When it snows in Baghdad.

There was an article in the paper the other day that I wish to write about. Only a little though. Basically, I'll just post the article for your reading convenience.

"Baghdad-The flakes melted quickly. But the smiles, wonder and excited story-swapping went on throughout the day: It snowed in Baghdad. The morning flurry Friday was the first in memory in the heart of the Iraqi capital. Perhaps more significant, however, was the rare ripple of delight through a city snarled by army checkpoints, divided by concrete walls and ravaged by sectarian killings.

'For the first time in my life I saw a snow-rain like this falling in Baghdad,' said Mohammed Abdul-Hussein, a 63-year-old retiree from the New Baghdad area.

'When I was young, I heard from my father that such rain had fallen in the early '40s on the outskirts of northern Baghdad,' Abdul-Hussein said, referring to snow as a type of rain. 'But snow falling in Baghdad in such a magnificent scene was beyond my imaginations.'

After weathering nearly five years of war, Baghdad residents thought they'd pretty much seen it all. But as muezzins were calling the faithful to prayer, the people here awoke to something certifiably new.

'I asked my mother, who is 80, whether she'd ever seen snow in Iraq before, and her answer was no,' said Fawzi Karim, a 40-year-old father of five who runs a small restaurant in Hawr Rajab, a village six miles southeast of Baghdad.

'This is so unusual, and I don't know whether or not it's a lesson from God," Karim said. Talib Haider, a 19-year-old college student, said 'a friend of mine called me at 8 a.m. to wake me up and tell me that the sky is raining snow.'

'I rushed quickly to the balcony to see a beautiful scene,' he said. 'I tried to film it with my cell phone camera. This scene has really brought me joy. I called my other friends and the morning turned out to be a very happy one in my life.'

For a couple of hours anyway, a city where mortar shells routinely zoom across the Tigris River to the Green Zone became united as one big White Zone. There were no reports of bloodshed during the snowstorm. The snow showed no favoritism as it dusted neighborhoods Shiite and Sunni alike, faintly falling (with apologies to James Joyce) upon all the living and the dead."

-Christopher Chester

Associated Press

What a universal prospect wonder is; and even more so the things that cause it. It's true that we've all had our breath taken away by beauty, natural beauty. Even our commercialized society encourages serenity in the simple. We decorate our homes and businesses with indoor waterfalls and earth tones. We make cd's dedicated to bringing the sounds of the rain forest or ocean right into our living room. We build huge structures in the middle of natural wonders so that we may look in comfort yet be protected from the elements. We thrive off of the idea that there are things that exist that we did not create. And so what do we do with this dynamic? We recreate it. We domesticate it. We make it in a way that's remakeable and tangible but always knowing full well that really, nothing compares to the original.

Snow. Water falling from the sky on a cold day. Not a new concept. So how can something so easily explained cause such a phenomenon. In the words of Graham Greene "“It was like an armistice with the guns silent on either side: you could imagine the whole world listening to what they had never heard before – peace.”

Peace. It's a nice thought. World peace. It's a good motto, but can we really create it? We say we can. But then we hear statistics of war and dispute and immediately we blame. We blame ignorance and rage, justify our indifference by labeling, and then proceed to pretend that there's nothing we can do. I think this becomes so easily accomplished because we've never quite seen what this whole purpose, peace if you will, looks like. Most of the time we never have enough silence in our own hearts to understand the true tranquility of peace personally. We're always trying to explain away the unknown; we make it logistic and wordy until no one, including ourselves, care anymore. I can remember times when I felt like I had truly experienced peace; moments when I had nothing to say or do, I had no motive or expectations. I just was. But these moments did not present themselves at a round table conversation about politics or theology. They were on mountain tops and seashores; they were times when I stood in the rain and didn't care. Moments when I watched someone reach out to another.

How easily God makes it look. How amazing are these little reminders that none of us are forgotten. Water falling from the sky on a cold day.
Wonder. Peace.

What am I suggesting? Nothing really, (although it would be neat to try a world leadership meeting on the crest of Victoria falls or in the hills of Huang Yao, just to see if it changes the mood) except that peace, void of wonder, is trivial and inconsistent. If we can see wonder in snow, then how could we miss it in each other?