Being a Seattle-boy and a Northwesterner at heart this bright, sunny, golden brown land of southern California sometimes isn’t my cup of coffee. “Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose” and so after a number of unusual rains this winter I have taken great delight in the rare look of the lush verdant foothills nearby where I hike. I keep expecting the Tella Tubbies to come frolicking down over the hills with Hildegard of Bingen, that Rhineland mystic who spoke of the greening power of God in creation. She coined the term veriditas to capture the greening spirit within all life, including humans. We sometimes forget that Lent means springtime and comes from the Old English word lencten referring to the lengthening of daylight. During Lent we slow down a bit, go simple and staid and unadorned for a time in order to more fully give ourselves to “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower” and to become bearers of a bit more light where winter still hovers.
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The cherry blossom trees are showing off their ruffled threads these weeks in the park near my house. I look forward each year to this exquisite show of quiet force and beauty. Both days this weekend people gathered to take photos of the pink and white and fuchsia flourishing that line the walkways. Others snapped shots of each other standing beneath the trees like giddy teens posing with a celebrity. There is something so archetypal and evocative in the bud-gone-to-bloom, in the sudden elation of life after a dark and wet winter. Howard Thurman refers to this as “the glad surprise” of life. He writes:
There is something compelling and exhilarating about the glad surprise. The emphasis is upon glad. There are surprises that are shocking, startling, frightening and bewildering. But the glad surprise is something different from all of these. It carries with it the element of elation, of life, of something over and beyond the surprise itself. . . There is a deeper meaning in the concept of the glad surprise. This meaning has to do with the very ground and foundation of hope about the nature of life itself. The manifestation of this quality in the world about us can best be witnessed in the coming of spring. It is ever a new thing, a glad surprise, the stirring of life at the end of winter. One day there seems to be no sign of life and then almost overnight, swelling buds, delicate blooms, blades of grass, bugs, insects—an entire world of newness everywhere. It is the glad surprise at the end of winter. . . It is the announcement that life cannot ultimately be conquered by death, that there is no road that is at last swallowed up in an ultimate darkness, that there is strength added when the labors increase, that multiplied peace matches multiplied trials, that life is bottomed by the glad surprise. Take courage.1
Sometimes the season of Lent coincides perfectly with the emerging elation of spring. This year where I live, the earth flowers and shines and greens a bit in advance of the liturgical season. But as I walk through the park I notice there are still entire groves that are yet to bud and burst with laughter and jubilation. And on the northeast coast of the U.S. there is a monumental storm of snow and ice coming. So any and all whose lives are still more winter than spring wait and yearn and hope for the festival of Easter and the freedom of resurrection alluded to in nature when newness flowers everywhere.
As we wait, Christ again is eastering in us, deepening our understanding of the subversive power of the bud and the blossom and the responsibilities that resurrection brings with it in a world too often gone dark and mean, indifferent and indecent.
Like the grove yet to unfurl, we prepare to practice resurrection together, each of us encouraging the efflorescence of the other like the trees that whisper at night, “Yes, let’s be a glad surprise. You be the bloom of mercy and I’ll be the blossom of justice and together we will witness to the joy that winter cannot wipe out.”
1 Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart, p. 108ff.