With a few exceptions, we're pretty much back to normal after the ice storm. The lights are back on everywhere, except maybe to remote summer cottages in a few spots. Some barns collapsed under the weight of the ice, but most people have cleared the ice off their roofs (there were a few casualties from that, including at least one death). The most obvious leftover is a five-inch-thick underlayer of ice that's full of ruts and deep potholes--makes it interesting driving around parking lots and down driveways and back streets. But mostly, the storm is behind us now. People have even stopped flinching when a lightbulb flickers and don't need to hold the bannister rail when going downstairs any more.

But there is an exception: the trees. Anywhere you look, there's the sharp angle of newly exposed pale wood where there ought to be only the black of bark. Anywhere you look, you see branches fractured, hanging at unnatural angles, or whole trees split, waiting for the chain saw. The scrub woods are full of young trees pulled down into graceful, unnatural parabolas, treetops snapped off and dangling, and shrubs smashed flat to the ground. It still remains to be seen how much the trees can recover, come spring and summer--what can pull itself back upright, which wounds can seal themselves off and heal, what the short- and long-term fatalities will be.

I've always taken a quiet pleasure in the beauty of winter trees --their splendid strength and intricate architecture exposed, the delicacy of their mass of twigs upheld against a pale sky. Now so much of that beauty is gone. Even the trees that aren't wounded half to death have lost so many limbs that they look crooked and misshapen. I am a tree freak from childhood, and the sight continually hurts my eyes.

It does make me think, however, of how different God's reaction is to us. We tend to think of the unbroken, unwounded, as being better and more perfect than things or people who have suffered injury. The cracked plate loses more than half its value. We have an instinctive revulsion towards people (or trees, for that matter) that have suffered obvious damage. Your glance slides off and away from the wheelchair, the portwine birthmark, the lost limb, the face pinched with long pain, the scars, the crazy woman nattering to herself on the street corner. It's too embarrassing. A small voice says in the back of the head, "Must have done something to deserve this."

Or look at the way we adore the perfect bodies in perfect, impossible performances at the Olympics, or the flawless skin of models. We won't tolerate the least falling away from perfection in them; a slightly wobbly landing, one hundredth of a second too slow down the slope, and there goes the prize.... I saw a copy of an invoice for airbrushing a cover photo of Michelle Pfeiffer--not quite perfect enough, even her beauty.

But look at a word--not an English word, but a French one. The word for "wounded" in French is "blessé". I woundered a while ago if there was any connected between "blessé" and "bless", so I checked "bless" out in my Big Fat Dictionary, and there it is: blessing was originally done with the blood of sacrificed animals. Being touched with the product of wounds can make a thing or person holy, if the wounding is made over to God.

Simply being hurt is, in itself, a neutral (if drastic!) experience. It can cripple and embitter you, or it can break you into a shape that God can make much of. It says something about God and human nature that, in fact, the latter reaction is quite a common one --I don't have any statistics, but most of the people I know who have undergone suffering have, in fact, been made holier people by it, and most of the people I know who I think of as being profoundly unholy have, in fact, got that way by refusing to accept necessary suffering.

Maybe God's notion of human beauty is almost inverse to ours. We're so attuned to seeing beauty only in gracefulness and perfection, in unblemished skins and clear healthy eyes; we're used to thinking of scars as ugly and brokenness as unwholesomeness--and the impulse to "shoot the wounded" is still such a normal, if ugly, part of human nature.

But God chose to be ugly and broken on the Cross, punctured and bleeding--maybe, in part, to show us that God doesn't find us less attractive for being a bit battered and worn around the edges? Not, I think, that God wills hurt and brokenness to us, or expects us to court damage to ourselves--life does quite a good job of that without any help from us, if we choose to try to live the Way in this world. But God's standards of beauty are not ours; they are far richer and more complex.

And so, to God, maybe the broken trees are differently beautiful than they were before the ice tore them limb from limb. And maybe God looks at our woundedness without a hint of lookng-down or blame. And maybe, if we can acceot that radical notion, we can stop being so ashamed of our brokenness--able therefore to admit it and to love ourselves, broken as we always are.