November

I am a warm-weather child.

Living in Ohio has been such a new experience for me, especially as frost sets in. The leaves have long since fallen from the trees, and the world has grown winter-quiet.

Twice a week, I have a holy hour early in the morning.

I'm pretty sure that approximately 90% of the world has no idea what a holy hour is, so I'll explain. I go to one of the Cathlockiest of Catholic universities in the country, and we have Perpetual Adoration. This means that there is a chapel in which the Eucharist is kept, 24/7, which means that someone is there praying before it at every moment of the day. Even in the middle of the night.

Which means that twice a week, I drag myself out of bed in the wee hours, pull a jacket on, and set out across campus.

At the beginning of the school year, when the weather was September-fresh and I could slip out with only a sweater, it wasn't bad. Then it got colder, and I cringed and quaked and whined like a pouty little kid at having to leave my room.

Yet every now and then, while the bitter wind swirls around me and my bones jump with shivers, I'm struck by the raw beauty of winter.

Winter has no pretense. It is bare and immediate. It calls my heart with its silence.

It's November now, and my holy hours will get more difficult. The world is turning to ice, and in those moments just before I see the lamps outside the chapel entrance, when I experience only wind and darkness, I'm afraid.

And when I enter the chapel and am so welcomed, so loved, by the soft glow of candles and the beauty of the monstrance, I know that I can trek across an icy campus in the dark, that I can sacrifice hours of sleep, that I can kneel on a stone floor, dizzy with wishing for my far-away bed, because this is worth everything.