Crystallized
joy, soft and white, fell in heaps from a void of pink overhead. The dark of
night lay pierced by sparkling masses, guests of an undeterminable number
insistent upon a night’s lodging. No
functioning lights were visible, leaving the gathering white to guide us home
in a world with which we thought ourselves familiar. It was Christmas night, approached swiftly
upon a day of rejoicing – my family was together and it was Christ’s birthday.
We left the
Lepine house shortly after dessert and conversation by candlelight, the
electricity absent once more from our quiet corner of town. It was then, after polite exchanges of
“goodbye” and “Merry Christmas,” that we plunged forcibly into introduction to
territory of our own, vividly transformed and wiped clean in a veil of white. My mother led the journey home, just an
afternoon walk’s distance, holding an old umbrella that immediately faced (oxymoronically),
a gentle aerial assault.
A great sleeve of ice, formed amid
the early celebration made a comfortable welcoming party for fluttering beauty,
more so than dry earth ever had the ability to assemble. The world with which we thought ourselves familiar,
therefore, had been given a different kind of enchantment than that which it
already possessed. The kind of
enchantment that is a pure, sparkling white, one that stirs no tangible interruption
in landing upon a shoulder. It is beauty
of a kind that impels a conscience to guilt – once ruins have been made of its
soft, untouched, state by the harsh impression of a boot.
Nothing else as cold in essence is
as warm in ability to be enthrallingly moving, and all the greater is its
representation of human transformation.
Unlit, quiet homes on either side, we journeyed through the center of
the residential road dressed beyond recognition, no cars or others visible in
any direction. A new experience was held
in every lawn, bush, and hanging branch, and the barrage managed to make a
symphony out of itself still, although in whispering faintness.
Why, we should ask, is the encasing
of the earth in rich, sparkling white known to be beautiful to the extent of
enthralling? Perhaps it is that the
blameless, unmitigated sheathing of our homes and the land beyond visually
makes all things new. Likewise is the
newness of a soul, eternally secured by the hands of the Creator, but all things
known are made new in a real sense – and in much more beauty. The transformation of a human being is from
the inside outward, wiping clean the gathered stains of earth and separating
ties with the beaten path already tread upon.
How the Teacher intertwines a lesson with the richness of falling snow,
leaving symbolic purity in its white brilliance is enchanting in itself.
Following a brief stroll, my family
trekked across the invisible driveway and made their way to shelter from the
unyielding snowfall. My mother retracted
the old umbrella that had been heavily caked with white as the night had been,
and I closely followed, reluctant to cut adventure short.
“Come now, let
us reason together,’ says the Lord: ‘though your sins are like scarlet, they shall
be as white as snow; though they
are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.’”
- Isaiah 1:18
(ESV)
“And behold,
there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven
and came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like
lightning, and his clothing white as snow.”
- Matthew 28:2-3
(ESV)
Grace & Peace
in 2013,
J. S. Wade
