Osler's Razor

Like a lot of people from the north, I connect snow with advent and Christmas. I know this is not very Biblical-- Jesus lived in a climate much more like Texas than Michigan. Still, these things get connected in childhood and are hard to unhitch.

For me, there is a connection in a real way between the idea of Advent and snow. Snow slows everything down-- not just people and traffic, but sound, and falling snow diffuses the light to something gentler.

In 2003, I heard the Nada Surf song "Blizzard of '77," and I remembered that blizzard. I wrote a little devotional for my church starting from that song, part of which is included below:

In the blizzard of ’77, I was a child. It started with big, early-season flakes drifting unevenly to earth, easy to see in a child’s palm before slowly melting away. As the early dusk of the North fell, the snow grew heavier, gathering on frosted windows. I was a child, so I waited. Every few minutes, we would look out the window and see the soft snow coming down, the lights of cars filtered through the gathering of white.

We waited all night. The next morning, it was still falling. The edges of the world were rounded off, and the greens and the grays of the city were subsumed by the pure white drifts. We ate our cereal, waiting, waiting. And then the snow stopped, and the waiting was over. We went out into the yard in our boots and snowpants and jackets and lifted our feet up high to get to the end of the driveway. There before us was the whole of the world we knew, transformed, one flake at a time. The Day-Spring had come, leaving a world with no cars, no danger, a wonderful calm and silence and an unbroken line from our snow angels past where the shrubs and cars had been, each reduced to just an undulation in the white plain, to the flat expanse of the lake and Canada lying quietly beyond.