Drawing in the Snow

We are perfected by the work of the angels and of God; analogously, we perfect the material world.

It is becoming winter here in the Midwest, and that means snow. Earlier in the season, there was light dusting of snow while I was at work. My commute involves a stop at the train hub, and along the train track, someone had drawn a small smiley face in the quarter-inch of surprise snow.

I'm a sucker for those sorts of things. Somewhere out there is wanting to make me smile! Why would I want their effort to end up empty?

Snow is wonderful for this. It so often falls so evenly, making something like a canvas. I think the mathematicians can describe it using differential equations for airflow, but the rest of us describe it as a simpler "that's just what snow does." Its evenness gives it the potential to be drawn into, giving a chance for some pleasant I-didn't-meet-you-but-we-visit-the-same-place kind of hello. 

Drawing in the snow is a prototype for human creation in general.

Recently, New Polity (a Catholic journal out of the Franciscan University of Steubenville) announced their fourth conference, "Should We, Therefore, Destroy the Servers?" As referenced before, New Polity is a big intellectual influence on this blog, and there's no way I'm missing such a fantastic discussion. In their announcement video, among many other great ideas, Marc pointed out a very simple, beautiful, theological view of human creation (around 18:56 in the video, lightly edited for clarity) 

Marc: This is the Christian view of the cosmos - that the perfection of things is actually outside of themselves. So you see this- everyone knows this about man- or everyone should, which is that your perfection is ultimately something you couldn't expect. It's in God, it's in what transcends you. But what we often don't do is say that that relationship that we have to God, where the fulfillment of our nature is precisely in being transcendently given a gift that we couldn't expect, so we actually perfect ourselves outside of ourselves- we don’t often say that this is also true of dogs and trees and everything. I perfect the tree, right? I mean I don't actually but I- 

Andrew: You could. [Laughter]. Maybe you ought to. Have you thought about that Mark? [Laughter]

Jacob: And it's true! That just as man cannot fulfill his own Nature by himself- he actually needs a more powerful agent above him, the angels and God, to reach down and and to fulfill him- so those things that are beneath us, animals and and plants, actually need us to be able to fulfill their nature too. It's a linking arm stretch going all the way down, lifting all the way back up. 

This is the dynamic of the Christian with the natural world. It avoids the sooty blackness of an exploitative, abusive relationship of domination of the world, and the blinding white of a pagan animism that looks at man as just another animal and who has grown as a cancer on the planet. It even avoids melding them into the bleak gray of simply eking out what we need for survival or some minor level of flourishing. God has synthesized these two contrary impulses into a whole - or rather, He has instituted the whole, and we have separated the whole into these parts that we can't seem to see beyond. The middle road is not a compromise but a dynamic, taking the black and the white and turning them into a love letter in return to God. There is a good in these natural created things themselves, and we work with the natures of those things to bring them up into their fulfillment. It's another way of saying what we tried to say in one of our first posts.

Drawing in the snow leverages the nature of snowfall (to fall evenly) and directs it, uses that potential, to form a moment of connection between citygoers. It may sound grandiose to say that such an impulsive, anonymous action is fulfilling our original human vocation, but it is nevertheless true.

Take care of the creation that awaits its fulfillment in your work.