On the First Sunday of Lent, Contemplating the Beauty of Melting Snow

This afternoon I took a brisk half hour walk in the late winter air to watch our son coach basketball. Along the way to Lucky's final game coaching a team of 9 and 10 year old girls, I heard water dripping. Snow is melting and findings its way to water drains.


After a long, somewhat solitary winter, the ground beneath me is thawing. I realized on my walk to the school that this was the longest I had been outside in many months. It was far too cold most of the winter to spend any time outside except walking to my car or from my car.

As I walked I was thinking about Father Peter Cebulka's homily this morning about Lent and how its original purpose to was to prepare converts for their Baptism at Easter. He talked about how, as a parish community, we are to pray and to walk with the young adults who are being baptized this Easter vigil by keeping them in our prayers and keeping our thoughts turned toward on own baptism. So how apt,  I thought,  that snow melts as Lent begins, how wonderful we can use the cycle of the created world  a reminder of the rhythm of our own continual conversion.

"Thus he makes the snow like wool,

and spreads the frost like ash;

He disperses hail like crumbs.

Who can withstand his cold?

Yet when again he issues his command, it melts them;

he raises his winds and the waters flow." 

From Psalm 147