That's Not Snow

Today in the supermarket a mom was naming things for her toddler. “That’s a lobster. See the lobsters? Say ‘Hi, lobsters!'” And the toddler obediently waved a greeting and tried to say “lobster.” We learn the properties of things as we learn their names: in this case, lobsters are crab-like things with big rubber bands around their claws stuck in a fish tank in the seafood section. And some of that is true about lobsters and some is not. But when you are less than two-years-old, you go with what you know and there is little room for ambiguity.

The other day I had a similar experience. I was out for lunch with my friend’s preschool-age son, who looked out the window at the piles of dirt-covered snow. This is snow that has completely lost its pure, ground-covering pristine beauty and has, after five or six months of being around, become old snow. “Look at that snow,” I said with a sigh.

“That’s not snow,” he said to me with absolute certainty. “That’s garbage. A garbage truck must have dumped that there.”

I look into my soul and wonder how to name the person I am becoming. There are times I’d like someone to give me that same kind of clear-cut reminder: “That’s not snow.” Or, “That’s not who you are—you are better than that.” Better than the pile of petty insecurities and resentments that often haunt me. Better than the selfish, inward-curving weariness that keeps me from the joys of knowing others. “That’s not who you are.”

And then I could remember once again what snow and I were made to be.

Windrows

The dictionary says a windrow is a “row of hay raked up to dry before being baled,” and right now I can almost imagine the smell of new hay and the warm summer sun. Almost, but not quite. Because outside it’s February, which seems to go on forever. And everywhere on the roads I see another type of windrow: piles of snow shoved the side by giant graders clearing the streets.
This week in the newspaper, a number of people were complaining about the increasingly large windrows, with due cause. The streets get so narrow you can’t pass two cars side by side, you have to pull far into the intersection when you are making a turn to see if it’s clear, and there is not the smallest hope of parking on the road.

Windrows are a great image for the way my career has gone—an increasingly large pile of “stuff” that has been pushed to the side, at times violently by a sharp blade. It’s hard not to stare at those piles, to pick through them and relive the disappointments and confusion of each successive loss and change, to try to make sense of it all. Yet spending my energy picking through those piles feels like a waste; I should be looking instead at the path that has been cleared ahead of me.

That’s a nice metaphor, but it isn’t really working for me. Because where the path is cleared is only empty space, and there are times I have no idea how to fill it. As a woman I’m forced in so many different ways to be creative, to fit things in depending on what my family needs, or what others need, and it’s hard to think about that empty space as something I can fill entirely on my own. There are too many other competing demands to consider. And I know whatever I put into that space is just as likely to change yet again, to move in another direction. I am weary of change and the older I get, the more I just want some things to stay the same.

It takes a certain amount of courage to walk into empty space, to suck back the disappointments and self-doubt and keep being available for whatever life puts in front of you. So I try to keep forgiving myself, forgiving the snowplows, forgiving the narrowed spaces and the long cold of winter, and trust that all the courage it takes to keep walking will make me the kind of person that can come alive again in spring.

The Problem of Snow

Like many places in North America, we have had record amounts of snowfall lately. And I always get a kick out of seeing the big dump trucks full of snow. Because there comes a point when there is simply nowhere else to put it, when the streets have become so narrow because of leftover snow piles that it’s no longer possible to drive on them. So the snow becomes a problem and they have to cart it away.

The same day as we saw the truck carting away snow, we saw this giant pile in a parking lot. And while I thought bitter things about how much winter can a person really take, my kids both said (almost in unison): “Wow, wouldn’t it be great to climb that?”

And there is the difference. Is snow a problem to be solved or is it a gift?

Too often I see my life as a problem to be solved. Snow to scrape off, roads to manage, strategies to think through and implement. But what would it take, what does it take every day to get back that sense of life as a gift, as a giant snow pile just waiting to be touched, climbed, and laughed over in the fading winter sun?

Bear Eyes

The family story goes like this: I had a teddy bear that my brother threw in the mud. For some reason (and to this day I’m not sure what that is), it was impossible to simply throw it in the wash; it was beyond repair. My parents wanted to offer some kind of replacement, so I got a wise-looking stuffed mouse, which I proceeded to name “bear eyes.” In whatever way my two-year-old mind could process, I knew that this mouse, no matter how lovely, would never replace the bear I had lost. She might be a mouse, but there was clearly bear in her eyes.

