I've wanted to write this for a long time, so now you're getting it just as it comes, in one go - even though we've circled this story several times in earlier posts.
But there's a detail in the story of Noah you easily read past, because the rain fills so much of it.
The ark was built in dry weather.
Read that again.
The ark was built in dry weather.
That's actually the most essential thing about the whole Story. And many of us only see it decades after being told it.
It wasn't built one afternoon while the clouds gathered and everyone could see what was coming. It was built over years, under a sky that was perfectly fine, in a society busy with all the things societies are busy with - where everyone could walk past every single day and see a man building a ship on dry land and draw the only reasonable conclusion.
That Noah had quite clearly lost his mind.
Because he had nothing to present. No measurements, no documentation, no committee behind him or anything solid and tangible he could point directly to.
The only thing he had was a voice only he could hear inside - which he couldn't get around. He didn't know exactly what, how, or when what it spoke of would happen. But he wasn't in doubt that what he heard was true - and that it couldn't wait for others to hear the same thing he did.
So he did the only right thing, which was simultaneously the thing no one around him would ever understand. Until it was too late.
What's most remarkable about the story of Noah is that it isn't only ours.
The story of The Great Flood exists almost everywhere humans have told stories - in Mesopotamia, in India, in China, among peoples who have never met each other and never read each other's books. It's as if something in Man knows it. That catastrophe exists. That it comes in many forms, from within and from without, toward the individual Human and toward whole cultures, and that it always threatens with the same thing -
To take EVERYTHING you have, and EVERYTHING you are.
And at the centre of all those stories stands the same figure.
One who heard it first.
You know her from Troy. Cassandra got the gift of seeing what was coming, and the curse that no one believed her - and when she stood at the wall screaming that the horse was full of soldiers, the city danced past her and dragged it in. Laocoön said the same thing with a spear in hand, and the gods sent the serpents after him for it, while the city watched and read his death as a sign that he'd been wrong.
You know him from Jerusalem. Jeremiah walked around the city for years saying that Babylon would come, and that the walls wouldn't hold, and they called him traitor, said he took courage from the soldiers, and lowered him into a cistern so he stood chest-deep in mud. Then Babylon came. Then the walls fell. And the Lamentations were written by the man no one had wanted to listen to.
More locally we know him from Kierkegaard, who tells of the clown who comes on stage to say that fire has broken out in the theatre behind the scenes. The audience claps. He says it again, more urgently, and they clap even louder, because it's the best joke they've heard in a long time. And thus, writes Kierkegaard, the world perishes - to general jubilation from witty heads who think it's a joke.
We know him from Ibsen. Dr Stockmann discovers that the spa water, which the whole town's economy rests on, is poisoned, and in his naivety he believes the town will thank him... Instead he loses his job, his friends, and stones are thrown through his windows - while the town gives him a name that has since remained as a title - an enemy of the people. And the water was still poisoned when the curtain fell.
And we know him from reality, where it hurts even more.
Semmelweis saw that women were dying in the maternity ward in Vienna because the doctors came straight from the dissection room without washing their hands, and when he got them to wash their hands in chlorinated lime, mortality fell so sharply it couldn't be explained away. What needs to be grasped here is that it was explained away anyway. He was driven out of the profession and died in an asylum, and only decades later did what he'd seen become something everyone knew.
Churchill spent most of the thirties saying that Germany was rearming, and was kept out of every government as a warmongering old man who couldn't let go of the past.
And the night before Challenger launched, the engineers from Thiokol sat and asked NASA to wait, because they knew what frost did to the seals. They were asked to take off their engineer hat and put on their management hat. The shuttle launched the next morning. Many of us sat watching it on television when it happened. It took seventy-three seconds.
You see the pattern when you lay them side by side. It's never the information that's missing. The information was there every time, carried forward by one who couldn't help it. What was missing was a society that could bear to hear it.
Because a society can't itself hear everything. It's too big, too busy, including with itself, too certain of its own continuation.
Its access to what only the few can sense goes through those who step forward and say - "I hear something. I can't prove it yet. But there's something here worth stopping for."
A healthy society knows this. You can see what it looks like, because it also exists in history, though more rarely. For example when Jonah finally went into Nineveh and said the city had forty days left, the city didn't laugh. The king got down from the throne, put on sackcloth and gave orders that the whole city should do the same. And the city remained standing. That's the whole difference. Not that Nineveh was better than Troy. But that Nineveh could listen while there was still time to do something.
So how do you tell them apart? How do you know the difference between one who hears something, and one who's just crying wolf?
It's difficult. But a good bet is to look at what it costs.
The shepherd boy shouted because there was something to gain - the attention, the laughter, the sight of everyone coming running. The profit exposed him. But Jeremiah won nothing in the cistern, and Semmelweis won nothing at the hospital, and Stockmann won nothing by standing alone in his ruined house.
The one who steps forward and only loses by it has no reason left but what he hears. The price doesn't prove he's right. But it proves he's not doing it for his own sake.
And this is where it becomes uncomfortable, because we raise statues to them. All of them. We read Cassandra in school, we perform Ibsen in the national theatres, we name hospitals after Semmelweis and airports after Churchill, and we do it with a reverence that could almost make us believe we were on their side.
But we weren't.
We were the ones who clapped. We were the ones who threw the stones. It's the same societies that honour the warner afterward that made him an enemy of the people while it mattered.
It doesn't mean we don't listen.
It means we listen too late.
And then there's what you'd rather not say, because it comes too close...
This story isn't only about cities and societies. It's about what happens inside a human being, in the thousand inner places where there's always a voice that hears it first. Before reason. Before explanations. Before all the other voices you've learned to listen to because they sound more adult.
The voice that says something is wrong, long before you can prove it. That this relationship won't hold. That this job takes something from you that you don't get back. That you just said something you don't mean, to stay in good company. That what you call peace is something else, and that you know very well what that something else is called.
And you do to that voice exactly what Troy did to Cassandra and the city did to Stockmann. You pretend it doesn't speak truth. You dismiss it, drown it out, call it something else - overthinking, fear, old resentment, a bad day - and if it persists, you lower it into the cistern and put the lid on, until you can only hear it late at night when you lay your head on the pillow, where no one can see that you lie staring into the dark trying to get it to shut up. You applaud the clown inside. You make it wrong, and finally you banish it, and then you move on in dry weather and tell yourself you're fine...
But that voice isn't a stranger you can put outside the door. It's a part of yourself. It's the part that can still hear. And what you do to it is what societies do to their warners - you don't do it because it's wrong, but because it's cheaper to agree with everyone else... right until it isn't.
The rain comes from within in the same way it comes from without. Not as punishment. Just as what happens when what you've heard and didn't want to hear finally becomes something you can no longer ignore.
And that's the actual point of the story of Noah, if you dare hold onto it.
He didn't build because he was certain. He built because he heard, and because he understood what all the others only understood when the water stood at the door -
You can't build an ark when it's started to rain.
Have any of you others noticed that it's started to drizzle quietly down... or is it just me?
❤️🔥🪽
