A pair of cardinals likes to nest in the Texas Mountain Laurel in our back garden.
This year, they hatched their babies successfully – taught them to fly – and then started all over again in the wisteria bush out front.
I am dazzled by their industry. I am awed by their energy. It’s an amazing process to watch, so much busyness and bustling, so much color and movement, so much life.
Granted, our cardinal pair is hardly original.
This part of the year has been synonymous with “new life” since time immemorial.
The rhythms of nature, winter’s long sleep into spring’s exuberant awakenings, resonate deep in our understanding of what it means to be alive on this planet.
Spring as the season of reawakening and growth features in everything from pagan mythology (Persephone’s pomegranate seeds) to pagan accoutrements to Easter (bunnies and chicks, anyone?).
Indeed, in respect of our expectations, we are all enthusiastic pagans – we expect spring to bring leaves, blossoms, nests, newness. And we delight when creation obliges us – and creation does oblige us, confirming our expectations, year after year, cardinal pair after cardinal pair.
But sometimes the rhythm of the seasons, of spring, gets subsumed in a larger truth about being alive on this planet: death is no respecter of seasons or human expectations.
A young cardinal is cheeping and fluttering in the hedge just outside my window as I type this; that is a fact of springtime.
But my father and grandfather have died within weeks of one another – and that is a fact of this springtime, as incontrovertible and physically real as the baby bird outside.
It is hard for me to reconcile the two facts. Death. A cardinal chick chirping. How can they co-exist?
“Remember you are dust, and unto dust you will return.” Those are words for Lent, for winter, for the somber weeks of long nights and chilly dark mornings. Those are thoughts more appropriate to bare trees and grass-less lawns. Where – in the bright fecundity, noise, and blooming of springtime – can death be at home, here and now?
The prophet Hosea, writing seven centuries before Christ, prefigures the resurrection in achingly clear terms even as he likens God’s faithfulness to spring rains:
“Come, let us return to the Lord,
for it is he who has torn, and he will heal us;
he has struck down, and he will bind us up.
After two days he will revive us;
on the third day he will raise us up,
that we may live before him.
Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord;
his appearing is as sure as the dawn;
he will come to us like the showers,
like the spring rains that water the earth.”
Hosea speaks of God’s purpose in healing, binding up, reviving, and raising up: it is LIFE. That “we may live before Him.” All the pain, all the death, ultimately dissolves in the faithfulness of God and the certainty of living in God’s presence.
Hosea’s faith in the goodness of the God whom he believes has torn him and struck him down contrasts sharply with my own melancholy.
Hosea wrote about a third-day raising up, seven hundred years before it happened… and the vision of it coming was enough to turn his lamentations into praise. I, who live daily in the afterglow of the Resurrected Messiah, struggle to do likewise.
Hosea’s contemporary, Habakkuk, offers another witness of stubborn devotion. He lifts joyful words to God in the midst of a spring devoid of new life… a spring where death (by starvation) beckons, omnipresent:
Though the fig tree does not blossom
(Habakkuk 3:17 – 18)
and no fruit is on the vines;
though the produce of the olive fails
and the fields yield no food;
though the flock is cut off from the fold
and there is no herd in the stalls,
yet I will rejoice in the Lord;
I will exult in the God of my salvation.
Perhaps this defiant disregard of circumstances is what sets prophets and saints apart from the rest of us?
The capacity to keep one’s eyes locked on the Lord, even when those eyes are drowning in tears – is that a pretty accurate picture of the kind of faith God commends?
Even… the kind of faith God requires?
Yes, I think so.
But also, maybe not completely…
Because Jesus, Himself, was overcome by grief in the face of the death of a beloved friend.
The gospel-writer John tells us, twice, that Jesus was “deeply moved” as He approached Lazarus’s tomb. John adds that Jesus was “deeply disturbed in spirit” and that He wept.
Jesus wept.
Jesus – who knew that He was going to call Lazarus back from the dead, who delayed going to heal Lazarus before he died for the express purpose of calling him back from the dead – Jesus wept.
Jesus – co-eternal with the Father, living out His mission of salvation, about to face the Cross – was overcome with grief at the death of His friend.
And then, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead.
And then, Jesus Himself died.
And then, Jesus was resurrected, resetting the parameters of death in a way we will only fully understand when we experience it ourselves.
Which we will. Each of us. All of us.
Remember you are dust, and unto dust you will return… but remember, too, that dust doesn’t have the last word because the Word – the Logos – is Lord of the dead as certainly as He is Lord of the living and He has CONQUERED death in some miraculous way, rendered it null and void, drained it of all its horror, and us of all our helplessness before it.
This Jesus Who weeps, Who bleeds, Who conquers death not from some safe, hygienic distance but from inside a tent of flesh as fragile and pain-racked as any other – this Jesus is the One who connects the hatchling just outside my window with the newly-delivered souls being watched over by Him.
He is with them – He is with us – He is with me.
So.
I will hear the cardinal babies calling and the parents responding, and I will know that call and response is a model for me – a prompt from my heavenly Father.
And, prompted, I will pray.
I will pray for the kind of prophetic faith that sees in those new lives a premonition of the Life that awaits on the other side of death; I will pray for the kind of hope that exults in my God even when my vision is too tear-blurry to see Him.
And I will be consoled by the certainty that my prayers are offered up in the name of the One whose sovereignty over life – and death – didn’t keep Him from mourning.
Jesus instructs me, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”
Jesus assures me, “In my Father’s house are many dwelling places;” “I will come again and take you to myself, that where I am, there you may be, too.”
And Jesus casts a vision of springtime Heaven for me, knitting together the new lives of this season and eternal Life in Him:
My beloved speaks and says to me:
(Song of Solomon 2:10 – 13)
“Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away,
for now the winter is past,
the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtledove
is heard in our land.
The fig tree puts forth its figs,
and the vines are in blossom;
they give forth fragrance.
Arise, my love, my fair one,
and come away.
