death

PHOTO: Mary van Balen

I’m in Virginia visiting my daughter and to get here I had to drive through West Virginia’s mountains. My friends know that driving through West Virginia is the part of the trip I dread. Mom, born in West Virgina and a resident for a while (while I was five and six) could never understand my feelings. The mountains are beautiful, she’d say. They are. But so is the ocean and the more open vistas of Virginia. Trucks don’t whiz by on one side of their highways while the mountain drops away on the other side.

Granted, the highways through West Virginia have improved immensely since I began driving them each summer on the way to the beach with my family. Still, I don’t relish the thought of winding through them to arrive at the east coast. I thought about using the Pennsylvania turnpike this time. Google Maps showed it passing through fewer mountainous regions, but the substantial toll caused me to reconsider.

Parisian hot chocolate at the Blue Talon

So, Tuesday, a rainy grey day (Rain is right up there with semis and fog in my list of things that make mountain driving worse.) I set off in time to make it to Virginia before darkness fell. As I sat at the Blue Talon restaurant, sharing amazingly rich, creamy hot chocolate with a brick of homemade marshmallow floating in the silver cup, I shared the mountain drive with my daughter and her friend. I had to admit that the leaves were stunning, even without the benefit of bright sun.

“The colors were breathtaking. I could only imagine how they would’ve looked if rain wasn’t falling and clouds weren’t obscuring more direct light. I would’ve had to stop to gaze at them. As it was, keeping my eyes on the road was work.” My mother appreciated mountain beauty year round, and even if I were a begrudging seasonal admirer, she would’ve approved of my admission.

I thought of my drive as I read this blog by Omid Safi on Krista Tippet’s “On Being.” The magnificent colors of autumn forests have a message for us: Welcome the little deaths that come. They unmask the Divine that is already present in us. Today’s first reading at Mass also speaks of the Presence that is already within us:

Ephesians 3:14-20
This is what I pray, kneeling before the Father, from whom every family, whether spiritual or natural, takes its name:
Out of his infinite glory, may he give you the power through his Spirit for your hidden self to grow strong, so that Christ may live in your hearts through faith, and then, planted in love and built on love, you will with all the saints have strength to grasp the breadth and the length, the height and the depth; until, knowing the love of Christ, which is beyond all knowledge, you are filled with the utter fullness of God.

I can’t wait for the short trip to the beach my daughter and I will enjoy beginning tomorrow. I am an ocean person at heart. Still, after reading the blog, I’m hoping for a sunny day to drive back home. The thought of glorious color and prayer breathing out of those mountains may ease my dread of the West Virginia trek.

Snowdrops

I saw snowdrops today, spread with abandon across a friend’s yard. Flowers! Spring, rumored to be coming soon, is on the way. After this relentless winter, flowers atop green stems are a welcome sight. Forsythia has not yet bloomed, so, according to my grandmother, we have at least three more snows to go, but I don’t mind. Today’s snowdrops were a seal on the promise of warmer days ahead. “Have a little faith,” they seemed to say. “Remember other years. Spring always comes.”

Of course it has. Millennium after millennium spring has followed winter. We all know that. But sometimes, in the midst of cold and biting winds, we allow ourselves to wonder, perhaps not if spring will come, but when. We grow tired of waiting. A warm day here and there in the past few weeks has been a tease and makes the cold even colder.

“It’s not below zero,” my daughter said a couple of days ago. “We’ve had days much colder than this. Why does it feel SO bitterly cold today?”

Perhaps it has to do with expectation. With having had a taste. A glimpse. The sun is out. The day before saw the temperature reach 50, and we mistook the moment for an announcement that winter was over.

I think of the three who went with Jesus up the high mountain and saw him transfigured before their eyes. There was their friend, their teacher, in all his glory. Peter was ready to build tents, ready to stay. “The wait is over,” he may have said to himself. “No more parables and hardships, and mystery or trying to figure out what Jesus is saying.” The struggles and dilemmas were coming to an end. The good times had arrived and he, for one, would be happy to settle in and enjoy.

Alas, not so. It was a glimpse, and then it was gone. There were more roads to walk. More mystery to embrace. More suffering. I wonder if, during those long days between Jesus’ death and resurrection, if Peter remembered how Jesus looked that day. If he had, would it have given him hope? Or maybe the days were so dark that he could not remember the glory he saw or trust that it could not be snuffed out even by death. Maybe having seen Jesus’ glorified self made the experience of those three days more bitter. Peter had seen what could have been but was no longer.

Like experiencing spring following winter year after year, we have the advantage of knowing that resurrection followed Jesus’ death. Yet, in the midst of our own spiritual winters or the groaning of our world struggling with countless injustice and atrocities, we can forget. “Where is God?” we wonder and perhaps doubt the Holy One is still around.

Our lives seem impossible, too difficult, too complicated, too messed up, to be good again.

Today’s snowdrops remind me that the glimpse of glory does not lie. God is present. Resurrection follows death. The wind will not always feel so bitterly cold.

Lesson from the Leaves

Snowdrops