As I type, I can see the trees across the street. Mostly-gray-and-brown for months, this week they have begun to put on colors – a misty green on the hackberries, a smudge of ethereal lavender on the Texas redbuds.
It is not just the view from this window, either – everywhere I drive right now, the stark leaflessness of winter is being quietly subsumed by streaks and splashes of green, clouds of soft plum.
In these parts, redbud trees are reliable heralds of winter’s end. They bloom in a multiplicity of shades (none of them red, weirdly). The volunteers in the flood plain across the street sport much daintier hues than the vivid Oklahoma cultivars Mark has planted around our house; wild redbuds whisper “change is in the air” in softly tinted innuendos while ours holler “SPRING!” as loud as color can shout. But whether in pastel or neon, when the redbuds bloom, you know everything else will soon be blooming, too.
I passed a Holi festival today. Cowboys and suburbanites, under the smiling tutelage of Indian congregation members, were whacking one another gleefully with bags of brightly colored powder. It looked messy and mischievous, like paintball without the pain.
A little research revealed that Holi is Hinduism’s nod to “spring, love and colors” – an auspicious set of reasons to get out the chalk dust weaponry, to be sure. And when the redbuds are in bloom, a responsive frenzy can just feel appropriate.
But arboreal and human celebrations of color do not give the whole picture of spring, do they?
Spring begins with bare branches and withered, dry pods, and dirt.
“Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain, but if it dies it bears much fruit.”
(John 12:24)
The dying-as-birth – the solitude of waiting – that’s as much a part of spring as redbuds and euphoria.
Here at home, that part of spring exists side-by-side the redbud glory. My turk’s cap died back in November; Mark cut it all the way to the ground. And his gardenia got hit hard by a late freeze.
Neither plant looks good.
Their spring aspect points to their winter travails; their spring potential seems limited by their winter injuries.
I’m not looking too good, myself. My own winter travails and injuries remain conspicuous; I wince in a similar way when I pass the mirror as when I pass the denuded gardenia.
How to reconcile those disparate vistas – the beauty and newness on the one hand, the broken-old on the other?
How to embrace the splendor of springtime, when the evidence of winter’s ravages seem entrenched – permanent – even victorious?
I’ve been puzzling over that conundrum as I’ve been prepping to start teaching my teenage students Dante’s Divine Comedy. Such works can sound like an anachronistic waste of time (especially to teenage students, ahem), but I am finding that Dante has much to say that pertains to this particular spring landscape, circa 2023.
Dante set his masterpiece in Holy Week, 1300; the climax of both his poem and his theological vision is Easter Sunday. Meticulous documentation of the astronomical progressions toward spring equinox keeps the poem’s fantastical travels tethered to the physical universe… where spring is coming. And Paradise is a metaphysical garden of delights, suffused with sweet smells and gorgeousness. If ever there were a Springtime Magnum Opus, The Divine Comedy is it!
But Dante goes the long way ‘round to Resurrection, descending to the very depths of Hell and then making his way back up, step by excruciating step, toward the One on the Throne of Love Who has allowed his journey in the first place.
And Dante’s painstaking detail of what happens before Easter, before arrival in Paradise, speaks directly to the battle-scarred, brittle state in which this spring finds so many of us: the journey is hard.
Sin, and failure, and gruesome torments in myriad forms must be navigated around. Exhaustion, grief, and confusion must be confronted and conquered. Misery and monsters lurk around many corners; precipices and predators abound.
Doesn’t that sound… familiar?
Don’t misunderstand me – the years of obvious bloom, the Holi festival mood years, certainly happen. But not always. Not every spring.
And when the colors and new growth feel like an indictment – when sorrow, or illness, or unemployment, or relational brokenness, or addiction, or any number of human conditions make our lives look more like a casualty of winter than a harbinger of spring – that’s when we need Dante’s reminder: this journey is LONG. This journey is hard.
But Easter is coming.
I looked more closely at my turk’s cap and Mark’s gardenia today. Both still look largely pathetic, but the dead wood of each has some tender new green growth:
Those teensy reminders of the stubbornness of life point me to God’s promise regarding life that persists beyond the breaking:
A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,
(Isaiah 11:1 – 13)
and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
The spirit of the Lord shall rest on him,
the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
the spirit of counsel and might,
the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord.
That shoot from the stump – our Messiah – lived in His own broken, battered body the death of all dreams… the death of all hope. What could be more concrete evidence of winter’s ravages as entrenched – permanent – victorious – than the lifeless body of God?
But he ROSE.
He rose.
So I will be gentle with my battered plants and my battered self. If you are struggling this spring, I encourage you to be gentle, too. We may be living the in-between, but we know Easter is coming.
Friends, we also know that Love abides, even now, even in the meantime. Love is with us, guiding and guarding as we trek through the wilderness of winter.
Easter promises: Love will be with us, always.
And when it is time, Love will bring the beauty.
We will bloom.
