It caught me on the way out of the driveway, as Iwas backing the car out to run an errand: that particular blue, unmistakable. The trees stood black against it, transfigured in their beauty. The western horizon was brushed with streaks of light gold and delicate apricot--but mostly the sky was that particular blue.

I am not a summer person; summer blue skies strike me as being conventionally pretty, like male models. I am fonder of the bold, authoritative blue of October, deep and a little dusty, or of the incisive strong blue of January, dazzling over snow and telling you that, temperature be damned, joy IS--gotta problem with that? Late May blue is a delight--almost as deep as October's blue, but milder and happier. But my favourite of all blue skies is this one. It's the cusp sky--the moment when winter swings around into what will become spring in a while.

I'm not an artist; I don't know the name for this particular quality of blue: cyan, maybe? It's got a faint greeny-ness to it, that I do know, and there's something about the intensity: neither deep nor pale, but perfectly balanced--strong yet very gentle. If the Madonna's cloak is indeed blue, I think this it the blue it ought to be, because this is such a peaceful shade, a shade full of quiet contentment, of the certainty of good.

Its beauty is in sharp contrast to what's beneath it. Thanks to El Nino, we've had a week of full-fledged thaw, and the results are--well, sloppy. It's even worse this year than most, because of all the detritus from the big ice storm in January; yards are still full of broken brush and torn-off tree limbs, in addition to the ordinary post-winter underlayer of sodden leaves, waterlogged junk mail, defrosting dog droppings, beer bottles, and Skittles bags. Mud Season is generally ugly, and this particular Mud Season is outstandingly ugly. But the sky makes up for it all.

This is, for us semi-hardy northerners, the landscape of Lent. And maybe it's not such a bad expression of what Lent is about, either. If we're doing what we're supposed to, Lent is when we strip off our covering of bland cool white denial and take a look at what's accumulated underneath it, which can be pretty discouraging, if we're being at all honest with ourselves. There are things about me that I don't like at all. Maybe some of them are the result of my own choices; maybe some of them are the result of things that I have undergone (which are in turn often the result of my own choices, but not always). But whatever the history, certainly, my soul is anything but tidy and neat and fresh and wholesome. I know my own Shadow much too well to think otherwise.

But then there's that sky--the softest sky of the year, so full of tenderness and promise, so hopeful, reminding me that the lilacs will come back and flower--will, in fact, probably double in bulk in response to the beating they took last January, lilacs being like that. There's that sky, the soft gold streaks on the western horizon, the blue deepening steadily overhead; and when I turn and look the other way, to the east, the stars are pure silver set in dark blue velvet. This isn't the sky that goes with Easter. Easter never has this tinge, this quality. This sky, too, is peculiar to Lent.

For grace arches over us, whenever we are feeling at our worst, and it does so with such a gentleness and hopefulness of colour... God stretches towards us in a deep, longing, reaching, peaceful love. whenever we stand appalled by the mess at our feet, not knowing how we're ever going to clean it up. That's when the quiet blue of Love enfolds us so very quietly, so gently we can't sometimes tell it's there at all. Hope comes all so still, as still as the frost or the oncoming thaw.

We may have a final dollop or two of winter; this is Canada, and it's only March. But I've seen that sky, and winter won't hold onto us for much longer. I know that. I've seen that sky before.