The Holy Snowy

We had received 7 inches of snow, so it was time to get up and clean the cars, clean the walks, clean the driveways. We have a snow removal service here, but their schedule seems arbitrary, so I never know when they will arrive. If they have arrived on the scene, their presence is punctuated with disappearances, and if there is a strict regimen of activities- such as drives first, sidewalks second, blow snow on the front doors third-I am unaware of it. Usually with a small snowing, they show up at 3:00 A.M. with dull, noise-making plows and grind the new asphalt laid down last fall.

After being awakened early, I usually take a nap at the time of afternoon they show up with the internal combustion snow blowers. The scene is intensely odd to me. The beauty of the snow filled landscape is so, so evanescent here. One must hurry to view it and to take pictures, because a little crew with a big noise - a snow eating Langolier outfit!-is coming over the horizon and is going to whack it and hack it as if it were an Amazonian rain forest.
It is Michigan so a lot of the snow removal workers are wearing University of Michigan winter garb, not because they support the football team, but because there are no jobs other than Snow Blow and Grass Mow and have not been in quite a while. I saw some Michigan State stuff, some Wayne State, and some Oakland U.

I was shovelling with God. It was His snow, so to speak, so it was only right He should lend a hand. We were talking about the book "The Secret". I said that I thought things such as "vision walls" related to notions such as "karma" and "reincarnation". He said it was not clear up front, but he supposed I could make a case for it. I asked, then, just how many ways there were of interpreting reality. He said an infinity of them...as many as there were individuals thinking about interpreting reality. So I asked whether the underlying reality was One or Many, or are the many interpretations about One Reality or Many different Realities.

He said that shovelling snow was a good deal of work, and He would appreciate it if I could restrict myself to things like, "Cold enough for ya?" . At the risk of portraying God in coveralls instead of regal raiment, I shall say that God is a bit more like the French worker priests who were right down in the trenches with people every day, rather than like some mediaeval cleric's vision of the High Holy Over Our Heads, so far away that the Virgin Mary be needed to intercede for us.

God works hard and is a bit like Mother Teresa, right down in the cancer and the bedpans and the colonoscopies. When I speak of God, I do not get glassy eyed nor start speaking in tongues. I always wanted to. I mean, I thought it would be cool to go rigid and comatose and take a flight to seventh heaven...but I never could. God was always hard at work. He would look over and shake his head.

One day He was running the front end loader and I was tossing garbage into the bucket so we could take it back to the dumpster. He seemed to sense I was thinking about the isolation and grandeur of being God. He called me over and motioned for me to climb up to the cab of the loader. It was a big one, like a quarry machine that could fit two or three Kias into the bucket. "There's two things you got to remember about Heaven and Holy Visions and Holy Rapture," He said. "...just like there's two levers you got to remember for running this loader." He pointer to two levers, pronouncing the word with a long "E" so it came out "leavers" instead of the alternate pronunciation "levvers". "This is Lever A..." I nodded. "...and this one, the most important, is Lever B!" So I had to "Leave 'er Be."

The paradigm for holiness has slipped from Padre Pio to Mother Teresa. But even though the picture we have of holiness might be a hard-working nun rather than a stigmatic priest, I sense we are closer to the intention of Jesus when He said that we go forth and baptize in His name. Notice that He did not say that we stay behind within a cell and practice mortifications and allow our minds to become possessed of an inflated infatuation we call the Holy. He said to go forth. Do stuff. Change the World.