The weather couldn’t be more obviously Canadian: during the day, the clearest sky and snow so new and clean it dazzles, and at dusk, just as the light is going, that extraordinary electric blue that pierces the soul like a boy’s voice singing. It couldn’t be more beautiful, in a deeply wintery way. And it’s so cold, it feels like it could snap granite. It’s so cold, who knows? the very air might crack and splinter. It is so cold that Celsius and Fahrenheit are irrelevant; they’re starting to coincide.

Step outside and the cold slaps your cheek like a hand; it reaches into your mouth if you try to talk, making your teeth ache. Earrings and glasses--anything that conveys cold to the skin--are a problem. Grab a car door handle and if you have no gloves on, you may find your fingers the interestingly yellowish-white of dead flesh: frost-nip, and it hurts like crazy as the warmth comes back.

In short, it’s cold. Really cold. Cold enough to be quite dangerous: God help anyone who, in our cities, is homeless tonight. When I was out earlier, bolting desperately from car to store to get my minimal errands done, I saw pigeons burst up from the old hotel at the corner and wondered how anything wild manages to get by in this weather – and indeed, there will be casualties, human and animal.

Long ago I took chemistry, and I learned that cold is the absence of motion. If you chill an atom, its movement slows down – and conversely, if you still an atom, it gets colder. The temperature at which all atomic motion stops is -273 degrees Celsius, which is REAL cold: absolute zero. At that point, if I remember correctly, atoms are motionless.

Cold, then, is an absence, a lack of something that, under normal circumstances, is there--the absence of a gentle thrumming, atoms dancing, each infinitely small but containing a universe of space, each resonating to whatever music it is that animates it. Slow up the dance and everything cools down.

Atoms are meant to move, in the ordinary way of things; they jiggle and dance in their natural configuration. Absolute zero doesn't, in fact, happen. We are intended to love, in the ordinary way of things: to love those God has given us to love in particular ways, and to love all others in a webbing of _caritas_, charity --“the perfection of love”, my big dictionary calls it, with more spiritual wisdom than I’d expect from Webster ’s.

Atoms have no will of their own; they can’t choose to dance or be still. We can, however, choose to love or not. And as often as not, we choose not. We fail constantly in love: we fail out of selfishness, fear, and egotism. We fail because real love has its costs, and we don’t want to pay them. We fail because love calls on us to be open and vulnerable and imperfect, and we’re afraid of being like that. We fail because we’d rather sit in judgment on others than love them, because it feels soooo good, so richly soothing to the ego, to establish our own superiority and to avoid looking at our own imperfections.

Real love, after all, requires a lot of hard work, discipline and ego-pruning, and that’s hard and painful, calling for much effort and self-doubt and real discipline--a true setting aside of the Ego for one’s best Self. But we think fool’s gold’s good enough. They’ll never now. Until, of course, it actually gets weighed and measured against the true Gold.

But the absence of love where love should be is just as cold as the absence of motion when atoms should be dancing, and it harms the spirit as much as this cold can hurt the flesh. Even a comparatively mild chill can be lethal, if it gets us when we’re vulnerable, and that’s as true of the spirit as it is of the body. In fact, hypothermia’s actually more dangerous than this bitter weather, because it’s so much harder to detect. Just so, the gentle absence of love does worse damage than the bitterness of anger or hatred, because how can you resist being quietly chilled to death, when it doesn’t even feel particularly cold?

There’s stillness and stillness: the quietness of contentment, the quietness of death. There’s the healthy stillness of sitting with your hands in your lap, dreaming in prayer, and the stillness of a predator waiting. There’s the gentleness of deep affection and the gentleness of passive aggression. Funny how the same thing can be so healing or destructive, depending, and how deceptive stillness and quietness can be.

Christ did not set propriety at the top of his list, or prudence, or doctrinal purity, or discipline, or self-fulfilment, although these things are also good in their ways, and we need them in this life. He put love first, and humility second – not self-abasement or self-abuse, but the real and proper understanding of our own humanity. Failing in anything else may create very real problems, but failing in love is the thing we have to answer to God for, when we come to stand before him. As all of us will, sooner or later.

I went to call in the cats, and the weather had broken; it was starting to snow fast and hard and the temperature had risen to something more reasonable. We’re in for another sort of Canadian weather: reasonable, but very messy. I think I like this better.