The first snow of the season came on Thursday evening, along with record low temperatures. Because it was also the first killing frost of the season, it stopped the geraniums in our back yard dead in their tracks, although up until that time they had been blooming incessantly in defiance of the times and seasons.
The arrival of the first snow of the season is as untimely as death, and sadly is often the harbinger of death as we once again go through the costly process of remembering how to drive on icy roads and streets. In this climate zone, why are we surprised and so unprepared? Every year, the first snowfall provokes a frenzy of calls to automotive service centres to install winter tires. Yet, garage owners might be the only ones who actually welcome the first snowfall.
On the other hand, does anyone welcome death? And is there such a thing as a “good death”? The Scriptures say, “The last enemy to be destroyed is death”. Although many people of faith will affirm that death does not have the last word, the thought of death and the pain and separation it brings grips most with terror.
When I consider what a good death might look like, I think of my grandmother Wilson, who died suddenly one night in her eighty-first year, when she was still strong in body and sound of mind. Until the very end, she attended weekly Bible study and prayer at her local church, kneeling to pray on the cold, hard floor. On the other hand, my father-in-law passed away in his forty-seventh year after losing a ten month-long battle of attrition with the cancer that ravaged his body. Although he suffered immensely, he kept his focus on immutable values and challenged his family to centre their lives around the same. He was broken physically but unbowed spiritually. Each, in its own way, was a good death.
We are frail and finite—but our frailty and finitude do not need to prevent us from seeing eternity at every turn, transient as it may be.
Until I personally pass through the valley of death, I cannot predict how well I will do at dying. But, I can begin to prepare even now by choosing to see the immutable through the veil of winter, the little deaths that are almost an inevitable consequence of being human—the vulnerability of our bodies to sickness and disease, the unexpected job losses, our seeming inability to live in peace with our fellow human beings. We are frail and finite—but our frailty and finitude do not need to prevent us from seeing eternity at every turn, transient as it may be. In fact, Jesus said “You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.”
Early in the morning after the snowfall and the killing frost, the geraniums stood strong and green until the sun thawed the water in the frozen plant cells and the lifeless stems collapsed. There was beauty in that moment, which I tried to capture in my photograph. A few weeks earlier, my camera caught another moment of beauty as the rising sun illuminated a fog bank over the Fraser River. Once the sun was a little higher in the sky, the fog dissipated and all I could see were the muddy construction sites and grimy industrial buildings it had hidden.
Are these glimpses of beauty ephemera or hints of a higher order? You can decide for yourself, but I choose the latter. I choose to believe that the world tilts toward order and beauty, rather than chaos and death. This perspective is what theologian Brian Gerrish calls “elemental faith”:
… the elemental faith that underlies all human activity: confidence in the intelligibility of the world we experience and of our own existence in it. We encounter our environment as order, not … as chaos. Without this confidence, not only religion but the entire enterprise of science and learning and, quite simply, living and being human would collapse. As a rule, it is tacitly presupposed rather than explicitly affirmed; and many of those who do affirm it might not wish to acknowledge its status as faith… The correlate of this elemental faith is the order, meaning, or reasonableness—in short, the logos—that the experienced world actually has, and the Christian theologian will add that there we have the elemental concept of God. But elemental faith, so understood, is not peculiarly Christian, or even peculiarly religious. Much less is it contrary to reason. It is the faith on which the exercise of reason, tacitly or explicitly, always rests. And its opposite is neither unbelief or heresy, but the despair of nihilism and meaninglessness.
I perceive imperfectly the God on whom I base my confidence, and that confidence may result in gaps of rationality– but this imperfectly perceived God is the only God I have, and this imperfectly constructed rationality the only framework for how I live.
Winter is coming—but I expect to find life and beauty in winter because I choose to live by faith.
