When We Talk About the Weather

I said last week that almost every one of you has told me how excited you are to have me here. (And many of you told me that all over again after the service!). If that’s the most common sentiment I’ve heard from church folks since arriving in Savannah, the second most common sentiment I’ve heard from church folk, and first most common overall, is curiosity about how I like the weather.

And why wouldn’t you and the hairdresser and the guy at the barbecue place be curious? I moved here from Minnesota, some 1300 miles to the northwest. And what do we know about Minnesota? It borders Canada (though that border is a good three hundred-fifty miles farther north than where I was living). And it’s cold. And snowy. Roads here close if they flood. Roads there close when blizzards cause white-out conditions. Unhoused folks die from exposure in both places, but in Minnesota it's from cold, not heat.

So asking how I like the weather or what I think about the weather is one of the easiest, most natural questions to ask. But just like telling me you’re excited to have me here isn’t necessarily the straightforward, uncomplicated sentiment it might seem to be on the surface, neither is asking me or anyone else about the weather. Sometimes, as the narrator says in Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, the weather is the only topic that feels safe or comfortable. But it is also true that when we talk about the weather we’re not always, or perhaps even very often, just talking about the weather. A character in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest puts it this way:

"Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous."

Some of you might remember a classic example in the movie version of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I don’t remember if it appears in the novella. Audrey Hepburn’s character Holly Golightly, earns $100 a week visiting a gangster in prison. After each visit she meets up with his lawyer and delivers the weather report Old Sally Tomato has given her–proof that she made the visit, she thinks–and then the lawyer pays her. Later we learn that she’s really passing coded messages about Old Sally Tomato’s drug empire. The weather in the C.S. Lewis classic, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, is not so much a code but a physical manifestation of a repressive regime: the land of Narnia, as the story opens, is covered with perpetual but Christmas-less winter..

Sometimes, when we talk about weather, we’re using it to describe circumstances or pass on knowledge that cannot be directly expressed because to do so would be too dangerous or not evocative enough to reflect the true nature of the situation. While helping a convict run a drug empire from prison is never a good idea, doing so overtly, in plain language, would shorten your life expectancy drastically. And, while "The White Witch… has got all Narnia under her thumb", starts to paint a certain picture, the next line–"It’s she that makes it always winter. Always winter and never Christmas; think of that!"

–makes the picture come terribly alive.

It’s an ill will that blows no good. Theirs was a stormy relationship. She stole their thunder. Those weeks were the calm before the storm. He’s feeling under the weather. Don’t rain on my parade. He was a sunny child. We can weather this storm together. He had a flood of job offers while she experienced a drought of opportunity. In German, ein Gesicht wie sieben Tage Regenwetter–a face like seven days of rainy weather.

In these and hundreds of other ways, in probably every language, we use weather as metaphors, similes, and other descriptors of human experience. This makes all kinds of sense to me. Not a day goes by that we don’t experience weather (or at least observe it, if we stay indoors all day, but even indoors we experience things like baromatric pressure or the sound of thunder). Weather happens. It happens in common to all the people in a given geographical locale. It often, if not always, has some effect on our moods (though not always the same effect on everyone’s mood). And it is both predictable and unpredictable. For all these reasons it’s a handy metaphor, simile, descriptor.

Likewise, the emotions, and to an even greater extent the behaviors, of the people we encounter are sometimes predictable, often unpredictable, and can affect our moods in ways that feel as all-encompassing, uncontrollable and unavoidable as the day’s weather. And social conditions, movements, moments of great, unfolding significance can feel even more comparable to weather–storms of injustice and violence; the oppressive weight of the atmosphere just before such storms erupt; the calm and sunny warmth of just peace. Sometimes when we talk about weather we’re talking about the human condition and societal conditions.

And sometimes, when we talk about weather, we are talking in code, but not the kind of code Holly Golightly unwittingly employed.

“Say it,” shrieked the little girl. “Say it say it say it!”

“I love you,” said her mother. “I love you I love you I love you!” ….

“That’s what I wanted you to say,” said the little girl.

“That’s what I’ve been saying all the time,” her mother said, laughing. (from Say It! by Charlotte Zolotow)

When non-church people learn I’ve just moved here from Minnesota, and ask me how I like the weather, they are probably genuinely curious about my initial experience of the heat and the humidity. I think they are probably also testing me, just a little bit. Trying to predict if I’ll stick it out. If I’ll adapt. If I’m tough enough. These non-church people are also telling me something about their home, about this community. Because the conversation almost never ends when I say, “it’s hot!” It almost always continues with my questioner replying, “I know! So hot, right?! Just awful! But wait until October. You’re gonna love October!” Their admission that they dislike the heat gives me permission to complain just a little, too, and their assurance that for more than half of the year the weather is beautiful, tells they are proud of this place they call home. It’s weather is a welcome ritual.

When all y’all ask me how I like the weather, you’re probably genuinely curious about my initial experience of the heat and the humidity, too. And you might also be testing me, just a little bit. Trying to predict if I’ll stick it out. Wondering if I’ll adapt. If I’m tough enough. You too say, “I know! So hot, right?! Just awful! But wait until October. You’re gonna love October!” It’s part of your welcome ritual, too.

And because we’re entering into a relationship with one another, you and I, I think you’re saying one thing more when you ask me about the weather. I think you’re also asking, “are you ok?” Saying, “We care about you, and we want to know that you’re ok. And we want you to know that this one thing, this one thing we know is probably difficult for you, out of the dozens of things, hundreds of things that are new and maybe difficult or strange, this one thing will get better in just a couple months. Maybe by next August you’ll have adjusted to the heat and the humidity, but you don’t have to wait that long for relief. We’re glad you’re here, and we know that come autumn you’re going to be ok–at least with regard to this one sort of predictable life-area.”

Sometimes when we ask about the weather–ask our new minister, ask our kids who are off to college in another state, ask our sibling who moved to Spain–sometimes when we ask about the weather we’re saying "I care about you." Maybe saying "I love you."

My late colleague and teacher Ken Sawyer wrote a rawly beautiful meditation that I’ll share with you in its entirety sometime. The open line is: "And the most embarrassing statement, the hardest thing to say, is this: I love you."

Direct, undisguised verbal expression of love or simple caring are for many of us the most difficult things we’ll ever say or try to say–for reasons as universal as the fear of vulnerability, and for reasons as unique as each one of the relationships in which we might want to utter such declarations. It’s a sermon for another time to explore why it might be good for our souls, our spirits, our relationships to take the risk and say the words anyway.

In the meantime, we have the weather. And, "get home safely." And, "let me pack up these left-overs for you." And, "when did you change the oil last in this car?" And, "are you up to date on your vaccines?" Just like the mother in this morning’s story, we say it to one another all the time: "you matter to me; I want to know that you’re ok; I love you."

Pray do talk to me (and others) about the weather. Don’t dismiss it as shallow conversational filler, and try not to be too nervous about what else such conversation might really be about. Instead, may we each be curious enough, brave enough to listen carefully for what that something else is, when we talk about the weather. And bold enough to reply, “ I hope you’re ok, too. Because you matter to me.”

Amen.