Snow is supposed to be pure, a sheen of white. That’s what I thought after moving from the warm sun of Los Angeles to the cold air of the Twin Cities. But a few days into the first snowfall, dead leaves littered the smooth surface. Car grease and dog piss yellowed its edges, snowmen started looking lumpy, wheezing and twisting in the dry cold. The postcard-perfect winter scene maybe lasted a day, and that’s when my first Minnesota winter really started: months of bright air and bitter cold, good days and gray days, snow and mud.
In “Snow,” the artist Sleeping at Last finds within snowfall — and the inevitable mess that follows — durable imagery for how community can emerge from suffering, and how moving through our own pain can be the first step on a journey toward wholeness.
Throughout the song, the singer introduces common Christmas imagery: gifts and trees, carols and mistletoe, scarves and lights. But we quickly sense things aren’t quite right: warm breaths look like ghosts in the cold air, the lights are tangled, and the table setting is missing pieces. Even lines that feel like blessings implicitly evoke their opposite: “may the melody disarm us / when the cracks begin to show” suggests we’re fearfully protecting ourselves, and “may we remember who we are / unconditionally cared for by those who share our broken hearts” suggests that we’re forgetting, over and over, how a better future comes not from isolation but a shared life.
There’s no escaping it. As hard as we might try to perform our own lives, sooner or later the bruises start to surface. But that’s the gift of this Advent song: When things fall apart and grief overwhelms us, a deeper love can surface, too.
So this month, I’m listening to this song over and over and thinking about mud and snow, about angels and a welcome table. I’m thinking about what it looks like to lay down old wounds — and to feast with dear friends and family who know how to do the same. Maybe this is what the German mystic Angelus Silesius meant when he wrote: “If in your heart you make a manger for his birth, then God will once again become a child on earth.” What does it feel like to make room for this sacred empty space? Where we let our hearts open wide as a manger, and meet one another there?
