Gone by Afternoon

October Snow. It isn't unprecedented. I remember one year Jack-o-lanterns wearing snowy crowns. But I don't recall ever seeing snow on October 10. In fact, no one remembers. The paper said that hadn't happened since records have been kept -- sometime in the 1800's. Nonetheless, there it was on Saturday morning -- falling in tufts as though it were December. In fact, I was tempted to break out the Bing Crosby; but I don't think even WalMart has its Christmas displays up yet.

Though it snowed all morning -- an inch or more according to reports -- it was gone by mid-afternoon. The air was chilly, but not cold enough to hang onto the blanket. Still, it was persuasive reminder of how suddenly the seasons can change -- outside, to be sure, but elsewhere too. Sunday evening the phone rang with news from a friend of problems in their extended family -- an unconscious spouse, a 911 call, an ambulance ride and now intensive care. Just that morning it had still been autumn at that house, and all of a sudden it was winter.

I have a new book -- a "Field Guide to Snowflakes" -- that notes the influences of such things as temperature and humidity on the ultimate design of a snow crystal. As to the common axiom that "no two are alike," the author draws the analogy of arranging books on a shelf. With just 15 books, he calculates, there are over a trillion ways to arrange them on the shelf. "With 100 books, the number of possible arrangements is vastly greater than the total number of atoms in the entire universe" (p. 13).

In a complex snowflake specimen, "you might count a hundred or more individual features, each of which could go in a different place. The math is like that with the books, so the number of possible ways to make a snowflake is absurdly large. Thus, the probability of finding two identical specimens is essentially zero..." (ibid).

And to think that each of these utterly original, completely unique creations was extinct within hours of its formation.

Seasons change quickly. And life is short -- each utterly original, completely unique specimen of it. It sort of gives new urgency to the importance of living each day to the fullest, and treasuring the precious and intricately complex creations with and around whom we get to live -- every second that we can.

Kicking up Whatever Dust I Have Left

I'm not old enough to be this nostalgic. Maybe it was going to see the new Get Smart movie and all the other "old" TV shows it made me think of and want to watch again. Maybe it is fed by the old Lone Ranger radio episodes I have been listening to on my iPod. Maybe it has something to do with the old reel-to-reel tape of David and I singing together in high school I found in the box of memorabilia brought back from my parents' move. Maybe it has to do with the old slides I have been scanning into digital form. Whatever is the explanation, it seems that I have been spending an inordinate amount of time lately looking backwards rather than forwards.

Perhaps it is the inevitable challenge that grows increasingly complicated the longer one lives: integrating a constantly growing number of experiences and memories and relationships and accomplishments into the ongoing opportunities and demands of the present and the future. However large may be the mountain of sand representing the whole of one's life that starts out on one side of the scale, every passing day moves some of that sand to the other side. Before you know it, the arms of the scale begin to tilt in a different direction.

Maybe that's what's on my mind -- less nostalgia than a nagging sense of mortality. Shifting sands. No amount of rerun-watching is going to obscure the fact that life, regardless of how long it turns out to be, is short. Which is to say that I had better quick sulking around, wake up, and plunge into however much I have left -- kicking up a little dust instead of simply watching it shift and settle.

Babies, Baptisms, and Graveyard Wreaths

I'll admit there is a note of irony. Tomorrow in worship we will be celebrating new life on this weekend set aside to honor the dead. It is yet another common, if not altogether comfortable, cohabitation of the calendar by church and state. Throughout the weekend and culminating on Monday, our public life is consumed with Memorial Day, a day technically set aside to honor our nation's war dead -- initially proclaimed in 1868 to remember casualties of the Civil War and later broadened after World War 1 to honor Americans who died fighting in any war -- but long since more popularly expanded to remember all those loved ones who have died. Originally known as "Decoration Day," the occasion now finds decorated not only the graves of soldiers, but of husbands and wives and children and grandparents who died at the hands of disease or accident or old age or disaster, as well. Our public life has found in this weekend an occasion to remember all those for whom we have grieved, regardless of their transport into death.

But as it does every so often, the national observance of Memorial Day coincides with the church's observance of Pentecost, that day in the Christian story 50 days after Easter marked by the movement of the Holy Spirit in a way so dramatic that the storyteller could ultimately rely only on metaphor to capture it, because mere description proved inadequate --

"And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind.... Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit..."

The episode proved to be so powerful, so transforming that, according to the story, 3000 people were baptized that day. We look back on the day as the "birthday of the church," when the disciples came into their own as the "Body of Christ." Whatever took place, a fairly flimsy fold of followers became a bold company of advocates. It was the beginning of a new kind of life as they took on the vitality of the one whose spirit -- and mantle -- they assumed.

And so in our particular congregation we have come to use the day to baptize young people who have been studying and praying and watching and learning about what it means to be a Christian. Tomorrow in worship -- Pentecost Sunday -- the baptistry will be filled not only with water and one after another newly-professed disciples, but also the stirrings of the Spirit and the beginnings of new life. Just to add to the celebration, we will also celebrate the birth of a new baby in a service of the "Blessing of Children," giving thanks for new life in a more literal sense.

And so the odd and circumstantial juxtaposition of death and birth -- baptism, blessing, and Memorial Day; reverently remembering, and joyfully celebrating. And in both places -- sanctuary and cemetery -- giving thanks for the precious and marvelous gift of life.

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How Much Lower Than God?

There are certainly positive examples in the news of daring rescues, heroic efforts and charitable contributions, but it doesn't take very many examples of human depravity to wonder just what it is that we are made of. The Psalmist looks at the heavens, the work of God's fingers, the moon and the stars that God has established, and wonders aloud, "what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor" (Psalm 8).

But then I read the Associated Press story of the Pennsylvania mother who pleaded guilty this week to swinging her 4-week old son like a bat to hit her boyfriend during a fight -- and fracturing the baby's skull in the process -- and then the Associated Press story of the Indiana man who crashed his rented plane into the home of his ex-mother-in-law, killing himself and his 8-year-old daughter, and feel myself begging the question, "Just how much lower than God have we really been made?"

How much lower? Whether we are terrorists or defenders, murderers or jurors, disgruntled fathers or angry mothers, the value of life has slipped so far that, if a traded commodity, it would be dropped from NASDAQ as junk status. What would it mean to recover a glimpse of the Holy in those we live with or pass on the street? What would it change if we valued each other as highly as our cell phones and iPods? What would it feel like for tears to flow as freely over the loss of another human as they do over the loss of data in a crashed hard drive or glitched PDA?

At the very least I think it would mean using wood, once again, for baseball bats...
...instead of children.