3 - ICE, SNOW, FIRE

                                                       

Time is a great mystery.

Try and pin down exactly what is meant in the opening of Genesis where reference is made to God naming day as the period of light and night as the period of darkness, then the Sacred Writer begins to enumerate the days of creation, and we are confronted with the pitfall of assuming ‘day’ in this context means our understanding of a day being the sequence of hours over a twenty-four-hour period.

It would be millennia before that latter concept would be accepted and then it would take centuries more to agree on things like time zones!

St. John Paul teaches that: In Christianity time has fundamental importance…..In Jesus Christ, the word made flesh, time becomes a dimension of God, who is Himself eternal…..[from the Apostolic Letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente, II, para. 10]

Time can flow like a gentle stream or rush like a torrent.

Time is illusive, non-material, tangible mostly by what we experience, feel in a given moment.

Mysteriously if we watch a clock time seems to unfold excruciatingly slowly.

If, however, we are deeply immersed in some project or enjoying some relaxation, even more so if getting ready to meet someone we love, time seems to slip by like water cupped in our hands and suddenly slipping through out fingers – perhaps leaving us thirsty – or yearning for more time.

Fundamentally time is a gift, portioned out by our loving Father, who creates us, to each of us precisely in the amount we need to live, move, have our being in communion of love with Him, as He sanctifies us and we fulfill our Baptismal vocation to become saints, until chronological time has been spent – how precisely we live this out in each moment is ours to choose, for we shall be held accountable for each graced moment of time – then, having spent the treasure of time granted us we will step across the threshold into timelessness to dwell in eternity with love Himself.

The paradox is I was not a little surprised when my heart was moved to write this morning to see how much ‘time’ had passed since I last wrote this.

I recall an elderly Aunt telling me once how her experience of time between fifty and seventy was that it passed so quickly but since she had entered her eighties time seemed to be slowing down again.

Perhaps that can be my excuse for not having posted here since June – I am not yet eighty!

More accurately though are two things my mentor as a writer taught me: “Interruptions are my life.”, for this is prime duty of the moment, not writing but attention to whomever needed his attention or help in anyway, and also “All my words are for the Word.”, the former means, with other writings, but more importantly the daily duties of moment: the Divine Office, Holy Mass, answering phone calls, emails, snail mail, attention to family, all the ordinaries of life, it is my way of living out the prime duty of every human being: God first, my neighbour second, I am third. The latter means being attentive to the Holy Spirit so that as best I can ultimately every word is for the Word.

It has been a week since I typed “I am not yet eighty”, again interruptions are my work too.

The extreme cold has eased somewhat, there has been more light snow, and preparing for confession today, a wonderful brother priest is coming to visit, I suddenly recalled the nuns teaching us catechism and all we needed to have in our hearts before First Confession and First Holy Communion.

In those days children were taught to memorize the catechism, prayers, parts of Holy Mass, mathematics, important dates/events in history, poetry, in a word our minds/memories became both sharp intellectual instruments and treasuries!

For example, the first question in the catechism, the Baltimore in those days: Who made us? God made us. Who is God? God is the Supreme Being……Why did God make us? …..to show forth His goodness………

Part of His loving goodness is radiating His light upon us, of which the natural light we experience from the sun, the moon, the stars is icon of Light Himself.

Suddenly my best friend from those days right into high school comes to mind. He was kind, gentle, and, something rarely mentioned these days, noted here in the highest sense of the word, a pious person who radiated purity.

After I left home and city as a teenager we would not see each other for more than forty years until one Sunday decades later, in one of the missions attached to the parish where I was pastor, a woman came up to me as I was vesting and said a family friend, a priest was visiting at the family cottage for the weekend and might he concelebrate. I said sure and a few minutes later she returned with the priest.

Instantly we recognized one another, and two childhood friends were reunited at the altar.

Memory is both a treasury of things already experienced in time, the gift of the present moment, hence the decades seemed to evaporate as we encountered each other anew.

Given that light is indicator of day this far north in June the sun lingers until almost midnight, while just north of here is indeed the land of the midnight sun.

However, this time of year here the sun does not shine before nine in the morning and sets not much after four in the afternoon.

The first snows arrived the first week of October and often the last snows are in late April, so I agree with the poet who declared ours is not so much a country as it is winter!

We have had a long stretch of the temperature in the low minus 30s Celsius, but with the wind it feels more like the minus 40s, particularly dangerous for the homeless and outside workers.

Today the wind howls, the snow falls, the slap of puck against stick, the shouts of glee when a goal is scored, the laughter of parents and children skating, all from the neighbourhood rink across the road witness we are indeed a winter people, as do the ice castles and slides in city parks, the special train from the city into the mountains for skiers.

When I was a teenager working in the bush felling trees for the pulp mill we would drive to the end of the packed snow road and start walking, long before dawn, to get to the day’s cutting area and at dusk we would trudge out.

Sometimes in the swirling snow you could lose sight of the others working the area and only know of human presence by the sound of chain saw.

Then, when everyone broke for lunch there would be, deep in the snow-covered forest, air thinned by arctic winds, a silence of such depth as to be sacred.

Because of the Great Depression and industry switching from consumer goods to war materials during WWII, post-war food production took time to balance between starving overseas populations in countries devastated by war, hence rationing lasted for some time, longer, for example in Britain than in North America.

After my mother died a few years back my sister sent me, among other things, my ration card from those days.

Staring at that ration card, the ridiculously small amounts of even milk apportioned, how grateful in my old age to live in a country of abundant food being aware, as Pope Francis has said: “Throwing away food is like stealing from the table of those who are poor and hungry.”

I grew up at a time when it was ground into us not ever to waste any food and when ‘I don’t like it”, regarding some food item meant it was taken away and you simply missed that meal, even if it meant going to bed hungry.

Food was never taken for granted, just like no one assumed there would always be enough, ‘enough’ being a flexible term, to eat.

When I was a child, through grade school, at least until eventually the post-war boom allowed families to replace coal fired furnaces with furnace oil, oil stoves with electric ones, ice boxes with refrigerators, cold and ice, even in the house, were winter’s constant companions.

So, since buildings such as schools, tenements, indeed still most trains, ships, were heated with boilers, or ran on steam, in the main coal being the fuel source, though larger warships tended to use bunker fuel, a heavy oil, and some people still burned wood in furnaces and stoves, winter snows often were soot covered, and fog was thicker than these days, as the water droplets clung to the soot.

Now, some seven decades later, I live in a northern city where, when there is fog rising from the river which meanders, deep and swift, well below the cliffs, dividing this city in two, the fog is thinner than that of my childhood without the familiar tang of ocean salt!

Now, where natural gas is the main source of fuel for heating, winter snows, such as that which falls deep this frigid day of near minus 30 windchill, the snow itself is a sparkling white-brilliant, even before the clouds disperse and the sun comes out.

Time is the messenger of change as much as it is the passing of moments, days, weeks, moreover time is a mysterious storehouse of memories, the good, the bad, the expected and unexpected, but above all else, time is grace.

As Christ said, and St. John Paul loved to repeat: “duc in altum: put out into the deep. [Lk.5:4]”, the depth of each moment.

As Bernanos puts on the lips of the dying priest in DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST: “All is grace!”

 (c) 2018