Rituals for Rain: Reflection

By Sylvie Shaw

It's pouring down with rain outside. I can hear the plants shouting with joy. It was too dry at the end of 2012.  A heady, musty, earthy aroma emerges from the land annoucing fecundity, beauty and lush growth. In the early morning, when there's a break in the rain, the local neighbourhood is out with their lawn mowers, hedgecliipers and leaf blowers, in an effort perhaps, to tame nature's heady fertility.

Going for walks in the rain is invigorating - but to avoid the damp, I need to be enveloped in raincoat, rainpants or under an umbrella. Walking around yesterday I saw several people not equipped for the annual tropical deluge. Dressed in black plastic garbage bags and a host of transparent plastic 'Little Red Riding Hood' cloaks, they huddled under shelter. Or crowed into cafes, frosting up the windows with their warm breathing.

When we were small we would don our raincoats, gumboots or just wear bare feet and run and jump in puddles, spalshing the water over each other. My greatest joy was to ride my bicycle through shallow watery ponds, making that wonderful squwooshing sound as the water splashed everywhere. To avoid getting wet, we used to place our feet up on the handle bars, and if we were brave enough, we also raised our hands in the air (but not for long).

Do you ever feel like jumping in puddles, yelling loud laughter as you run through the watery delight? Do you ever watch the rain as it drops on the puddles forming ring after spreading ring? Do you ever wish you could dance in the rain?

In an Indigenous and religious sense, tribal peoples perform rain dances to encourage the seasonal rains to come or to pray for a drought to break. The dance is a sacred ritual that sustains the intimate and intrinsic relationship between community, land and cosmos - and water. Without the rain, the people cannot survive. Their prayers for rain a sacred reminder of the turning of the wheel of life and seasonal change.

Located on the sacred texts website is the 1931 treatise on the Native American culture of the American south west - Dancing Gods by Ema Ferguson (1931). 

Fergson reminds us of the missionising morals that condemnded sacred and essential Indigenous rituals, like the rain dance, as sin, but also makes the point, that the often theatrical performance of mainline religious services, is also a kind of sacred dance.

'An Indian dance is not a dance in the sense in which we use that term. It is a ceremonial, a symbolic representation, a prayer. It is, in fact, what all dances were in the early days of the race before the dance as a social and dramatic expression grew apart from the ceremonial which gradually developed into the church service. In a sense the mass is still a stately dance, the theatrical production is descended from a prayer.'

In places where drought and fire are increasingly common - including Australia - should we develop a community ritual to pays homage to water and the need for an annual balanced rainfall - certainly not a deluge or flood with its legacy of trauma and devastation for human communities.

In Israel, another place of drought and fire, the Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu (Fendel 2010) states:

'Every Jew who recites the Kriat Shma every day knows that the Land of Israel, unlike other countries, lives according to its rainfall. This is simply G-d’s way of speaking to us; this is His language. / If we experience a drought for two months, G-d is saying something, as we read in Kriat Shma: “If you hearken to My commandments… and love G-d… I will give you rainfall… But if you stray… I will be angered… and there will not be rain…'

The Rabbi terms the rain that follows drought and fire as 'rains of blessing'.

In a similar vein, Johnny P. Flynn (2012), writing on Religion Despatches, describes how the Native American Hopi nation dance to 'welcome' the rain. Flynn was out hiking in Northern Arizona on the day of the Hopi ceremony and retells what the hikers experienced:

'One summer I was hiking with friends at the Wupatki National Park which is exactly on a line from the San Francisco Peaks to the Hopi reservation. The day was clear, cloudless, until about one o’clock in the afternoon. Clouds began to roil over the peaks to the southwest and by two o’clock thunder could be heard in the distance. By 2:30 we were soaked to the skin by a “sudden” thunderstorm headed northeast to the Hopi reservation. I remembered it was the day of the Hopi Snake dance which is most often cited as a “rain dance.”

With the rain flowing down, I take my raincoat and tevas and head for the outdoors. Getting wet, in this warm humidity, is a happy-making feeling.

As I walk the currawongs' call echoes, erie and evocative.

References
Fendel H, 2010. Rabbi Eliyahu: Drought Demands Love.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/141046#.UTKPqxmzD4g
Ferguson E. 1931. Dancing Gods. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, http://www.sacred-texts.com/nam/sw/dg/dg02.htm

Image source:
Pixabay, http://pixabay.com/en/water-drop-of-water-drip-journal-55317/