Christ the Water, Christ the Snow

There’s going to be a thaw next week. All of this snow will turn back into water.

The average winter in the Ohio Valley tends to be a series of snows and thaws, neither lasting long enough you get used to them, but it’s stayed bitterly cold for awhile now. That foot of snow we got in January is still here. The last few days it’s been over twenty degrees. The cat was happy to get outside and make her rounds of the neighborhood, leaping from footprint to footprint in the tracks of the mail carrier’s boots. And then it snowed again, filling in the boot tracks and covering over the road. Tomorrow the wind chill will be severe, and I don’t know if any of us will go out at all. But next week, there’ll be a thaw. It will feel a bit like Spring on Tuesday. All of this ice and snow are going to melt into water again.

After Tuesday, the weather will go back to freezing at least at night. The series of days where it’s above freezing in the middle of the day and freezing after dark will wake up the maple trees and the farmers will collect the sap. In about three weeks, the rivers will swell. The melting ice will run down the shale hills like a waterfall. That waterfall will fill up the vernal pools and the skunk cabbage will start to peek out of the mud on their banks. And then it will be warm, and the green will come back to the trees, and the long wait for spring will be over.

This weekend, I am ordering my seeds for the year’s garden. Jimmy’s boy is already demanding cucumbers, which never do very well in my yard for some reason, but I promised I’d try. I’m also going to get as many different kids of clover seed as I can find, to sow all over the grass. I want milkweed and cornflower and Queen Anne’s Lace, not only the white kind but the “chocolate” kind as well, in the new front yard patch I’ll dig once the snow is gone. Right now, the only garden work is the compost heap. I can’t turn over the compost so it decomposes properly in all this snow. The whole heap is frozen stiff. But I still layer it up: snow, then kitchen scraps, then hay with guinea pig manure all through it, and then the snow falls to cover the hay and the heap looks sterile and clean. When the spring finally comes, I’ll turn over the whole mess with my shovel, and spread the rich black soil from the bottom over the vegetable patch. Come summer, people will admire my giant sunflowers and ask how I got them so big. When I tell them my secret is guinea pig manure, they won’t believe me.

When you are raised a certain kind of Catholic, you’re told that that wicked heretic Martin Luther claimed the grace of God was like snow covering dunghills.

By that, I was told, he meant that we are horribly filthy and smelly to God, but the Son covers us up in a nice layer of white so the Father can stand to look at us. I tried to research where Luther wrote that phrase recently, and all I found was Christian apologists explaining that he never really said that, so I can’t tell you whether the phrase is his or not. I’m  not the best person to ask about Martin Luther. But I have met more than a few Protestants, and a sizable number of Catholics, who view salvation that way: we are noxious and toxic creatures, rotten to our very cores, and all Jesus can do is drop a clean white covering to hide us from the Father. This is a miserable notion of the atonement. It also betrays a lack of knowledge of dunghills, and what they’re for.

Personally, I’d preach a different sermon about snow-covered dunghills.

I am a person who’s failed at everything I’ve ever tried, and sometimes I think my life resembles nothing so much as a great big pile of waste. There is a cold and miserable blanket of snow on top of everything, and I’m tempted to despair. But Spring is coming.

Did you know that the word “Lent” means “Spring?”

Did you know that Christ doesn’t cover up your inadequacies? Rather, He descends to be one with you and permeate everything that you are.

In winter, snow is a great heavy layer of lifeless white, but snow is made of water. When the Lent, the Spring, comes, that snow will thaw and sink into the compost heap and permeate every layer right down to the ground. Right now, I could knock some snow off the top of the heap with my shovel, but pretty soon that won’t be possible, because the water and the compost will be one. The water will help it all break down into the most beautiful jet-black soil you’ve ever seen. The Gardener will spread it over the garden and plant seeds, and this terrible, miserable, ugly life will bear fruit a hundredfold. All around, the people will admire your flowers and be nourished by the fruit of your labor. They’ll ask you how you managed to have such a beautiful garden, and you will answer “because my life is a snow-covered dunghill.” And they won’t understand.

There’s going to be a thaw this week, and then the cold will come back and I’ll despair. But then, the real Spring will come and turn all of this ice and snow into water. Just a little longer, and all will be transformed.

Whoever has ears, let him hear.