Let it Snow

I’m sitting in the living room of friends and am looking out their picture window. A suburban neighborhood sets the scene. But the drama is in the magnificent snow that is falling outside. Inch upon inch, it keeps stacking up…in the street, on the car, and on every little angle on every little branch of every little tree in the neighborhood. A streetlight casts is gleam on nearby flurries as they float by to the ground below. The feeling of it all comes quite close to a life-size, Dickens-esque snowglobe. Everything quiet, everything white, everything stacking up around you…but this time not with the unspoken threat of keeping up in this world, but rather with the whisper of relaxation that might actually be affordable after all. The kind we all work so hard to get in position to achieve, when really on this night it can simply and only be received. Participated in only by watching and observing and being surrounded by such beauty and quiet that the reminiscent notion of peace on earth actually feels tasteable.

And, of course, being the end of 2007, the newest in flat-screen technology whirls its dervish of light and color in the same room yelping for attention to its world of technology. But all eyes are focused beyond its distraction to the wonders of winterland going on outside. A faint sense that the beckoning call from both voices is sourced in something deep, something that we want, something that feels bigger and better than ourselves keeps its pace…and we’re left to wonder in a private way about which is more real. I’m going with the outside world I’m seeing…though I have to acknowledge that its appeal is internal.

The two, side-by-side, force me to consider their odd juxtaposition, as I admit to myself that I actually like both. But, I also realize that part of what I like about the electronic one is the false sense of something that I can achieve by ‘buying’ it. It makes me think I am better than I am. It tells me to define myself by what I do, even more by what I can get. I am defined by the stuff I accumulate around me, it repeats. Even worse, it starts its insidious chant that I am who I am relative to what my friends and neighbors have, by the amount of stuff they have accumulated. And, I catch myself falling into its stream of pride or despair about who I am relative to whether or not I am better than they are.

Meanwhile, fantastically unique and homogenous snow maintains its silent descent to earth adding to its chorus that who I am has nothing to do with comparing myself to my neighbor, but rather in living with what I am given. After all, everything is given. The commodities god gets worried at such thinking, such realization. Because it feeds on consumption. But the world of gift releases my grip on such things and such neighbors and raises its voice to me and my neighbor to say, “Look outside…isn’t that amazing!” And we stop, for a moment, imaging who we are in light of what we see going on around us…imagining who we are in light of what we are given…imaging who we are by the Giver of such goodness to us. And we relax…and enter peace. Snow and peace kind of go together, don’t they?

Let it snow, let is snow, let it snow.