Snow as sin: more toil than play

“Benedicite glacies et nives Domino; laudate et superexaltate eum in saecula!”

During the ice storm of 1998, a friend of my uncle took a photograph of an outdoor crucifix in Montreal, thinly covered in ice and surrounded by trees encased as if in shimmering glass.

It is hauntingly beautiful and I had it framed for my office, where it now hangs. I put the above inscription under it — “Bless the Lord, frosts and snows; sing praise to Him and highly exalt Him forever!” — taken from the song of the three young men from the Book of Daniel. Their hymn, in which all of creation, including the ice and snow, praise God, appears in the breviary and, according to a venerable tradition, constituted part of the priest’s thanksgiving after offering the Holy Mass.

I pray the canticle and savour its poetic cadences. I firmly believe that all created things give glory to their creator, albeit imperfectly. As for the snow though, my heart is not in it. I don’t like the snow. It doesn’t generate piety within me; quite the opposite.