the snow has arrived...

The snow has arrived - and for at least a moment all feels right with the world. We walked through the wetlands this afternoon as the dry powder poured down upon us. Lucie romped like a puppy. Our new neighbors introduced their six-month old son to the pleasures of snowboarding. It is quiet, cold, and dark here just as January should be in these parts.

Today's snow struck me as a sacramental gift as we walked in quiet solitude. Less than 24 hours after the close of the Iowa caucus it whispered that there is still more awe, beauty, serenity, and joy to be revealed. Debacle and despair are real, but never the whole story. So let's savor the winsome wonder of this day however it surfaces because, at some point, just below this frosty blanket of elegance lies a new mess waiting to be revealed. The frozen powder currently covering our barren landscape and muffling the noise of the road, will eventually give way to the comingling of mud, muck and the detritus of autumn. They, too, move us towards new life as winter slowly morphs into spring. But for a time what was once pure will become soiled. What once felt reassuring will seem unhinged. And what once strengthened our souls will give way to the practice of patience and careful discernment.

This election cycle, like Mud Season in New England, will expose all that is ugly, dangerous, and challenging within our body politic. I studiously refuse to pretend that I know how this shakes out. I just trust that humility and love are the necessary virtues of this hour. Those who choose otherwise are either ignorant or arrogant or both. All we know for certain is that there is more volatility in play in 2024 than 2020 or 2016 - more guns, propaganda, fear, loathing, and suffering, too. I can't recall who said it but it rings true that the reason fascists hate love is because love is unpredictable. Uncontrollable. Healing and transformative. With a prophetic prescience, MLK said: "I have decided to stick with love; hate is a burden too great to bear." St. Paul got it right when he told us:

If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love. Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have. Love doesn’t strut,
Doesn’t have a swelled head, doesn’t force itself on others,
Isn’t always “me first,” doesn’t fly off the handle,
Doesn’t keep score of the sins of others, doesn’t revel when others grovel, takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, puts up with anything, Trusts God always, always looks for the best, never looks back, and keeps going to the end. Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled.

Love connects us - it is how solidarity transforms individuals, cultures, and even nations. Hatred corrals us into siloes. It celebrates segregation. So let's be clear right now that we are called by the sacred to see beyond the mean-spirited demagogues who manipulate the all too real wounds of rural America and the white working class and remember they are family. Let us choose to trust love and mystery whenever they preach division and violence. And let us listen ever so carefully to the cries of the poor, the silence of those denied a voice, and the unspoken fear of so many sisters and brothers of every race, gender, class, and nationality. 

Walking in the snow is not only therapeutic and refreshing, it is soul food for compassion. It offers us the gift of silent beauty at the same time it invites us to know that there is so much more going on just below the surface. It is a both/and prayer not a binary judgement.