After arriving at home, a slight rain started. I pried open my study window to hear its patter, drops on shingle pooling, slow rivulets of water trickling down the roof’s slope into a gutter newly cleaned. A robin peered across the pine floor, eyes sharp for worms or seeds that make do. A downspout drip beat out a rhythm, kept time for evening thoughts.

The rain did not live up to the sky’s portent. Earlier, driving home, an untimely darkness descended, clouds pressing down, like a canvas tent-roof puddled by rain-catch threatening to burst any moment. But it refrained, only a light spray washing down, enough to speckle the windshield, like a playful flick of God’s wet hand.

On the radio, Karen Peris of The Innocence Mission sang “Rain or shine, this street of mine is golden. . . God is love, and love will never fail me.” Here now, by the window-gap, reminded, I reach for the CD, run my finger past Peter Himmelman’s Skin, smiling at his wit, until my fingers find the Is, and the album, My Room in the Trees, where, opening it, I find the words, “God is Love. . . I can walk under these clouds.”

An article I read on Walker Percy — whose book, “The Moviegoer,” perches promisingly on a shelf above — reminds me of his theory that people feel better in hurricanes, or bad weather. As the writer, Walter Isaacson, summarizes, “Percy’s diagnosis was that when we are mired in the everydayness of ordinary life, we are susceptible to what he called ‘the malaise,’ a free-floating despair associated with the feeling that you’re not a part of the world or connected to the people in it. You are alienated, detached.” Monks called it the “noonday demons” and, in its most chronic form, “acedia.” I know its atmosphere, a languid calm.

But my cat is at my feet, gazing intently, her gentle face pitched upwards, inquiring of me as I type this sentence. She has nothing particular in mind but my attention, to distract. But I forgive her, as she is a prop for mood, for ambience, who added to the sounds of the evening, memory of the drive, and thoughts of Walker Percy, make incarnate those words, “God is love.” I pick her up, drape her gelatinous and malleable form over my shoulder, and let her low purr reverberate through me until, satisfied, she pushes away, the rain slowing.

Percy was right. When my wife and I were dating (or friending, for lack of a better term), we were happy in the fury of a thunderstorm observed from the safety of the indoors. We loved the thunder, the rain, the clapping of God’s hands. Maybe it is the sense of security. More likely it is the wonder of connectedness to a Creation not safe, but good. And when the storms ended, perhaps malaise is not the word for what descended, but mundanity, the ordinary run-of-the-mill returning, like work and dishes, laundry and love: The ordinary works of love. Faithfulness in rush-hour. The stewardship of minutes. Grace.

The rain has stopped. Birds emerge and begin to chirp and tweet. The last muted light of day is failing. “Oh, its over,” sings Peris, “all the weather is gone.” A few soggy leaves strewn across gray shingles, drying, are all that remain, but these words. Here, at the end, my fingers still, like Peris, “I said so little. . . The words all flew away, up away from me, up into the trees, where they shout, shout for joy.”

For that I am thankful.