Prayers for Rain

Commentary

The other day, we were praying for rain. We have done a lot of that lately.

Texas has been suffering through years of brutal drought. My neighbor’s well went dry. Our irrigation well went dry. The grass has struggled, the ground has cracked, and I have found myself doing what farmers have probably done since the first human intentionally pushed a seed into the earth and waited.

I prayed.

My brother was with me the other day when he said something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about: “Maybe in the history of man, nobody has prayed for anything more than they’ve prayed for rain.”

I think that he may be right.

What have human beings prayed for most?

Today, maybe it’s money, power, health, love, success, or security. But for most of human history, I wonder whether the most common prayer wasn’t much simpler: Please let it rain.

Rain meant food. Rain meant grass. Rain meant animals survived and crops grew. Rain meant children ate, and families might make it through another winter.

Too little could mean famine; too much could destroy a harvest. The right amount of rain falling at the right time was an abundance arriving directly from the sky.

Maybe praying for money and praying for rain aren’t actually as different as they initially sound. When people pray for money, very often what they are really praying for is security and abundance: enough to feed their family, enough to stop worrying, enough to know that tomorrow will be OK.

For thousands of years, rain was that prayer stripped of its abstraction. We didn’t ask for the thing that could purchase abundance. We asked for abundance itself.

Modern life has put an extraordinary number of layers between us and that reality. Food comes from the grocery store. Water comes from the faucet. Grass is something we mow. Rain is something that cancels soccer practice, ruins a wedding, changes vacation plans, or makes the morning commute miserable.

We may have forgotten our connection to rain, but nature hasn’t.

Everything we eat still needs water. The corn needs it. The wheat needs it. The cow needs water, and the grass the cow eats needs water. The chicken needs water, and the grain the chicken eats needs water.

Every meal, no matter how industrialized or sophisticated the system that produced it, remains connected somewhere along the line to soil, sunlight, and water.

Irrigation is an incredible invention. Wells, reservoirs, pumps, and miles of pipe have allowed human beings to grow food in places and at scales our ancestors could hardly have imagined. But irrigation has limits, and I know that because our irrigation well went dry.

When you watch the water disappear after years of drought, the illusion that technology has separated us from nature disappears with it. A well doesn’t create water. It only moves water that already exists, and eventually something has to replenish it.

Rain.

I have prayed for rain thousands of times. My children have even invented their own rain dance and a little rain song: “Rain, rain, come today, and bless our farm in this way. Rain, rain, come today, and bless our farm in this way.”

There is something almost ancient about hearing children sing those words on a farm. They aren’t thinking about agricultural history or civilizations that disappeared thousands of years before they were born. They simply understand something most of us once understood instinctively: We need rain.

When it finally comes, I become almost embarrassingly happy. The first drops hit the ground, and I am grateful, relieved, and relaxed all at once. I want to stand outside in it. I want to watch the water run and smell the earth change. Somewhere nearby, though, someone is probably irritated because his shoes are wet, traffic is slower, or the barbecue got canceled.

Neither experience is imaginary. Context changes everything. If your life feels disconnected from rainfall, rain can feel like an inconvenience that disrupts it. If you grow food, rain feels like life itself: life-giving.

Perhaps that difference says something important about modern civilization. We have become remarkably good at hiding our dependencies from ourselves, and money helps make that possible.

If the local farm fails, food arrives from somewhere else. If there’s no surface water, we drill a well. If the well gets deeper, we drill farther. If a region can’t produce something, trucks bring it from another region. Eventually, we begin to feel as though money is what sustains us.

But money cannot feed you. Money is a claim on things that can feed you, and eventually those things still have to exist. A tomato doesn’t accept a credit card. A pasture cannot drink a dollar bill.

There are even companies now trying to make rain something we can purchase. Rainmaker uses cloud-seeding technology intended to increase rain and snow. After years of staring desperately at empty Texas skies, believe me, I understand the appeal.

But I am not entirely sure we should be making rain. Something makes me uneasy about engineering the sky to produce the weather we want, particularly when we are still discovering how profoundly what we do to the earth beneath those clouds can affect the water cycle itself.

That isn’t merely a romantic idea about healthy soil. The documentary “Common Ground” follows ranchers in Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert using planned grazing to restore severely degraded grasslands across a vast landscape. One rancher, Alejandro Carrillo, described rains coming multiple times per week in recent years and called the people restoring those grasslands “the rainmakers of the desert.”

I would be careful about claiming that grazing alone caused those rains. Weather is enormously complicated. But the biological mechanism underlying the idea is real: Plants don’t merely receive water. They participate in moving it. Roots draw water from the soil, and plants release enormous quantities of moisture back into the atmosphere through transpiration.

Research from China’s Loess Plateau makes this relationship even more fascinating. China has undertaken enormous efforts to restore vegetation across landscapes that have suffered severe erosion and degradation.

Researchers studying decades of satellite observations and atmospheric models have found that the greening didn’t merely change what happened when rain reached the ground. It altered the exchange of water and energy between the land and the atmosphere.

One recent study estimated that vegetation restoration contributed substantially to the increase in precipitation observed in the region after 2000.

That changes the way I think about “making rain.” Maybe before we engineer the clouds, we should ask what we have done to the land beneath them.

Healthy soil absorbs water rather than immediately shedding it. Vegetation shades and cools the earth. Plants draw water through their roots and release it into the atmosphere. Water moves from the earth to the plant to the sky and eventually back to the earth. Rain grows grass, but on a large enough scale, grass also helps create the conditions for rain.

There is something profoundly different about those two approaches to me. One attempts to intervene in the sky to produce the weather we want. The other asks whether we have disrupted a natural cycle and whether restoring the land might allow that cycle to recover.

Perhaps some of the world’s most sophisticated rainmaking technology has been beneath our feet all along: soil, roots, plants, sunlight, and water working together.

And this doesn’t mean that if I rotationally graze my cattle correctly, rain will arrive over my ranch on Tuesday. I wish it did. Atmospheric systems are vastly larger and more complicated than any individual farm.

But it does mean the relationship between land and rain isn’t entirely one-way. The condition of our landscapes determines how much water we hold when it rains, how much vegetation can grow, and how much moisture eventually returns to the atmosphere.

It makes me wonder whether some of our drought problems are questions not only for meteorologists but also for farmers.

What have we done to our soil?

What happens to the rain when it finally falls? Does it soak into living ground and remain available to plants, or does it rush across compacted earth and disappear downstream?

Farming reminds me constantly that I am not entirely in control. I can build better soil. I can increase organic matter so the ground holds more water. I can manage my animals differently, plant differently, and prepare for drought. I can become a better farmer.

But when the Texas sky remains blue month after month, and the wells begin going dry, there is a limit to what I can command.

Maybe that is part of what humanity has lost as fewer of us participate directly in producing our food. We haven’t eliminated our dependence upon nature; we’ve hidden it behind infrastructure.

We may someday become astonishingly good at manipulating rainfall. We may desalinate oceans cheaply, seed clouds precisely, or invent technologies I cannot imagine. But we will still need water.

My brother’s observation has stayed with me because there are very few prayers I can think of that connect us so directly with people who lived thousands of years ago. Across wars and kingdoms, civilizations, and continents, how many human beings have stood beneath a cloudless sky and whispered some version of the same request my children sing today?

“Rain, rain, come today, and bless our farm in this way.”

Maybe it is one of humanity’s oldest prayers. Maybe it is one of humanity’s most prayed prayers. And maybe remembering why we prayed would remind us of what actually keeps us alive.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.