“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight... Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
-James Joyce, The Dead
Thus ends The Dead, Joyce's finest short story.
Part Christmas story, part ghost story, part lament against Lady Ireland, The Dead has become a mighty footing in the cathedral that is Irish literature. All these many threads - the warmth of a Christmas dinner, tense political conversations, a dawning existential crisis, and old haunts - are realized in the subtle, haunting beauty of the story's final breath.
The focus of the story is Gabriel Conroy, a well-educated man from Dublin, Ireland, who is aching for life and status abroad. Gabriel pines for an existence far from Ireland and all that she has, in his mind, come to represent - endless war and death, an empty Catholicism, and a cultural heritage about as lively as still water. The greater part of the story's drama unfolds during a Christmas party in Dublin held by Gabriel's two aunts, Julia and Kate.
Upon leaving the party, Gabriel and his wife Gretta make their way in the early morning hours to their hotel room across town. All the while, as the cold snow is falling gently, Gabriel’s heart is burning within him. A vision of his wife upon the staircase from earlier that night, enveloped in shadow and distant music, has stirred something in his heart. However, once Gabriel and Gretta enter their hotel room, the moment seems to have faded.
“Gretta dear, what are you thinking about?”, Gabriel asks once they are alone, the snow still gently falling just beyond their hotel window. On the bed, ebbing in and out of a sleepy melancholy, Gretta reveals to her husband Gabriel that the night's festivities - one song in particular - roused from her past a ghost she had long since thought to be dead and buried. The memory of a young man named Michael Furey, deep from within Gretta's past, has again entered her thoughts.
“He is dead”, Gretta said at length. “He died when he was only seventeen. Isn't it a terrible thing to die so young as that? I think he died for me.”
Overcome by melancholy or exhaustion or both, Gretta falls asleep on the bed. Gabriel, pierced by the haunting suggestion that he may not, after all, know his wife as intimately as he suspected, walks over to the shadowy window and observes an equally haunting sight - “the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
Why should Gabriel not feel haunted? Why should he not feel terribly, terribly alone? His academic mind, beguiled by philosophy and secularism, has cut him off from any and all Divine comfort. Like Herman Melville's Bartleby,
“He seemed alone, absolutely alone in the universe. A bit of wreck in the mid-Atlantic… like the last column of some ruined temple, he remained standing mute and solitary in the middle of the otherwise deserted room.”
Before we came to know God - or rather, to be known by God - we were all like Gabriel. Outside of Christ, we were nothing but bits of wreckage floating in the howling infinite of a holy God's wrath. If you are yet outside of Him, and while the door of grace yet remains open, repent, confess and turn from your sins, and cast yourself upon the living Christ in faith, trusting in His death's atonement to wash you spotless from every sin. Then, and then only, will you be able to stand secure in the splendor of His righteousness and holiness. To persist upon the road of open rebellion against God has but one end; to be terribly alone, infinitely alone, tormented without even the presence of Him who fills all in all to comfort you.
To speak of being abandoned by God, our Maker, seems an almost unthinkable thought; and yet the infinitely horrifying reality is made clear time and again in Scripture, most often by our Lord Himself. My dear friend C.S. Lewis put what I call 'infinite abandonment' this way,
“Does not God know all things at all times? But it is dreadfully reechoed in another passage of the New Testament. There we are warned that it may happen to anyone of us to appear at last before the face of God and hear only the appalling words, 'I never knew you. Depart from Me.' In some sense, as dark to the intellect as it is unendurable to the feelings, we can be both banished from the presence of Him who is present everywhere and erased from the knowledge of Him who knows all. We can be left utterly and absolutely outside - repelled, exiled, estranged, finally and unspeakably ignored.”
However, it is not so for those of us who have turned from our sin to the living and everlasting God through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. When the Gabriel Conroys of this world see a veil of snow falling upon the face of the Earth, a dreadful shadow falls upon their souls also; a black-stained anticipation of the end that awaits all enemies of the Lord.
It is not so with us in the Lord. When the redeemed observe the faintly falling snow through the universe, their minds ought to turn to the Maker of both snow and universe, the One who crafts each and every snowflake individually, separately, uniquely. A great torrent of white snow settling on a blemished creation ought to remind us all of Him who delights in washing us clean - whiter than snow, spotless (Psalm 51:7). Whereas the world sees cosmic indifference and judgement in a snowfall, we as Christians should see grace upon grace.
“Do not be anxious about your life,” the Lord Jesus said (Matthew 6:25). Why? He goes on to point our eyes and hearts upwards, not to the snow but to the sparrows, and down again towards the lilies. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these” (6:28-29). He goes on:
“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not, therefore, you are of more worth than many sparrows” (Matthew 10:29-31).
If not a single sparrow falls to the ground apart from the Father's knowledge, why then do we so easily grow anxious and troubled? Consider the lilies, consider the sparrows, consider the snowflakes, and consider deeply Him who made them all. Jesus is the God of both great and small. He is Lord over birds, beasts, and creeping things; over men, demons, and angels. He has made the stars, and when dawn blooms He calls them out of the abyss one after the other by name.
If you are in Christ, you may very well pass through this life without much acknowledgment, devoid of fame or riches of any kind. Moss will gather upon your grave and dust may settle even upon the very memory of your name; but fear not, for you are worth more than many sparrows. Consider the sparrows, and consider the snowflakes. He who has time - indeed, makes time - to craft each and every snowflake uniquely surely has His affections set on you. And when the dawn comes, He will call you forth from this present darkness by name into His glorious light above.
Photo by Mihika, Unsplash