by definition unknowable. It is also perhaps the simplest, at least in theory: We are close to the end of the world. All that remains is to gird ourselves with the armor of God and prepare for the final tournament match with the principalities and powers and the rulers of darkness. If nothing else, this certainly tracks with other narratives of exhaustion or collapse—political, social, economic, above all perhaps cultural—which I suspect many of my readers find persuasive. (Does anyone seriously think there will ever be another poet?) In the economy of restoration foretold in the Apocalypse, a revival of conceptual clarity would be small potatoes. My guess is that for some of you, this third possibility might be the most attractive.

Still, I think we are better off without solutions. I also think that even if we had one it would be of less importance than acknowledging a simple truth: namely, that it is the shape and texture of human lives that have changed, not Scripture, and that, however coarsened and idiotic and well-nigh unlivable modern post-industrial civilization becomes, we still participate in it (albeit perhaps from a position of recusancy) as beings made in the image and likeness of a Creator Who Himself assumed human nature in order to bring about a redemption of our fallen world, one that has already taken place—a victory that was won for all time at Easter. To put it more bluntly: Who knows, and really, who cares? If we reach the point at which “to everything there is a season” becomes a truth we can affirm only in the vaguest, most fideistic sense, what have we lost? If there is one thing we can say with certainty about our technological society, it is that, like most of our works, it will surely be cast into the lake of fire.

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The day after the feast of Saint Patrick, I was sitting in my office when I heard the tornado siren again. I of course went immediately to the basement. A thousand things occurred to me. I tried to call my wife, but she didn’t pick up. This time I noticed the cobwebs and a row of old bookshelves and a large red sign that read “Freedom.” I noticed, too, that there was another door, providing access for the upstairs tenants. (I wondered whether they had been home last time; perhaps they had simply ignored any warning messages.) I do not know how long I was down there, but it cannot have been for more than five minutes. When I came up I wondered, once again, whether a tornado had been sighted nearby. I saw a police car pass my window unconcernedly with the rest of the usual traffic in our downtown, which most people regard as a convenient thoroughfare rather than an actual place. I walked down to the bar and asked whether they had heard the siren. The bartender said it was a test.