snow day absolution

Early this morning - just before 5 AM - I woke to the first snow of the season and my first snow as a resident of Philadelphia. Beneath the windows at the front of our row house, a few noble inches covered everything and diffused the yellow of the street lights into icy gold. Behind the house, even the regional rail tracks seemed marvelous. The swampy, cramped backyards of our block revealed a sort of mythic charm that I saw with clarity for the first time, and absolutely everything was quiet.

It has been some time since I grew up in Wisconsin, but there is never a good way to leave a place that was once the place you tried to leave behind for good. This morning I cleared the small walkway up to our neighbors’ porch, and I remembered my dad grabbing the deluxe-sized forest-green shovel from the garage and reminding me to lift from the knees. There was so much snow then that one massive scoopful was too much for me to carry at one time, but I enjoyed the steadiness of the effort.

The dads are always hardcore in Wisconsin. Whatever their shovel or blower of choice, the standard-issue uniform was thus: 1) flannel pajama pants or generic sweatpants or (!) cargo shorts and 2) a Green Bay Packers sweatshirt or a Wisconsin sweatshirt and 3) a hat from Fleet Farm, purchased sometime before 1999. Gloves optional, but “you really just need a good hat.”

My dad would laugh at my pride this morning in shifting four powdery inches from twenty yards of sidewalk, but I nearly sent him a picture. I started with the stretch outside our house and continued to the corner, greeting neighbors and feeling, perhaps for the first time, like I was home.

Something about a snowfall always feels like an extraordinary sort of mercy. Especially early in the day, it is as if the echo of a good dream remains tucked around one’s shoulders and given material substance into the bright of morning. There is hope in the freshness and the possibility. Maybe with some rest, we think, maybe with some concerted-but-not-exhaustive efforts, maybe something within us will also find itself reconfigured and made new.

I keep thinking of the railroad tracks before dawn – a thing muddy, practical, dangerous – suddenly the protagonist of a fairytale.

When I celebrated the noon Mass yesterday for the Epiphany, I prayed for “newness of life.” This is a constituent prayer of one of the Confession formulas in Rite I of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. I say it many times each week, piling my sins before the altar and gathering up the confessions of those who speak those words along with me, holding our darkness up to the Light. Together, we approach the foot of the Cross. Together, we trust that each burden, each small embarrassment, each mammoth horror is taken up lovingly by a Savior whose gaze has always already been enough to set us free.

It occurred to me on the sidewalk this morning that confession is an ontologically perfect invitation to a life-long snow day. Everything is fresh, cool, pure, and new, suffused with golden light and possibility. Everything is ripe with opportunity. We are safe, home, suddenly free from burdens we had not anticipated being able to set down. Someone who loves us is taking care of us. Our own labor is sheer pleasure, a work offered solely in thanksgiving for the One we love.

When the snow melts, all is revealed to have been made new.