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This morning we’re waking up to assess the impact of Storm Ciara and we’ve been hearing on this programme from people around the country describing extraordinary conditions. In many places today the misery will continue. Yesterday, despite warnings to stay in doors to avoid flying debris and treacherous travelling conditions, some of us will not only have tried to make an essential journey but will have ventured out simply to experience the force of the extreme weather. I remember the fascination as a child. We lived in Dover and when there were high winds we would beg our parents to take us to the sea wall to dodge the waves, or walk out to the end of the pier. There, if the wind was in the right direction, there was a wind tunnel, powerful enough to lean your whole weight into it. I loved this close contact with the elements. It was exhilarating and yet I don’t think I was really aware of the danger until in 2005 I crossed the Pyrenees as a pilgrim to Santiago de Compostela. When I set out the weather was bright but once I reached the snowline the wind was almost impossible to walk into. Crosswinds whipped across my back and threatened to pull off my rucksack. Gloves and scarves were plucked out of pockets and whirled away down the mountain, and the six of us who had bunched together ended up crawling on our hands and knees. I realised that the memorials on the sides of the path were to real people. People die on this road. The experience remains a watershed moment in my life. A moment in which I was confronted by the power of nature and my own powerlessness before it. A moment in which I stopped thinking that the beauty of a sunset is an act of God because I could not also believe that a violent storm that randomly takes life is an act of God either. And yet it was, perversely, a moment in which I encountered God. As for the prophet Elijah, it was not that God was in the violent wind, not in the earthquake or the fire that followed, but in the still small voice that came through it all: you are mortal, and yet beloved. It was a startling beginning to a 500 mile pilgrimage. This week, at the Heong Gallery in Cambridge, there is an opportunity to see an exhibition by Peter Shennai called ‘Hurricane Bells’. Based on the structure of Hurricane Katrina, that began life out of nothing in the Gulf of Mexico and grew into the terrifying storm that hit New Orleans in 2005 causing massive flooding, the exhibition consists of 5 bronze bells that visitors are invited to strike. Struck in order, each bell gets progressively deeper and more resonant as the impact of the hurricane strikes home. The exhibition is a memorial to those whose lives were devastated by Hurricane Katrina. But it’s also a memorial to the storm itself, and an invitation to contemplate our existence before the power of nature. An opportunity, like Storm Ciara has been, to face our fragility as human beings and even there find a place to stand.