This December has been filled with music! We started the month with Entourage Jazz’s annual Christmas Concert. Our youngest son has been performing all over town with his choir. And our church had it’s Christmas concert last weekend. One of the pieces performed by our choir director, Erin Reil, accompanist Nathan Cleaveland, and his partner, Naomi Brandt, was Snow Angel, the fifth movement of a choral work by Canadian composer Sarah Quartel. I’ve been listening to it a lot since then. You can listen to it by playing the video below.
I went to my window one bright winter’s morn
and gazed at the new fallen snow.
The world overtaken by flurries of white
had set my surroundings aglow.I looked to the heavens seeking the source
of this wonderland newly appeared.
When there I spied a snow angel
holding the flakes and spreading them near.She sang: “Even though the snow may blow,
there’s not a wind can stop my music.
For I know that winter shelters life.”
from Snow Angel, Sarah Quartel
We don’t have a lot of snow here in Albuquerque, New Mexico. We enjoy it when we have a few days of it each winter season. And it’s fun to drive into the nearby mountains and play in the snow–at 8,000 feet elevation–in the mountain meadows and Ponderosa Pine forests, before driving back down to the mere-mile-high desert. But I remember winters in Michigan with multiple feet of snow on the ground…snow on lake ice…snow beneath trees in forests…snow blanketing our garden beds. I know very well how a layer of snow can be shelter in the freezing cold of winter. And, as I get older, I know ever more how important a season of rest is.
Angels don’t figure strongly in my personal spirituality, or that of the Lutheran church that I belong to. To me, they’re agents of God: mostly messengers. Unlike some faith traditions, I don’t see them as avatars of specific qualities of God (like love, justice, or healing), and I don’t feel an affinity to one in particular. In my spirituality, an angel means something like, “Incoming message! Pay attention!” It could be anything, but most likely it’s going to be something I would never have imagined on my own.
As I was decorating our Christmas tree this year, I noticed that we have an awful lot of angels on our tree! Most of them are Kristin’s. Which makes sense to me, because in my life, Kristin has been a powerful source of enrichment: bringing possibilities into my life that I never would have imagined or made happen on my own. I sometimes joke that Kristin is the agent of chaos in my life! That’s a very good thing, because without someone like her constantly jostling me around, I lean toward being a very boring person.









So Sarah Quartel’s song, depicting the Snow Angel as a source of shelter and rest, is a reminder to me that chaos and rest are both necessary for a good life. And they can sometimes even come from the same place, or the same person.
As a busy and eventful 2024 draws to a close, I pray for even a brief time of restful shelter. 2025 is looking to be a year of storms for our friends, our community, and our world.