Dear Fellow Parishioners,

After a few fits and starts, Fall weather has finally arrived. The Fall colors, the cool rains, brisk mornings, stunning sunsets, the wind-picked skies. Some of us are hoping to harvest just a few more tomatoes before the first frost, which could come any day.

The weather and seasons have always been popular topics of conversation, whether as small-talk “filler,” or in relation to planting a garden, harvesting grapes or other crops, threatened water shortages, etc. Then there is talk and longer term concern about “climate change.” For people who generally spend so much time indoors, we talk a lot about the weather. There is even the “Weather Channel” for true devotees.

As to our local weather and climate, as Petalumans we are about as blessed as it is possible to be. We have a climate with distinct seasons but without extremes, where punishing storms are rare, and in which it is possible to grow nearly anything – even palm trees. And we don’t have many bugs – especially pesky mosquitoes. In the southeast, there are massively destructive hurricanes (which in turn generate tornados) it takes years and billions of dollars to recover from. Some people return in rowboats after a hurricane only to find alligators and poisonous snakes in their destroyed and sodden homes. (They get alligators, we get earthquakes and fires, but we all get the insurance premium increases….)

When reading and reflecting on the Gospels, it is important to have, to the extent possible, a subjective experience of being with Jesus and his disciples, pondering their words, and following in their steps. What comes to my mind is how seldom the Gospels mention the weather except when required by the circumstances, such as the raging sea that Jesus calmed (“who is this that even the wind and the waves obey him?”), the darkness that fell on Good Friday, the vineyard workers laboring in the heat, or the seed sown on different kinds of land. At the same time, Jesus and his followers spent long days and even months largely outdoors, probably “sleeping rough” much of the time. The saving grace of the climate was that, like Petaluma’s, it was generally not extreme, with the exception of extended periods of summer heat. Winters, however, were cold enough that to be without a cloak could, on the coldest of nights, be life-threatening. The conditions Jesus mentions in the “Separation of the Sheep and Goats” – hunger, thirst, nakedness – were not merely dignitary wounds of poverty, but potentially matters of life or death.

The pagans of Jesus’s time largely believed that the weather resulted from the action of various gods, whose wrath needed to be propitiated. Even in pre-scientific ages, nearly every cosmology known to man (and woman) tried to explain these phenomena in one way or another. However, in our scientific age, we can still see them also as aspects of God’s creation. Taking some time to take in the beauty around us at this time of year, with hearts and minds elevated heavenward, becomes a prayer and an act of thanksgiving.

Blessings,
Fr. Bill Donahue