A Meditation on Winter

If anyone has had the misfortune of seeing me in RCIA, they know that I like to use metaphors and analogies. In fact, it probably appears that I paid good money for each as I try to wring every drop of meaning out of them, or as I often put it "I stretch a metaphor until it screams".  We're having a wonderful Texas winter right now with temperatures in the 50s so I was reminded of this metaphor that I haven't had the chance to use yet.  So I'll share it here for the benefit of my few regular readers.


I'm sure you've had this experience.  You are out and about when it's cloudy and gray and the temperature is in the upper 40's and there's a light breeze.  It's just gray and cold and everything you touch is cold and you just feel miserable.  Now consider a different situation. It's still in the upper 40s and there's still a light breeze but the sun is shining brightly.  Now it doesn't feel so bad.  The thermometer would say that things are exactly the same, but you feel much better.  You might even be able to do without your coat for short periods of time.  Obviously the sun is the difference, but what does the sun do?

The sun doesn't heat the air, the sun heats you and the ground and everything else.  But the air is clear so the sun has no affect on it. So even though the air is the same temperature, you are being warmed by the rays of the sun and so you feel warmer, even though the thermometer on the weather report (which is typically in the shade) says it's the same temperature.

So if the sun doesn't warm the air, how does it change temperature? How do we get cold fronts and warm fronts and all those strange runic symbols they show on TV?  Air warms up because it passes over the ground and trees and buildings that the sun as warmed.  It's a slow process.  Air is actually a good insulator as long as it's not moving.  That's how thermoses work.  Here in Texas we are frequently menaced by air that came from Alaska and drops our temperatures to the 20s and 30s.  And then we also are hit with winds coming from Mexico that pushed our temperatures into the 60s and 70s.  It's cold in the winter in the polar regions because the sun doesn't shine much and even when it does shine it's rays are very weak, coming in at an angle and having to pass through a lot of the atmosphere (air).  In the equatorial regions it is warm because the sun shines a lot every day and it comes perpendicular to the ground so it isn't diffused by the atmosphere as much.  It's a lot more complicated than that: there's factors such as humidity and air speed and probably wind shear that affects how quickly the air warms up or cools down, and in each case there's an equilibrium that sets up between the land and sea and air.  But the amount of sun and the intensity of the sunlight is a key factor that starts it all.

I think the lines and letters and triangles are added later, but I'm not sure how that works.

The obvious parallel here is between the physical world and the spiritual world.  I would propose that the "air" in my discourse above is roughly equivalent to the culture.  And the sun is equivalent to God. I'm not the first person to make a play on words between "Sun" and "Son".  When there's no God, the world seems like a cold place and it's uncomfortable and we don't like to spend any more time in it then we have to.  But when there's God, we are warmed and we enjoy being in the culture.  But of course by letting ourselves be warmed by God, we radiate that warmth and eventually even the culture around us becomes holier.  It takes a long time though.  We can look up in the sky and see that there's a lot of air that needs to be warmed up.  We know from experience that a few hours of weak sunlight a day won't do us any good and if we only have sunlight once a week, it's going to be a cold week.  So God can't be in our lives for only a short period of time if we're going to change the culture. And He can't be only a little bit there.  We can look around and see there's a lot of culture to change.  It has to be All God All the Time if we're going to do anything.

Finally, I mentioned that in the polar regions, the sunlight comes in at an angle and has to pass through a lot of atmosphere to hit the ground.  If we're seeing God filtered through the very culture we're trying to change, we aren't going to make much progress.  We are allowing culture to blunt the impact that God has on our lives so we naturally have less to radiate back to the culture.  The culture acting as the middle man here: giving us only the amount of God that it will allow and blocking what it finds objectionable or unnecessary.  In that case we're radiating the culture, not God.  And that's a dark and cold place.