John Hartman
I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.
1 Corinthians 10: 1-4
O tell of God's might, O sing of God's grace,
whose robe is the light, whose canopy space,
whose chariots of wrath the deep thunderclouds form,
and broad is God's path on the wings of the storm.
O Worship the King v2 Voices United 235
Last Saturday there was an article in the Globe and Mail about clouds and art and why we need these Painting of Clouds are Just What the World Needs Right Now. Needless to say, I was intrigued and I appreciated the "centre fold" piece which did better justice to the accompanying works of art than reading it online.
Author Ian Brown has some profound things to say about clouds:
Quotidian, untouchable, impermanent and yet somehow always there, clouds remind us what it is to be materially of this world, when so much of what we see and know is mediated through a tiny rectangle in our palms. We store the data of our lives in the Cloud, but these are the real thing – up there in the sky, to which we have always looked to see what’s coming.
Brown introduced me to artist John Hartman who has created some powerful images of clouds over Georgian Bay, a happy place for us because we visited Killarney Provincial Park so often when I was in ministry in Sudbury. We paddled on the bay many times and both admired the clouds and watched them carefully for signs of impending dirty weather.
Swirling Clouds -- Gregory Hartman 2021
Brown also quotes Greg Hardy, the Saskatchewan landscapist, Greg Hardy, who has been obsessed with the prairie sky since he was a boy in Saskatoon:
“It’s not like there’s a God, or anything,” he told me a while ago. “But there is something larger than oneself that happens when nature unfolds – like when there’s a big storm or the clouds are racing by at 90 miles an hour.”
With respect to Hardy as an artist, I figure there is a God, and one partial to clouds if scripture is any indication. The day after Ian Brown's article one of the Lenten lectionary passages the apostle Paul reminds us of the cloud which led Moses and the people of Israel as they sojourned in the wilderness.
I appreciate that Brown also gave me a "I did not know that" moment when he makes reference to Luke Howard, a late-18th century Quaker who is sometimes called the father of meteorology. Howard named the three principal categories of clouds – cumulous, stratus, and cirrus. I immediately think of my late clergy father who would bore us blind describing cumulonimbus and cirrostratus cloud formations, yet I continue to be fascinated by clouds to this day.
And yes, Jesus seemed to be aware of the sky and how to interpret it.
The Pharisees and Sadducees came, and to test Jesus they asked him to show them a sign from heaven. He answered them, “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.
Matthew 16: 1-3
I can't depart from the subject without giving credit to Joni Mitchell who made this confession in her hit Both Sides Now. I've even included a link to Joni singing the song at the Isle of Wight festival.
I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all
From up and down and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all
Edge of the Forest -- Emily Carr
Blaze of Glory -- Rebecca Vincent
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