I love clouds: pure and white, constant and changing. Often I wonder how it is like to “wander lonely as a cloud that floats on high o’er vales and hills” and watch the earth below with flowers (like daffodils) blooming, children playing and people going about their busy-ness. I love the song “Both Sides Now”, how it starts with such ordinary yet beautiful clouds seeming to me like bows and flows of angels hair, and then teaching me the give and take there is in loving and the win and lose there in living.
Clouds figure prominently in many episodes in the Bible. God accompanied the people of Israel in a cloud during their wandering in the desert. A cloud overshadowed Mary at the time of the Incarnation. A voice from a cloud declared, “This is my beloved son” as John baptized Christ in the Jordan. There were also clouds when Jesus was transfigured on the mountain. And when days of the Risen Lord with His disciples were up, He was taken up from them in a cloud.
Life and our experiences are often too ineffable for words. What we go through is so much richer than words can express. When words are beggared by our experiences, we turn to ordinary things and use them as symbols of the ineffable, of the mysterious, of the ultimate realities we cannot fully grasp. Clouds are ephemeral yet are real as the life-giving rains they eventually bring. They are fleeting and yet as permanent as the reality of the eternal life God has promised us.
Clouds are reminders to me that I am in this world but not of this world. They remind me of God’s abiding presence in my life. I was born for greater and better things.
God mounts his throne to shouts of joy: a blare of trumpets for the Lord.
The eleven disciples went to Galilee,
to the mountain to which Jesus had ordered them.
When they saw him, they worshiped, but they doubted.
Then Jesus approached and said to them,
“All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,
teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.
And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.”
Matthew 28:16-20