Doors in Cold
I’m sitting, as I like to do, at the “village” hangout near my Dallas apartment. It’s been cold here; the signs are out everywhere: “Freeze Warning: Leave your heat on! Close your windows! Let faucets drip!” Freezing weather brings out not only the exclamation marks but the essential strangeness of this city. “Close your windows”? Really? Am I living among people who might leave their windows open in this weather? Yet the injunction needs to be followed: pipes do freeze here, and we all hope that it won’t happen in our building, for the obvious reasons.
So I’m sitting here, wearing four layers of clothing. There are two doors; I aim to be in a corner away from them both, but it doesn’t suffice. People come in and out; doors swing open and shut; and the cold comes in. I just now put back on my sweatshirt. At my apartment, the windows are closed, the heat is on, and the faucets are dripping. I like being here where I can’t hear the drip. But it’s still cold: those doors!
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It was only when I lived in New York City that I finally learned the value of revolving doors. They keep the wind from blowing the cold in. They prevent there being a straight shot for the outside air to invade the inside; only the confined space within the rotating doors brings outside air in. Of course, they are much more complicated than a simple glass door, and take up more room, and cost a bunch; I don’t think my village hangout should shell out for them.
Still, I feel the draft.
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How odd it is to live in the twenty-first century! We go through the seasons (even the very modest cold season here in Dallas, followed by the very serious hot season) as if they were essentially unreal. Inside, the temperature can be whatever we want. I can set my thermostat at 72 degrees, for instance, and enjoy inside air at that temperature all twelve months of the year. The nights are longer now, but I have electricity and can read or write after dark as well as in the day, and if I go out at 8 p.m., it doesn’t matter if it’s winter dark or slanted summer light: I can see my way and move safely to my destination. We protect ourselves from the seasons and eat and walk and work and play with little regard for the time of day or night or the presence of the sun.
This is what people long dreamed of. They called it “conquering nature.”
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Nature has been conquered and methinks it’s not altogether good for us. A frankly minor draft makes me cold and I put back on my sweatshirt, with a slight annoyance that the weather is what it is. I ignore the changing lengths of days, sleeping more or less the same hours and working the same, through the year. My one resistance, which I do with a thankful remembrance of my mother-in-law, is to change the default thermostat between winter and summer. If it’s air conditioning weather, I aim to have it close to 80. If it’s heat weather, I aim for 65 or below. My mother-in-law thought it was healthier to have less of a change between inside and outside temperature.
But really, this is nothing for me to be proud of. It is only a minuscule reminder of what real life has been for most humans through most of time.
Technology, which helps us in uncountable ways, still threatens harm to human nature. This threat starts long, long before smartphones and living your life on a screen. Is there a remedy? One helpful reminder of our groundedness in nature is in the prayers of the church. We have morning and evening prayers, and they are different: the times of day are not the same. We have seasonal prayers, and they are different: Easter is not Christmas. We have prayers for different stages of life, and they are different: birth is not youth is not adulthood is not the approach to death.
And although these different patterns cover different spans of time, the church understands them as layered on top of one another. Each day is a little picture of your life: born in the morning, going to sleep at the end. Each year also is a little picture of your life: from the birth in spring (like new flowers) to the cold dormancy of winter (with your body in the depths of the grave). There are more prayers than I know that play on this pattern. Let me close with a favorite, attributed to John Henry Newman:
O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in thy mercy, grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last. Amen.
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Out & About. This Sunday, January 26, I’m to preach at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas, where the Eucharists are at 9 and 11:15 a.m.
Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” will be discussed at “Good Books & Good Talk” also this Sunday, January 26, at St. Matthew’s. Anyone who reads the play is welcome to the conversation. We start at 5 p.m. and end at 6:30, meeting in Garrett Hall: when you leave the parking garage, it is across the beautiful close and to your right. (Coming up next: Bessie Head, Where Rain Clouds Gather, on Sun., Feb. 23.)
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About that collect: You can find it in the 1979 Prayer Book at page It first appeared in the 1928 Prayer Book (same words but fewer commas, pp. 594f.). The commentary on that Book by Massey Shepherd attributes its composition to the Rev. George W. Douglas, who put it together from phrases found Newman’s Sermons on Subjects of the Day, ##1 and 20. There is another version of it which begins, “O Lord, support us all the day long of this troublous life,” but Shepherd says the “troublous” clause is “not original to Newman.”