Whiter Than Snow

It’s Ash Wednesday.  I know I've posted this poem before but it fits today with the snow and Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday. It's about the bright sunlight of winter, how the angle of the sun is so low the light comes straight in the windows and reveals everything, good and bad.  

This is what Shrove Tuesday and Ash Wednesday are about, seeing your own dirt and scars, acknowledging them, being repentant and then "shriven" (absolved).  

Yesterday, on Shrove Tuesday, we had the bright sunlight that revealed everything.  Today, on Ash Wednesday, we've got the insulating and isolating snow.  Let that remind us of the love of God covering our sins, and this is the love that leads us to repentance.  “Do you . . . not realize that God’s kindness leads you to repentance?”  Romans 2:4.  ”Whiter than snow, yes, whiter than snow.  Now wash me and I shall be whiter than snow."

I Did Not Dread The Winter This Year

I did not dread the winter this year,

The cold and dying, 

The stark, the bare, the skeletons out the window.

I did not recoil from the aloneness,

The low sun, the slow,

The interior, the shutting down.

The low, cold beams shoot straight into the heart of the house,

Illuminate the silent interior and the dust glitter.

My bright colors are clarified.

So, too, my own quiet dirt and scars.

I sit in the sunlight and see them.

The beams of light turn the corner of the house.

Darkness crawls in from the east.

The evening lengthens.

The quiet deepens.

The shrouding snowfall snuffs the sound,

Insulates and isolates us from the out there.