Weather & Prayer
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Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow and this is The Weather Notebook.

A miracle seemed like the only way to account for it. Sixty-seven people had gathered for choir practice at the Open Door Church in Minor, Alabama. It was the Wednesday before Easter when a Category 5 tornado - the strongest on the Fujita scale -- ripped through the neighborhood and demolished the church. The tornado killed thirty-four people that evening and injured 250 others, but every last member of the Open Door choir walked out of the wreckage alive. One of the survivors, a 12 year old girl, later told reporters that as the churchgoers prayed and sang, she heard an angel murmuring "More help, we need more help."

Americans have been praying over weather for as long as we've been here. Many Native Americans sacred rituals were essentially weather prayers. During the dry summer of 1623, the Pilgrims of Plymouth Plantation held an all-day prayer meeting to beseech God for rain and succeeded in saving the corn crop -- "For which mercy," wrote Governor William Bradford, "in time convenient they set apart a day of thanksgiving." We celebrate the holiday to this day, though most of us are unaware that Thanksgiving originated as gratitude for answered weather prayers.

Children in tornado-ravaged churches; farmers in drought-stricken Florida; Oklahoma meteorologists watching their Doppler radar: we're still praying over our extreme, unpredictable, often deadly weather. Science has revealed a great deal about the atmosphere in the past century, but so far meteorology has failed to muscle aside faith. If anything, the more we learn about weather, the more we revere it.

Today's contributing writer is David Laskin. Our show is funded by Subaru, the beauty of all wheel drive with major support provided by the National Science Foundation.