I remember Radio Four Test Cricket Special, and the commentators filling in during rain delays with coversation and relaxed observations about life, the world and what is so about the loveably human. The hilarious spoof commentary on an empty crisp packet blowing across the wicket, and the discussions and disagreements about the colour, and therefore the flavour to be deduced providing they accurately identified the brand. On another occasion some virtuoso informed descriptions of clour formations, the different types of cloud, their various rain-bearing possibilities, and the memorable reference to the audience as 'cloud connoiseurs', whom they assumed to be listening intently to descriptions of that which they could not see, which were fleeting in shape and position, and transient structures of air and water with no significance whatsoever to the personal lives of the listeners.
I am, I confess, a cloud connoisseur. And the turth is the image of a clouded sky is an important metaphor in my own inner life, emotionally, spiritually and intellectually. Mary Oliver, (who else if you want a visionary description) is characteristically celebratory.
How good
that the clouds travel, as they do,
like the long dresses of the angels
of our imagination
or gather in storm masses, then break
with the gifts of replenishment.
She is right. The use of clouds as a metaphor of forebodiing, trouble or gloom is to do a great disservice to one of the great images of hope. That feaful saint, the poet William Cowper could write with terrifying fear of the menace and destructive force of storm clouds. But in one of his finest hymns he redeems the clouds by exactly the same technique as Mary Oliver.
You fearful saints, fresh courage take;
The clouds you so much dread
Are big with mercy and will break
In blessing on your head.
Rain is replenishment; clouds are harbingers of mercy; indeed rainless clouds are seen as vaccuous and deceiving. It's the clouds heavy with rain that are most replete with blessing.
At a different level altogether the cloud is the place where God hides, and our of which God speaks, whether on Sinai or on the Mount of Transfiguration. No one can see God and live so the cloud hides the blinding and annihilating holiness of God at Sinai, and thereafter is the symbol of the resident presence of God in the Holy of Holies of the Tabernacle; and it is the cloud which hides the mystery of the Father who speaks love to the beloved Son on Mount Tabor. All of this and more lies behind Cowper's hymn, and on a less intense level, Oliver's sense of a benevolent Creation.
For myself, I gladly concur with this positive view of clouds. I am a cloud connoisseur because their very transience and impermanence mean the skyscape of my life, like the sky above, is never fixed, but figures and reconfigures, and yet the faithful God is creatively present, even when hidden. I am with that whimsical cloud lover Gavin Pretor-Pinney who wrote the remarkable The Cloudpsotter's Guide. "The humble Cumulus humilis – never hurt a soul" I'm with him even more when he takes a swipe at the unthinking positivists who yearn for permanent blue skies. “We pledge to fight 'blue-sky thinking wherever we find it. Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day.”
God did not call us to cloudless monotony and blue sky thinking. Our calling is to live beneath the variable skies, to be cloud connoisseurs, seeing them as big with mercy, sources of replenishment, hints, clues and nudges in the direction of the God whose mercy is such that he stays a safe distance from us, and in Jesus has come cloer than we are to ourselves.
But yes, Cowper understood, more acutely than the pseudo-secular superficiality of our contemporaries, so dismissive or simply unaware of sin as a reality in human heart, experience and culture. He knew, and we may have to learn once again,that dark clouds are also harbingers of storm, judgement and the reality of a God whose presence is described best in the images of cloud, obscurity, power and weather fronts made up of the consequences and cost of an atheism whose evidence is in a ruined and ravaged creation. That's the thing with images such as clouds – they have an ambiguity and fluidity just as unpredictable and liable to change as that which they signify. God is a God of mercy, and judgement. The One whose chariot is the coulds is to be approached in faith, and with fear; and we do well to remember, the cloud makes possible the rainbow.
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