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Good morning. I don’t know about you, but right now – speaking from Oxford - I am longing for rain. Come back, blustery showers, all is forgiven. Dry August days are nothing new of course. Our seventeenth century forebears knew all about the dangers of drought. The Book of Common Prayer has a Prayer for Rain at the top of its list of Prayers and Thanksgivings.

A couple of weeks ago on a Friday, a priest I know took her cue from the Prayer Book and prayed earnestly for a change in the weather. As sheets of rain cascaded down on the following Sunday morning she was furious to discover that her umbrella had been stolen from the vestry.

There is, of course a problem with praying for rain. It suggests that God can simply change the weather for our convenience in a way that is both unscientific and selfish. Why should God do things just for us? Yet cause and effect on the global scale are anything but simple, tiny changes in one place can contribute to tornados thousands of miles away – the butterfly effect. So, my prayer for rain could in theory contribute to a change in the weather even if it is only by the exhalation of my parched breath sending a microscopic ripple through the atmosphere which builds into a thunderstorm – probably in another part of the world. When it comes to the English weather there will always be a high degree of unpredictability, the relationship between cause and effect are often lost in a storm of complexity.

I believe that prayer is an intensification of human desire, in some sense we are all praying all the time for what we most deeply want and need. In the Prayer Book adverse weather is a warning from God. The prayer for rain is followed by a prayer for fair weather, which pleads with God not to drown the world: ‘though we for our iniquities have worthily deserved a plague of rain and waters, yet upon our repentance, send us such weather, as that we may receive the fruits of the earth in due season and learn both by thy punishment to amend our lives, and for thy clemency to give thee praise and glory’. I used to smile at that rather grovelling attempt to appease God, but the words do not sound quite so bizarre these days.

The ongoing heatwave across much of Europe is at least an opportunity to reflect on the part we might be playing in changing the earth’s climate. Of course, no single weather event can be proved to be a result of global warming but the heating of the earth does makes summers like this more likely. So perhaps praying for rain reminds us that our planet is fragile; a gift and not a commodity, and this could stir us to remember that our future life here is still conditional on the decisions we make today.

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