A theology of blooming
Once upon a time, I was pushing a stroller through the Cambridge Botanical Gardens around this time of year, thrilling to the feel of sunshine and the sight of colorful flora after a cold, gray English winter.
A young companion – with me to help keep my oh-so-energetic little ones corralled – looked up from the glorious landscape and said, “I don’t see how anyone can live through spring and not believe in God.”
I don’t see how anyone can live through spring and not believe in God.
The speaker was a hip college student, complete with nose ring and multi-colored hair (and this was in the ‘90s, when such things were still statements).
Her words startled me.
Her words stuck with me.
I don’t see how anyone can live through spring and not believe in God.
It was a new thought to me in those days, but I hear the echo of her statement even now.
These days, when I walk the perimeter of my house to marvel at the little miracles that are appearing every morning, I often murmur “I don’t see how anyone can live through spring and not believe in God.”
I see the evidence of His hand in all His splendid handiwork; I see proof of His faithfulness in the return-to-life of things that looked like dead sticks.
I know very well that the world is not the Word, but “the heavens are telling the glory of God, and the earth proclaims the work of his hands.” (Psalm 19:1)
The world speaks words of praise.
Especially in the spring.
Another iris unfurling, wrinkled purple silk petals opening to reveal the furry orange beard…
Feathery red fronds on the baby red oak Mark planted this winter…
… pale, diminutive fan-shaped leaves on the gingko entering its second growing season.
The Texas Mountain Laurels starting to bloom, so the air is spicy with pungent, tangy-grape scent…
… and the redbuds in that exquisite transitional phase when glossy heart-shaped leaves are emerging on the ends of branches still thick with fuschia blossoms.
Azaleas and Spanish bluebells nodding amiably.
And the hummingbirds returned – to sip from the feeders, scold each other in the vitex branches, and dance through the turk’s cap when it comes into bloom, soon…
Any day now, the wisteria will burst into perfumed lavender clouds … and successive waves of irises will add scarlet, pink, peach, and lemon-yellow to the color-chorus.
I don’t see how anyone can live through spring and not believe in God.
My long-ago companion, a biology major at Gonville and Caius college, was talking about empirical evidence of a Designer, evidence writ large in the profuse variety and intricacy of what happens in the spring.
A student of Stephen Hawking, a reader of Richard Dawkins, her statement was a gutsy heresy… She was a rebel against the fashionable snobbery of secular humanism that explained-away the Divine via evolution, the Enlightenment, and holier-than-thou “experts.”
She was also one of the chorus of voices in my life that spring, inviting me to be still and know – really know – that God was present, God was good, God was wooing me out of the winter of my own heart and into something pulsing with life and light and newness.
I don’t see how anyone can live through spring and not believe in God.
Much later, another biologist – a woman older than I, who like me had come to faith as an adult – shared what convinced her of God: metabolic pathways.
These scientists – one prompted by spring, the other prompted by the complexity of cellular function – perceived God as an inevitable, unavoidable conclusion. They saw in nature designs that were too spectacular, too detailed, too perfectly synchronized, to have emerged spontaneously.
To their eyes, the designs declared the inarguable brilliance of the Designer.
I’m no scientist.
I’m not sure I will ever understand what a “metabolic pathway” is.
But I have no trouble believing God made metabolic pathways because I have been convinced that God made everything… including metabolic pathways. Including spring.
Of the two “proofs” (spring vs. metabolic pathways), I find spring more personally compelling not because I understand it any better than I understand metabolic pathways but because I experience it so unmistakably. I see it – smell it – feel it!
That exuberant sensory experience of springtime testifies to me about more than just God’s scientific brilliance as a Designer. In fact, I find in it theology that corresponds perfectly with scriptural claims…
First, God makes beauty
There is no scientific rationale for spring beauty – pollination and photosynthesis do not require effervescent colors or sunlight in multiple gradations from muted to eye-squinting. Yet God makes Creation beautiful… lavishly, extravagantly, specifically beautiful. In the budding, blooming, greening world, God’s pleasure in beauty for its own sake, and God’s delight in sharing that pleasure, is unmistakable (and unignorable!).
On a deeper level, God’s penchant for beauty as displayed in springtime mirrors God’s penchant for beauty as displayed in the creatures He made in His image (us).
The emphatically beautiful array of skin colors He assigns – and hair textures – and nose shapes – and toe shapes… what are these, but proof of the infinite variety encompassed in God’s infinite unity?
C.S. Lewis poses the rhetorical question, “Why else were individuals created, but that God, loving all infinitely, should love each differently?… If He had no use for all these differences, I do not see why He should have created more souls than one.” (The Problem of Pain)
Beauty – diverse, exuberant, beauty-for-its-own-sake – is God’s joyful idea.
Spring demonstrates that.
Second, God is faithful
Every year, spring follows winter. Nothing can interfere with the sequence. Not weather cycles, not wars. Not pandemics or plagues or personal tragedies or international crises. Spring follows winter. Period.
God’s Creation mimics God’s character in this no-matter-what-ness, this absolute reliability. The faithfulness of the Designer is integral to the design; spring celebrates that faithfulness.
Spring has a particularly potent place within the design, too, because spring is the season of new life – of babies and rosebuds and new branches shooting out from old trunks.
God is forever “making all things new” – God is the author not just of life but of Life eternal – God does not leave us locked up in winter. Spring reminds us of that ongoing fact.
Third, God privileges us to partner with Him
The acres of carefully curated horticultural grandeur at the Cambridge Botanical Gardens – like the beds around my suburban yard – represent God’s Creative genius working in tandem with the sweat equity of those God has called and equipped to steward His Creation.
The flotilla of botanists and arborists and plant geneticists in Cambridge do the same work (albeit on a much larger scale) as my green-thumbed spouse: they combine all the elements that God provides – water, sunlight, seeds, soil – to make designs according to their own delight in beauty.
There can be no lovely garden without God; but there can also be no lovely garden without an intentional gardener.
For that reason, spring reminds us that we are special, privileged creatures within Creation – and that our Creator invites us to reflect His goodness in the context of the world He has made.
We are heaven-bound, to be sure… but in the meantime, our task from God is to work to bring heaven near. That work takes multiple forms and is certainly not contained to one season of the year – but spring surely offers us some truly delightful options for kingdom demonstration?
And… given the Garden of Eden in the beginning – given Jesus’s life-long penchant for gardens – can there be any doubt that God loves it when we make and tend green places?
There is so much that is ugly, hateful, and destructive happening in our world right now.
But God is still good.
God is always good.
And if we are blessed enough to be living out this spring where bombs are not falling and food is not scarce, then we should witness to and walk out the theology Creation teaches while things are blooming!
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.”
