Back to the house Friday night from running an errand, grateful to get the car back in the garage because it’s miserable out there. We’ve had four days of purely lousy weather: snow, rain, snow-plus-rain, freezing rain, whiteouts, more snow, all coming wave after wave with hardly a break, and now another big dump of snow is on the way, I gather. It’s been purely interesting staying on top of all the shoveling – especially when the temperature plummeted and all that snow-plus-rain-plus-slush froze solid. We have ruts and potholes and horrible ridges of pure ice all over the back streets. You almost need an all-terrain vehicle to negotiate the parking lot back of the Red and White store down by the Legion. It’s remarkable, I can tell you.

On my way into the house, I stopped, grabbed one of the big leaf rakes from the garage, and had a few pleasantly mindless moments bashing away at the icicles dangling from my side roof. The roof gutters are not what they should be--haven’t been for quite a while now--and long icicles build up whenever conditions are right. Given the weather, conditions have been spectacularly right for several days now. It’s been Icicle City. Some of those suckers were five or six feet long and as big around as your arm.

Most of them are too high up to get, but with a long leaf rake, I can just hit some of the longer ones. If you do this just right, they break off right at the top and all that weight of pure clear ice hits the ground with a profoundly satisfying smash. The excuse for knocking them down is that they might fall and hit someone and do an awful lot of harm, even kill a person. But the reason for knocking them down is that they demand to be knocked down. They’re just sitting there waiting for that rake, begging to be hit.

It’s like rotten ice at the edge of the sidewalk, pleading, demanding to be stomped on, seducing even the most hardened and responsible adult. It’s like a drift of leaves in October; a person is morally obliged to wade through them making as much noise as possible. It’s like popping bubble wrap with happy obsessiveness. It’s like jumping two-footed into the right kind of puddle when you’re out walking in the middle of a thunderstorm and nobody’s around to catch you doing something so foolish. It’s like peeing your name in the snow if you’re a 10-year-old boy. In my not so humble opinion, nobody should resist that sort of call.

I was wondering about this, and especially about where it fits in with God-stuff, because I believe on principle that nothing is not related to God-stuff somewhere, although sometimes you have to fool around a fair bit before you can find a connection. Rather like that six degrees of separation business, except that in the God-stuff, five of those degrees are totally unnecessary, for God is around is closer than the air, closer than our own skins, if we could only perceive Him. So where does icicle-bashing fit into the scheme of things?

It does occur to me that silliness of one sort or another may be one of God’ s ways of ensuring that we don’t get too wrapped up in our own problematic self-righteousness, the source of so much human evil. Pride goeth not upon a banana peel, after all. You can’t be oppressing others, judging and condemning them, puffing off your own superior wisdom and spiritual maturity, while you’re popping bubble wrap You can’t lay burdens on people or use them as things instead of beloved souls, while you’re childishly cracking the ice on half-frozen mud puddles.

Too much of the time we are much too serious, and it leads us straight into trying to run everything and everyone in sight, out of righteousness or worry (or more likely both). . Maybe we need to be called to silliness more often, even in the middle of Lent.

Thinking of all this, I remembered sitting in my room on Wednesday, half-watching the TV but mostly just being at peace with God and myself. That day I had done a piece of real metanoia – made a change in my old bad habits, confronted something I needed to confront, found some courage I didn ’t know I had. And afterwards, I had that sense of real and blessed peace and that quiet joy that come when you have done what Lent is truly all about: not self-punishment, but finding what it is you need to change and starting the work of changing it, in the faith that somehow God and you can transform this into what it should become.

Jenny-cat was companionably asleep in the wicker chair in the bay window, and I was watching her sleep, her soft side rising and falling with her quiet breathing. Suddenly she half-woke, rolled over on her back, curling her white paws in the empty air, wriggling her whole furry person – the picture of idiot happiness. And I thought how beautiful cats are for their naturalness, their integrity, their healthy wholeness, and their willingness to work a bit of silliness into life whenever the need strikes them. Jenny can go from matron to wild-eyed kitten in 0.1 second flat, if there’s string around, just as big dignified Max can suddenly drop in his tracks with an overwhelming need to chase his own tail. Cats take their play with proper, absorbed seriousness. You won’t find a cat standing on its dignity when there’s a chance to bat a pingpong ball across the room.

Maybe there are times when God whispers to us to put down our self-conscious solemnity, get down off our soapboxes, forget our Sinful Human Condition, and just pick up a handful of snow and aim it joyfully at the back of someone’s neck. I contend that bubble wrap has been put into our lives for a reason, and it’s to keep us from taking ourselves far too seriously. I stand on my right as a Christian to get a little giddy sometimes, even in this solemn season. Especially in this solemn season, come to think of it.

Jenny is poised at the top of the stairs, waiting for me to play boogeties with her. Off to oblige….