c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

(UNDATED) I walk contentedly from the 13th green to the tee at 14.

I hear nothing. No other golfers are in sight. Children in nearby houses must be indoors on a gray day. The weekly leaf-blower din happened yesterday. All is quiet on this tidy North Carolina greensward.

Then I hear the rushing of wind through the pine trees. My valley of green is filled with dark sound. I suddenly feel cold, even though the temperature remains well above 50, for this is a wintry sound.

I hear echoes of winter in New England, where the ground disappeared for months on end. I hear echoes of a brutal winter in Indiana, when life seemed to stop at minus-11 degrees.

As I bend over to place Titleist on tee, I feel disoriented. This whistling wind has too many echoes.

I feel small, for winter speaks of large and uncontrollable forces. In warmer seasons, we exercise mowers, blowers and sprinklers and have an illusion of control. In winter, we watch storm alerts, travelers’ advisories, airport delays and school closings, and we wait to be acted on.

The winter wind’s appearance coincides with modernity’s annual campaign against bleakness. Shopping malls are bursting with promises of nostalgia and joy. Christmas tree lots are open. Wreaths are going up. Church bulletins point to pageants and love feasts. We will not yield to winter gloom, not as long as we have room on the Visa card.

As the late-November wind picks up these seasonal echoes, the day changes. Not for the worse, but different. My mood grows pensive. My horizon deepens. The larger world joins me on my golfer’s retreat _ not as worries, but as tokens of fallibility, mortality, noncontrol.

I think about the fragility of family, as one family weekend ends and a month of stress begins. I hear the confusion in this morning’s Sunday School conversation on aging and parents.

The election snafu in Florida seems sadder. It shows how cavalier we have been about enabling citizens to vote and how mean-spiritedly we will pursue our self-designated entitlements.

I look at ball, tee and driver, and ask the wintry question that we avoid in other seasons by keeping busy: Why am I doing this?

All of this from a surprise gust of wind. So much reaction to so small an intrusion. But I think our hold on well-being may be more tenuous than we think. Not only do most of us live paycheck-to-paycheck, but we wait for too many phone calls: a parent’s health report, a traveling teen-ager’s arrival, a contract’s fate, invitations we hope to receive.

Most of the time we go along OK. We dress our children for school, plow into jobs, make plans. But every now and then the curtains part, and we see the raging storms outside and hear the wintry wind.

When Jesus spoke of “signs in the sun, the moon and the stars” and of nations “confused” by roaring seas, he apparently had a day of cataclysm in mind. He spoke of “wars and insurrections,” natural disasters, persecution of the faithful, Jerusalem “surrounded by armies,” “desolation,” “fear and foreboding.” He anticipated they would signal the day of God’s victory.

But history has turned out differently, thus far at least. We have seen plenty of wars and insurrections, fear and foreboding, and troops warring over Jerusalem. They cycle in and out of our lives, punctuated by periods of calm but never banished, never completed in one grand sweep.

We think we have these angry forces under control, but then the wind blows and the “desolation” returns.

We resent the desolation; we think ourselves wrong to feel it. We feel betrayed. If the carols are so cheerful, why is this the season of depression, stress, suicide and giving up? We reach for a “cup of cheer.”

Faith becomes alluring. Half-empty pews become full again. Nominal believers reach for something deep. But faith remains confusing. For if faith cannot keep wintry echoes out of our greensward, what can it do? If Jesus wasn’t master of distress, who was he? If Bethlehem didn’t bring “peace on Earth,” what did it bring?

No wonder we shop till we drop.

DEA END EHRICH