REFLECTIONS ON A SNOWY DAY


Snow outside JMT Hermitage

We awoke this morning to a newly fallen snow at the Hermitage. It is a mystical time. All sound is muffled and "hushed." All is quiet. Likewise, not much work happens in those first hours after a fresh blanket of snow. We all still ourselves and enjoy it before the work begins.

I have great childhood memories of snow: silence, a fireplace, and lots of hot chocolate immediately come to mind. I remember my mom and dad telling me that the angels had coated us in a heavenly sugar.

But snow is also pretty ordinary for many. If you live in a northern state like my old home, Indiana, or even more so, Minnesota or Wisconsin, snow is just an ordinary part of life for five or six months out of the year. There is nothing really special about it.

Snow can also be dangerous. People from "up north" know this all too well. If you are unprepared, or go out in it for too long you can get lost, get sick, suffer injury, or even die within a matter of hours.

This is all a good lesson in spiritual life in Christ. Snow calls to mind our need to be still and just enjoy the work of God in the moment. So few of us do this, and we suffer high stress and troubled emotional life because of it.

Those who see snow as pretty ordinary are often the contemplatives. They are used to this environment of silence and stillness. But they also learn how to do the necessary work of life in a cloister, monastery, or secular world without upsetting the quiet mind and heart. They can also be the worldly ones who have so dulled themselves to spirituality that they cannot see it even when they have it dumped into their lives. All has become carnal, emotional, or intellectual for them.

Those who experience the danger of snow are the new converts and novices. Awed by the beauty of the contemplative life we can venture into it without the necessary preparation of the "active" life. In monastic spirituality the "active life" is not necessarily life in the normal secular world. It is the stage of still being prepared for contemplation through daily discipline and asceticism of community (like monasteries), liturgy (the Divine Office and the Mass, etc.,) and private devotion like sacred reading, and meditation through the many accepted forms in the Church. Only by preparing oneself through these active disciplines is one ordinarily graced with the gift of contemplation in the pure intuition of the spirit beyond any senses, thoughts or emotions stirred up by names, forms, or images.

And the inevitable work of the day is a sign for the natural things of life that even the most contemplative saints have to do on this earth. Work is the natural state for human beings. That work can either blind us to the deeper truths of creation and God or act as a divine ladder to heaven as St John Climacus wrote so many years ago. And if we can be "born again" to make this journey in Christ, then work can also be an overflowing from the heights of contemplation. This is when work really takes on a divine character. It is a gracious gift of God through Jesus Christ.

So I am enjoying the freshly fallen snow. But the animals have ventured out from their natural shelters in search of food, and the monastics are clearing walkways around the monastery. It is time for work to begin.

In Jesus,

John Michael Talbot, Founder and Spiritual Father
The Brothers and Sisters of Charity at Little Portion Hermitage