Snow Heaps Covered in Dung
It's Sometimes Worth Asking Why
Martin Luther once (in)famously offered us an image of God’s grace as snow scattered over a dung heap, covering over our corrupted natures to make us pleasing in God’s eyes. While I feel sure that it’s worth contemplating ourselves as smelly piles of excrement, I have been informed that Luther’s analogy is theologically inaccurate (apparently, God has no need to trick himself into accepting us into heaven, but rather can make us truly pleasing by healing our corrupted natures). Since Luther’s analogy then is more valuable for its striking imagery rather than its theological aptitude, I feel no shame in stealing the image, inverting it, and employing it for my own designs.
In the inversion of the image, the snow, no longer representing grace, but rather an individual’s sense of the natural law, is hidden from sight by a dung heap of cultural decay and perverted social expectations. It is my theory that this is the condition of so many among the masses of unfortunate secular creatures. In such persons, a delicate but persistent core of natural sensibilities and desires is masked by the acting out of aped social excess. Stylish vices and popular mortal sins are cultivated with an appearance of impunity that causes those with a moral conscience to retch and avert their gaze. Because the stench and appearance of the dung heap is so overwhelming, it is excusable never to suspect the existence of the snow beneath.
And yet, the remaining flakes of natural law within these confused hearts also sometimes quiver beneath the acts of the exterior. All that is needed is a small scraping away of the dung to reveal an utterly unique and unrepeatable core; a soul that yearns for a good it does not know. I recently experienced a small example of this phenomenon. I was smoking a cigarette across the table from a slightly younger acquaintance and I asked him, half jokingly, what were his hopes and dreams. His verbatim response was not appropriate for publication, but can be summarized by “make lots of money, commit lots of fornication.” Despite my own flippancy in asking the question, his answer appeared quite serious. This was the outward excrement automatically projected without a second thought. In similar situations I’ve let statements like that slide by, and simply moved on. Yet in this instance, I decided to test the strength of his aspirations.
“Doesn’t that only go so far?” I asked. “Let’s say you’ve made your money and had your fun. What’s next?”
“Well, I guess at some point, I’d probably want to settle down,” he responded, almost a little confused, as if the thought had never come up. It was as if he had never even expected, and probably rightfully so, that a life of easy cash and casual sex would ever come his way, but that nevertheless, was the goal that he would doggedly and despairingly seek. Somehow, a conglomeration of low expectations and shallow commercial exploitation had convinced him of the ultimate value of a lifestyle he had no reasonable expectation of achieving, but the scraps of which he would accept in the absence of other meaningful objectives.
His tones and his looks betrayed him. He didn’t really believe in this hedonistic mirage for a second, but there was nothing in his life to take its place. The cigarettes were burning. I would soon get up and move on to tasks I was obliged to finish.
“Isn’t it a little strange?” I asked, “how we all seem to accept hook-up culture as part of our life, and only a couple generations ago, it was unthinkable?” I think the fact that he didn’t know my background as a conservative christian allowed him to think about my question, instead of brushing it off.
“Haha, yeah” he chuckled. After an awkward pause he said, “You know, it’s almost..” he searched for a word “sad or something, just, ya know… I dunno, just how hard it is to find a good girl these days.”
He looked at me for confirmation, but my face hadn’t changed expressions, so he tried to justify his statement by explaining how girls tended to be unladylike (he used other words). “Yeah,” I said, and I tried not to smile at the irony, “but it’s almost understandable when you think about the tough spot they’re in. I just mean, that’s what a lot of guys are looking for, and yet, the costs are so much higher for them.”
“Guess it’s a two-way street maybe,” he offered. I nodded. He looked at me quizzically and said “Damn, that’s really crazy when you think about it. Hookup culture I mean.” He sounded genuinely surprised at his new discovery.
I put my cigarette out. I couldn’t stay, but I think I was just as shocked as he was by how swiftly his “hopes and dreams” had lost some of their luster. I didn’t know how to walk away. I left him with a platitude. “It’s a crazy world.” I said. Then I added “It’s sometimes worth asking why.”
He may have forgotten his breakthrough thoughts the second I walked away, but whatever the ending, I was glad I took the time to scrape away. I had the strong feeling that the snow beneath quickly felt the change and sensed that its natural home was high above the clouds, in the free air.
Needless to say, the scraping away of a dung heap is an unpleasant and thankless task, and as often as the work reveals the purity of the snow, it just as frequently spends itself in futile sweat. As Basil the Great told us, however, about seeking truth in pagan literature, when you can, you ought to try to snatch the pearls from the shit.
"To understand the medieval controversy, a I word must be said of the Catholic doctrine, which is as modern as it is medieval. That 'God looked on all things and saw that they were good' contains a subtlety which the popular pessimist cannot follow, or is too hasty to notice. It is the thesis that there are no bad things, but only bad uses of things. If you will, there are no bad things but only bad thoughts; and especially bad intentions. Only Calvinists can really believe that hell is paved with good intentions. That is exactly the one thing it cannot be paved with. But it is possible to have bad intentions about good things; and good things, like the world and the flesh have been twisted by a bad intention called the devil. But he cannot make things bad; they remain as on the first day of creation. The work of heaven alone was material; the making of a material world. The work of hell is entirely spiritual." ~ G.K. Chesterton (Saint Thomas Aquinas)
Wow! That is a powerful and satisfying article. More people need to see this.