Having just returned to Chicago from the small, rural New Mexican community where she grew up, Rozann Carter reflects on the differences between urban and rural Catholicism-- on display within a simple, fervent prayer for rain.
O God, in Whom we live move and have our being, grant us sufficient rain, so that, being supplied with what sustains us in this present life, we may seek more confidently what sustains us for eternity. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, on God for ever and ever.
-taken from the Roman Missal of the Catholic Church, special prayers For Civil Needs
Mounted on the post of the barb-wire fence that separates the front yard from the pasture is a rain gauge. When the first crest of a thunderhead is visible on the horizon, when the phone lines are busy with local farmers and ranchers dialing up their neighbors 20 minutes further west to see the scope of what is rolling in, while families are anticipating the post-rain, deep-breathing, prayerfully giddy backporch session that is hopefully to come, that rain gauge sits—a quiet, inanimate, unaware receptacle of the palpable hopes of an entire community—hopes grounded in an inch-worth of measured drops of water.
Please, God. Please let it rain.
And so they wait, day after day, watching the local weather channel with religious devotion for an often-disappointing percentage chance… and then the sky for a sign that the “real Weatherman” is more merciful than KFDA’s Doppler Dave. They make plan A’s and plan B’s based on the news, selling the cattle for another week of wind, tumbleweeds and dirt; holding onto the herd upon the prediction of a gully-washer. They talk at the coffee shop (the kind with Cain’s Drip and Mini-Moos cream) about what they’ll do when the grass doesn’t grow and only the noxious “loco weed” survives, about the inordinate number of grasshoppers that are eating up the remaining stalks… and then, with lightness and joyful carrying-on, about how the local football team just whipped a 3A school across the Oklahoma line.
And they go to Mass...