I was in New York a week ago and frankly, the subway freaks me out. Less lyrical and poetic than the Metro in Paris where the street musicians bring their accordions and Les-Miserable-looking children into the cars to perform and the name of each stop sounds like poetry, the New York subway system seems to exist in the dark bowels of the earth in its own eerie world of rumblings and rush.
Yet who could have imagined the subways would ever be closed, that water would flood the streets of Brooklyn and the lower East Side, and that the scenic Jersey shore would be ravaged by hurricane-force winds?
Who could have imagined anything knocking the election coverage off the front page?
Or that anything could close the stock exchange?
Enter Superstorm Sandy.
Like a formidable Minnesota blizzard, there are times when nature simply shuts things down, no matter how important, no matter how reliable. Stops it all. Then we remember that electricity is not a given, that transportation doesn’t always work, and that our world as we know it is not guaranteed always to be there.
When a really big storm hits, planes, trains and ships lay low. And we do, too. Separated from many of the usual forms of diversion, escapism, consumerism, and work, a coziness can settle over life in our homes, an unfamiliar gratitude, a slower pace. Hence as a student and then as a teacher, two of the happiest words ever were “Snow Day.” An unplanned respite, a broad space of unscheduled time, a day without the usual obligations. Yay….
A storm, super, snow or otherwise, is a reminder of human dependency on factors beyond our control and that can be disturbing.
In the New York of the 1920’s, the Plaza Hotel was one of the tallest and grandest buildings in the city. (Ernest Hemingway advised Minnesota writer F Scott Fitzgerald to give his liver to Princeton and his heart to the Plaza.) But Fitzgerald wrote than when he first went up to the roof of the Plaza at night and looked out over the city, he was profoundly disappointed. He saw that far from being the endless, magnificent stream of light that went on forever, it was surrounded by a dark wasteland as vast and dismal as the city was glorious. New York had limits.
Besides doing terrible physical damage, a storm can remind us that we human have limits. Which can be a good thing, as we remember that the God we worship does not.
Now…..what if the Internet went down……
See you in church.
Barbara
