As a New Englander living in the South, there’s perhaps nothing I miss more than the snow. My childhood is full of memories of weekends skiing, neighborhood snowball fights, and comical sledding mishaps. It makes me sad to think that my son, now almost 3, will have very few similar memories.
The snow and the cold always make me feel more alive. They make me more aware of my body—the frigid air sneaking into every crevice of my clothing, piercing the skin underneath, tickling the back of my throat, drying out my cheeks, and freezing my facial hair. They make me stop and be present—there’s nothing like the silent, falling snow that glues me in my tracks, inviting me to pause and appreciate the small beauties of creation.
When in mid-January a jet of cold air swooped down into the Carolinas and the forecast called for our first significant snowfall in over five years, I was cautiously optimistic. And when on a Friday afternoon, while I ran errands with my son, a few rogue flakes grew into a flurry and then a proper snowfall, I watched with wonder as my son greeted this novel experience (snow is quite cold, if you didn’t know). There were many joyful firsts that evening—first snowball, first snowflake caught on tongue, first post-snow hot cocoa—and by the time my family tucked into bed we had made I don’t even know how many laps of boot tracks around the house.
But our joy was nothing in comparison to the neighborhood’s. We live in a small development at the bottom of a steep hill tucked into the woods, a place typically so serene that the most common sounds, if you hear anything at all, are bird calls. But that Friday night our neighborhood was downright cacophonous with the shouts of gleeful children wrestling in the snow, the bonging echoes of bouncing rocks as teenagers hurled them on the newly frozen pond, the hollering of parents telling their kids to keep their mittens and jackets on or they’d catch cold.
The excitement continued the next morning: overnight sleet created a thick layer of ice, turning our road into one big skating rink and making the hill out of our neighborhood completely impassable. We were stranded, everyone’s morning plans canceled, but no one seemed to mind. To the contrary, we were delighted to have our day completely upended.
Everyone seemed to be outside, wandering this rare winter wonderland, including neighbors I met for the first time that day, who I don’t know if I would have ever met otherwise. We chatted and laughed and shared our collective wonder at our transformed neighborhood. Those with sleds shared with those without, and many a Southern child, including my son, enjoyed their first slippery, scary ride down an icy slope.
But by mid-afternoon, the shining sun and rising temperatures had melted most of the ice, and with the road once again passable, the spell was broken.
The whole experience convinced me just how much we all yearn for our over-planned lives to be interrupted, despite our statements and reactions to the contrary. Normally, we chafe at the slightest inconvenience: traffic, delayed appointments, anything that could even slightly offset our just-in-time lives. But those reactions belie an even deeper desire to stop doing and simply be: for sabbath, presence, and connection with those nearby. It’s sad that we have become so bad at doing this on our own that it took a freak storm and an impassable road to make me and my neighbors finally stop our busy lives, be present to the beautiful world around us, and spend time with each other.
The question is how to do this more—how to cultivate the practice of regular interruption, to be more present to this world and not simply passing through it. At least for me, the best way is prayer, and in particular prayer habits that I am willing to let interrupt my life—that I commit to even when it means pausing a task, or letting things go by the wayside. This is a habit of life that I am, as a relatively new priest and new father, still figuring out. For a while, I thought it was more a matter of design—that I could manage my life so that I could always find a place for prayer, sort of as an addendum to my daily schedule.
But I quickly learned that there will always be something—a sick child, a pastoral emergency, plain old exhaustion—that upturns even the most flexibly and carefully calibrated calendar, and that because prayer doesn’t “have” to happen from a scheduling perspective, it can be the first thing cut.
Rather, I’ve found that the question is one of disposition—a willingness to embrace the inconvenience of prayer, to let it not fit into but upturn my life, knowing that this cultivates more openness to God, to those times when the Spirit arrives unexpectedly and unannounced in our lives, and to our neighbors, whose needs and presence can be equally difficult to anticipate and just as important to receive.
Now sometimes, this interruption feels just like a snow day—like a joyful reprieve from swirling commitments—but other times it can be anything but. There’s not much joy when the words of the Daily Office are drowned out by the incessant screams of a toddler. But mostly I find that daily prayer feels rather banal: silence, some Scripture, a few minutes when nothing much happens. Not only is that okay, but it’s indeed the point: to be open and cultivate presence even and especially in the mundane moments.
A week after the first storm, we got a second snowfall, and just like with the first, our lives were once again upturned, but the neighborhood’s reaction was much more muted—fewer sled tracks, quieter cries, louder complaints about closed schools and offices. In the morning, I went out to clear our driveway before the snow hardened into ice, my head aswirl with how to rearrange my schedule to work from home and watch my child, whose daycare was closed.
Lacking a snow shovel, I attacked the fluff with a push broom, tweaking my back and cursing at how long it was taking. About 15 minutes later, I paused to catch my breath, and it was while leaning on the broom that I finally looked around at all the white, fluffy and sparkling on the trees, and felt the cold in my throat reminding me that I was alive, and I recalled that the inconvenience was the point.
The Rev. Keith Esposito is associate rector of Chapel of the Cross, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
