"The Kingdom of Heaven is like..."

I once read somewhere that, statistically speaking, there are more suicides in winter than any other time of the year. It's cold, it's barren. Nature goes from being a declaration of life to that of destruction. The caress of the sun, Summer's fire, Springs vivacity, Fall into emptiness. They are replace by frost in your lungs. Your bones freeze overnight.

Death is everywhere. Most anything annual dies with first frost, and even the perennials seem to be mere skeletons of what they once were. If we are to take Winter as an image of Life, of God, we have much to fear indeed. For even when Spring is inevitable, those flowers will also meet their winters. Sure, Spring comes after ever winter, but it's the Spring for different flowers, the heirs live on, but the parents must die. I have all but fallen in love with Spring, Winter seems almost to be a necessary evil, exciting only in that in drives me more often than ordinary to my fireplace. Winter makes a moth of me.

But, Oh! The snow! How could I have missed the gospel story? How much more blatant could it be tha tin the midst of senescence, the sky itself would clothe the world in white; for lingering nights to become the Blanche Nuit? For white is the color of purity. So, the flowers, the young and the lovely, in dying, yield to purity. The old, the strong, well rooted tree attains purity losing it's temporary garments, but containing on it the world. The exchange is having to undergo purification again. Sound familiar?

Shall we have further justification for white snow? What is more visually noticeable en l'hiver than the lack of color? Spring sets a thousand colors against the backdrop of a hundred greens. Even Autumn provides every color of a flame upon her dying members, emebers of the Great Fall. But Winter? Oh the monotone! Oh the dull neutrality! But wait! White! Have you forgotten white light? White light - every color in the spectrum combined! White light, the light, has come into the world...

But even snow can be tainted, can it not? Has pollution not played her part? Have we diluted and mutilated our redemption?

Hating to end upon a doubtful note an experience that was wonderful in general (wonderful -- filled with wonder, what else could the reaction to such beautiful white flakes be?), what shall I say? The snow falls, regardless of what we try to do to it. Perhaps it turns brown, and perhaps mothers tell their children it's no longer safe to eat, but Spring still comes, does it not?