Every holiday season when I see what’s going on around me—exhaustion, despair, busy-ness, greed, and worry—I wish again for the ability to simply rename them. To take all that turmoil and sadness and call them “Advent peace.” And find that somehow the words alone could make it true.

Naming something so clearly in opposition to reality is the province of children, with endless circular arguments of “it is too” and “it is not.” But the ability to remember is the true gift of childhood. To know that no matter how many things the world takes away, no matter how deep the losses, there will always be the memory of peace, joy, wholeness, the certainty of being loved beyond what we imagine. And those memories are continually calling us back home, to eyes that we’ve definitely seen before and never forgot how to love.

Holding Back Chaos

If my husband stays up much later than I do, a predictable thing happens: I inevitably drift over to his side of the bed. So when he gets in, he has to make his body into a kind of battering ram that pushes me back to my side of the bed. And while he may think of this as an example of me being a bed hog, I think it has much to say about the theology of creation.

There are so many parts of the Genesis 1 story that involve setting boundaries and limits: the light is separated from the darkness, the vault of the sky is defined over the chaos of the water, the sea is held back from the land, the day and night are named as distinct.

In a simple way, my husband’s presence in bed is a limit that says, “You will go no further.” When he is not there, I wonder if the night went on long enough whether I’d simply drop off the other side of the bed. But when he is there, I know where the bed ends and that I am safe from the drop on the far side. My own side of the bed I know instinctively; it’s that other, far-off edge that represents the unknown, the fearful limits of what I don’t understand.

Oftentimes I wish for some dramatic re-creation moment in my life: for new ground to appear out of endless seas, for light to push back a long darkness, for the naming of order out of chaos. But time and time again, those order-making moments don’t happen, even when they are needed most.

What I have instead is a kind of wall that keeps me from going over the edge—a tenuous wall made by intangible things such as the faithful constancy of a communion of friends, the perfect resonance of songs sung into the night, and the quiet certitude of the sun setting to end each day. It’s not much to hold on to when you add those things up, but somehow it’s enough to keep the chaos at bay and hold me back from going over the edge.

... And

For Krista
... and for you.

There is a prayer in the daily office that pleads “that I may not fall into sin nor be overcome by adversity.” There is something about that word overcome that falls from the tongue like a full stop, a period at the end of a word or a sentence that gives a note of finality. Overcome. And so often with adversity—things like unemployment, loneliness, despair, it is hard to find much more to say, much hope beyond that closed-off sense of ending.

And yet, as Scott Bader-Saye said at the King’s Interdisciplinary Studies conference last week, people of faith are the ones who are able to always say “and.” So it’s unemployment … and. Loneliness … and. Despair … and. There is so much grace in that one word, to be able to say, after even death, there is an “and” in the hope of resurrection.

Whatever the adversity you find yourself overcome by today, there is, even now, an “and.” May it find you as quickly and as certainly as the grace of God, in which we live, and move, and have our being.

Burning

“At that time the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish and five were wise. The foolish ones took their lamps but did not take any oil with them. The wise, however, took oil in jars along with their lamps.”

—Matthew 25:1-4

There is something about the song “Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning, burning, burning” that makes me tired. Not just because I often hear its peppy tune on still-sleepy Sunday mornings, but also because I’m not so sure it would be a good thing to just keep burning all the time without a break.

It’s not that I don’t prepare; like the wise girls I am always over-prepared with everything I might possibly need for my trips. So I’m sure I would have enough oil in my backpack, ready to go even through a long night of waiting. But even with enough oil, I imagine myself getting angrier by the minute as that oil is used up, wondering what the delay was about and silently scorning those who didn’t think ahead as well as I did. With every second that went by, with every lick of oil on that flame, I would grow slightly less loving, slightly less gracious, slightly less alive.

Today I heard something on the pray-as-you-go podcast that encouraged me to think symbolically about the passage: what might the lighted lamp represent in my life? And what is the oil that will keep it burning?

Because of course the story isn’t about being prepared; it’s not about greed or getting high marks from the bridegroom for planning ahead. It’s about a different kind of oil, one that keeps you alive instead of consuming you.

What is the oil that keeps me going, that keeps my lamp alive, that keeps my soul from growing dark and dead and tired? Because whatever it is, this kind of oil—oil that flows down the beard of Aaron, oil that anoints my head, oil that brings gladness instead of morning—is not about scarcity at all, but abundance. And maybe with enough of that kind of oil, I can keep my heart alive and full of grace, burning, burning, burning till the break of day.