Thunderbolts and lightning very very enlightening

Certainly they are very, very frightening but what are they and what do they mean? Mere meteorological explanations are colourless and limiting and have no poetry in them. And so one turns instinctively to colourful explanations involving God and Shakespeare.

Putting my (colourless and limiting) atheism away in its drawer for the moment I ask if thunder is God expressing His wrath with shouts and roars and growls?

The Bible says several times that that's exactly what thunder is.

Psalm 18 reports an occasion (it sounds not unlike what thunder-shirtfronted Canberra felt like on Christmas Day) when "the earth shook and trembled; the foundations also of the hills moved and were shaken, because He was wroth".

The great Christian hymn O Worship The King instructs that when mighty thunderclouds form (and they have dominated Canberra skies for days as I write this) those clouds are God's rampaging "chariots of wrath".

So what is it, this time, that God (so famously poor at anger-management) is so wrathful about?

Perhaps, understandably, He is furious with us for rejecting the Voice.

More probably the sordid Lehrmann defamation trial (22 days of revelations of murk, shame, skulduggery and lies) and what they say about the amorality of the Liberal Party and perhaps about the moral decay of Australia per se, have proved a kind of last straw for almighty Him.

I was kept indoors and thinking dark and stormy thoughts not only by the daunting weather but also by obligations to provide constant company for my always thunder-terrified dog.

I'm not one of those columnists who always writes about what goes on around his house, about his dogs and cats and wives, but I mention my dog here so as to marvel at how dogs are so super-sensitive to electric storms.

It is not only that the storms terrify them but also that they are so very sensitive to them, sensing their coming long before we do, experiencing them more fully than we do, perhaps in the same way in which their senses of smell are ridiculously more sophisticated than ours.

Almost as thunder-terrified as my trembling mongrel in recent days I realise that, a Shakespeare devotee, I have embraced the way in which Shakespeare uses electrical storms ominously (notably in his Julius Caesar and his Macbeth) to point to horrors that are about to unfold.

And so the Shakespeare devotee comes to believe, as thunder shakes, rattles and rolls his suburb, that all Hell will in coming days be set loose. What could be more frightening?

Then, Shakespeare scholars show, in Shakespeare's plays these storms are synonymous with human violence, with darkness and evil lurking in human heart.

"The storm in Macbeth," one scholar fancies "is a personification of all that is hideous and foul in human nature."

Scholars point as well to how Shakespeare has external storms coinciding with the "storms" of the inner turmoils suffered by his characters. And so, readers, those of you already with inner turmoils (and what thinking reader doesn't have them?) will have suffered a double whammy of tempestuousness, in the skies but also in your hearts and heads, during the tempests of this Christmas.

And if the sounds of thunder in recent days somehow suggested to you the sound of a cannon ball being rolled noisily back and forth along a wooden corridor that is exactly how early London theatres achieved the special effect of thunder for Shakespeare's plays.

So if all the world's a stage (and of course it is) then perhaps thunder is a theatrical-meteorological-cosmic special effect.

But back to God, and to how at my Anglican primary school we were told, to allay our fears when thunder was about, that all that rumbling and thumping high above was only Heaven's furniture being re-arranged by God's angels.

This was plausible and reassuring in the extreme. How one wishes one could still believe it.

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There is an amusing but profound T-shirt sporting the warning to children "Don't grow up - it's a trap!" and the way in which, growing up, one has to abandon the belief that thunder is only Heaven's lounge suites and wardrobes being moved is an illustration of what a cruel trap growing up is.

John Betjeman's soulful poem Norfolk won't fit on a T-shirt but has the same theme. It has Betjeman, grown up and old and unhappy now, shuffling along country lanes he used to gambol along as a blissfully happy little boy and wondering "How did the Devil come? When first attack?"

Then the aged poet goes on to plead:

Time, bring back

The rapturous ignorance of long ago,

The peace, before the dreadful daylight starts,

Of unkept promises and broken hearts.

There is a lot to be said for rapturous ignorance. Indeed one wonders if, today, rapture is possible without some ignorance, certainly of ignorance of daily news with its bulletins of wars, climate catastrophes and of sickening Liberal Party malignancies.

So I wish this column's readers a rapturously ignorant 2024, without knowing how you can possibly achieve that Nirvana without blotting out all news of the world.