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So, yeah, I grew up in Colorado, with summer trips to Texas every year to see my parents' families. My parents moved back to Texas in the eighties, into my grandparents' house. Jonathan Edwards captured language for "an angry, unpredictable God," and, right now, I'm thinking, one of the things that is a legacy of the Calvinists and Puritans, more a function of their time than of their religion, although JB Jackson has written about about the specific Puritan landscape that they brought from Europe and reinacted in New England (each family allocated a homelot, grazing land and wood lands, along with the shared common and the gathering place of the meeting house; sometimes, by law, everyone had to live within sound of the church bell, which called people together, not just to worship, but any time they needed to be summoned as a group) -- that one thing Northampton, for instance, has as a legacy of the Calvinists is that it clusters on a human scale, with many needed things available on foot or by bike, as they needed to be when everyone walked or rode.
Another thing about Jonathan Edwards is that he was unusual for his time, European background and cultural position in reading the landscape as a language, the physical world as part of God's efforts to communicate with his people. Most stuck to Scripture, but he read the crops, animals, bugs, water, storms, clouds, too. (Hmm, although there definitely was a Puritan tradition of taking omens, portents and acts of nature seriously as messages from God, sometimes admissable as evidence in court and things like that.)
Here's Rebecca Solnit from Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics again, looking at The Great Basin. Western, desert lands:
Because wild creatures too are spread far apart and often operate at night, because the colors and changes of the plant life can be subtle, it often seems as though the real drama is in the sky -- not exactly life, but life-giving, the light and the rain. Summer thunderstorms in the arid lands are an operatic drama, particularly in New Mexico, where the plot normally unfolds pretty much the same way every day during the summer monsoon season: clear morning skies are gradually overtaken by cumulus clouds as scattered and innocuous as a flock of grazing sheep, until they gather and turn dark; then the afternoon storm breaks, with lightning, with thunder, with crashing rain that can turn a dusty road into a necklace of puddles reflecting the turbulent sky. New Mexico is besieged now by a horrendous multiyear drought, and, watching the clouds gather every afternoon as if for this dionysian release that never came, I felt for the first time something of that beseeching powerlessness of those who prayed to an angry, unpredictable God and felt how easy it would be to identify that God with the glorious, fickle, implacable desert sky.
The whole essay quoted,"The Red Lands," is available as a pdf at the link above.
Another thing about Jonathan Edwards is that he was unusual for his time, European background and cultural position in reading the landscape as a language, the physical world as part of God's efforts to communicate with his people. Most stuck to Scripture, but he read the crops, animals, bugs, water, storms, clouds, too. (Hmm, although there definitely was a Puritan tradition of taking omens, portents and acts of nature seriously as messages from God, sometimes admissable as evidence in court and things like that.)
Here's Rebecca Solnit from Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics again, looking at The Great Basin. Western, desert lands:
Because wild creatures too are spread far apart and often operate at night, because the colors and changes of the plant life can be subtle, it often seems as though the real drama is in the sky -- not exactly life, but life-giving, the light and the rain. Summer thunderstorms in the arid lands are an operatic drama, particularly in New Mexico, where the plot normally unfolds pretty much the same way every day during the summer monsoon season: clear morning skies are gradually overtaken by cumulus clouds as scattered and innocuous as a flock of grazing sheep, until they gather and turn dark; then the afternoon storm breaks, with lightning, with thunder, with crashing rain that can turn a dusty road into a necklace of puddles reflecting the turbulent sky. New Mexico is besieged now by a horrendous multiyear drought, and, watching the clouds gather every afternoon as if for this dionysian release that never came, I felt for the first time something of that beseeching powerlessness of those who prayed to an angry, unpredictable God and felt how easy it would be to identify that God with the glorious, fickle, implacable desert sky.
The whole essay quoted,"The Red Lands," is available as a pdf at the link above.
