When a menacing hurricane almost hit Virginia Beach and then veered away, evangelist Pat Robertson, Beach resident and founder of CBN, took credit for diverting the disaster with his prayers. Years before at A.R.E., there was Eula Allen, who also lived in Virginia Beach and had the reputation of keeping away hurricanes. After her death, many people expressed concern about the increased risk of a hurricane disaster now that Eula’s protection was no more.

The fact that we name hurricanes perhaps says that we think they have personalities or awareness, or at least can be addressed, bargained with, and beseeched. Is there really a psychic component to the weather?

Maybe so. In Divine Tempest: The Hurricane as a Psychic Phenomenon (inner City Books), David Schoen, a Jungian psychoanalyst living in the hurricane-prone area of Covington, Louisiana, suggests that the hurricane may be a living symbol for the "Self," aka God, and thus endowed with some portion of the Creator’s awareness and available for relationship. One of the indicators, he suggests, is the occurrence of weather-related precognitive dreams. Another example is people’s behavior toward storm systems.

I still remember an incident from my early days in Virginia Beach, when, at a conference, a group of us were witnessing a tremendous rainstorm that was attacking the beach. I felt a compulsion to go across the street for a closer look.

Drenched and crouched low in the bushes, it was exciting to hear the thunder so close around me and see the bright explosions so near. Suddenly, a bolt of lightning shot down so close I felt as if I myself had exploded in frightful terror. At my first opportunity I ran back across the street to safety. It seemed so evident that the lightning was trying to communicate with me. Its awareness of my presence felt SO real, aware of my being there — and was displeased with me! In retrospect, it seems like a stupid thing to do. But at the time it was as if the divine mysteries were beckoning, perhaps to get me more into an attitude of respect.

It is just this sort of ambivalence — a vivid fear coupled with an intense, sometimes overwhelming curiosity — that Schoen points to in his book, suggesting that people see in hurricanes and other intense weather events the hand of God. Such adulation of hurricanes goes back to prehistory. We are aware of the Greeks attributing all kinds of natural disasters to the mischief of the gods. Yet Schoen finds even more evidence to link patterns in the lives of humans to hurricane phenomena.

Weather and other events in nature contain symbolic links with human experience, suggesting that our moods and nature patterns have some common origin. Earthquakes, for example, evoke sudden and tremendous shifts in the very ground of our conscious lives. Earthquake dreams may foreshadow sudden changes ahead, often coming to create upheaval where there has been too great a rigidity, to bring righteousness to an intolerable situation. Volcanoes can bring about destruction, yet provide the basis for new life. Volcano dreams may foretell of explosions of feeling, burning much of the surroundings, yet bringing about some needed changes and the possibility of new life.

A hurricane may be a natural way of bringing about change in the environment in a manner similar to what people experience in their lives. You can be in the doldrums, corresponding to the sultry weather in which hurricanes are born. Maybe a little depression sets in. The tropical depression over the ocean begins to draw to it winds and clouds, just as a human depression may draw quick fixes for solving the sense of unease by getting busy — don’t just sit there, do something! The storm begins to get some focus, a defined eye, and gets named — our attempt to form a relationship with it. A person may start to experience strong feelings. Someone in this stage may feel that a romantic affair or a trip around the world would be just the thing to fix one’s life.