Thaw
Community sermon (3.8.2026)
Welcome, people. Glad to have you here. Becoming a dad (over a year ago now, whoa) has meant that I don’t have time to write like I used to. This is as it should be, not only because being present with my family is the most important thing, but also because, I think, or I choose to trust, that the gauntlet of new fatherhood is somehow making me (or will make me some glorious day in the probably distant future when I’ve paid off my sleep debt and finally have more than a single solitary hour here and there alone at my desk to work toward becoming) a better writer.
That is to say, it keeps my fire lit to know that my Substack readership persists. Is growing, in fact. I think my recent work is calling out to the parents out there. Especially the moms, it seems, but I hope dads, too. Good to be with you in the fray of it all.
As an update, I’m doing a thing up in my neighborhood, putting on my interfaith minister hat and leading a pilot series of non-religious monthly worship services at our friends’ barn. When you’ve grown in a spiritual direction that eventually takes you out of the realm of the religion you were born into (Christianity, for me), but you don’t wanna join a new religion, and you still have a need and a longing to gather in a sacred way with people, what do you do? We’re experimenting. Giving it the ole college try. If you live in the neighborhood out here in Maine and want to be on the email list, let me know (andrewforsthoefel@gmail.com).
I’ll be sharing my sermons from these services here on Substack, in addition to the little essays I’m able to sneak when God (i.e. my son) allows. This one is from our first service back in March.
Thanks again.
There’s a huge pile of snow outside my office building in Portland, in the parking lot right next to the linden tree. And I mean huge. I could sled down this thing and have fun. We’ve got a bet going about when it’ll finally be gone. Some fools think it’s gonna be the end of this month. My horse is June 1st.
It’s hard to believe it will ever be gone. And yet, gone it will be. Well, not gone. Transformed, from snow to water, and then flowing elsewhere. It doesn’t disappear into nowhere.
There is no nowhere. There is no gone. There is only changed. There is only flowing on.
Thank God for the melt. Because that snow pile is right on top of my favorite parking spot. I need that spot, especially when it gets hot because the only shade in the whole lot is under that linden tree. I get in at 7am before most anyone else, so I can take whatever spot I want, and because I am selfish and no one’s watching, I take that one shady spot. It’s my spot.
We find our little spots, don’t we? We live our way into this life and we make it our own, as we must, and we start thinking it’s ours. How could we not? That’s my parking spot. That’s my car. My family. My body. And it’s true, our lives are our own. My body is not your body. That’s your family, not mine.
Yes. And. None of this is any of ours. Or, all of it is all of ours. This universe is one big snowpile, plowed up into a mountain by the faithful snowplow driver of God, of Goddess, or the Big Bang if you like, and you’re a part of it, and I’m a part of it, and the spring is coming, and we’re all melting, my friends, just like the shapenote song says,
We are passing away, we are passing away, we are passing away, to that great judgement day.
Now I don’t know about judgement day, though. I don’t think that’s what the thaw is about. I don’t believe there is some final reckoning we need to be afraid of. If there is a reckoning to be had, repair to be made, it is only ever happening right here and now. The hell…happens now. The heaven…happens now. We live it all right now. And right now, we are melting.
We are passing away, we are passing away, we are passing away, to that great…judgement…to that…to this…great…here and now. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
So I’m gonna need my parking spot back from the snowpile. It’ll work out. It always does. The design of the divine isn’t limited to the migration patterns of the ospreys soon to be passing through the neighborhood again or the alewives about to be swimming upriver. It includes the halflives of municipal snowpiles. They’re always gone in time for the real heat, which is when I need that shady spot.
But what if there’s been a lot of snow? What if it’s been a long, cold winter. You start to wonder, is this just how it is now? Will this snowpile be here forever?
It’s been a long, cold winter for us humans. I’m talking thousands of years of accumulation, the snow of our unresolved, unprocessed, unliberated hurt, confusion. Could call it suffering, but let’s call healing-in-the-making that’s all frozen up, waiting for the right conditions to thaw.
I’m happy to report those conditions have arrived. Look around. It’s us. We are the spring thaw, just as much as we are the winter freeze. We have what it takes, we are what it takes, to turn this snow into water.
What is it, for you? The snowpile you’ve kinda come to believe will just always be there, in your mind, in your heart, in a relationship, taking up your favorite parking space. That grudge. This loneliness. The little snowchunk you’ve taken as your contribution to melting this big snowpile we’re all working through together.
It’s not just yours, whatever it is you’re melting. And it’s not bad. It’s precious, life-giving water, and it serves us all. Our meltwaters flow into a much bigger watershed. We can’t know where it goes, across the Earth, what it grows, who it sustains through the generations and out into the cosmos. It’s not ours to know. But we can know this: what it feels like to melt together here and know. And we can know, if only we can remember, that we are not melting alone. We are not melting alone.