Beloved St. John’s community,
Words on a page can’t always delve more deeply than the mental surface of things. But poems and imagination and the living words of the Holy Spirit can, sometimes. I hope you will read what I have written, below, in the spirit of the latter, and not the former. God bless you.
At last, there truly is not just a sprinkle, but a wide splash of that green in the trees that has always and only ever meant springtime. It is spring. The brown of the fields can no longer be mistaken for fall; the earth has decided, it’s full-on time for growing, and greening, and life. Those nights that leave frost on the grass-blades and a skin of ice on puddles have slunk away quietly. Perhaps the air might insist on one more stubborn dip below freezing, like that annoying relative who has to have the last word in every fight. But then, that season will be well and truly gone for this cycle of the earth’s turning.
And in this time of spring and new life and birds singing for their own reasons beyond utility and function, it is time to ask if we can enter fully into the joy and hope and smiling life of the earth. Whatever is happening in the centuries of human history, whatever is happening in the traumas and sicknesses passed down through the generations, so deep it would be invisible except it’s enacted everywhere, there is still this: Alleluia, Christ is risen.
Our minds may have been despairing, our energies depleted. But our bodies have an ancient wisdom, born of the countless ages of the turning earth. It is time to wake up. It is time to dwell close to the soft ground, and allow the seeds of love planted in us to sprout and bravely emerge, small, so fragile, but able to birth a forest, a biome, a brave new world.
So go, with the risen Christ who is present with every earthworm burrowing life in the soil, and let the hard crust of winter slough off. Let yourself be tender again, your face sensitive to every gust of wind, your heart open to enter into the life of another and hear their story, strange though it may be. Go let yourself flow with the energy of life pulsing through the world. Love and healing and goodness are here, and are growing.
The Rev. Cynthia Bourgeault, Episcopal priest and teacher in Richard Rohr’s Living School, was the reflection leader this morning in Healing Our City’s virtual prayer tent. I highly encourage you to go and listen to what she had to say today. Among other things, she spoke of an inflection point she sees happening in our world, that the Healing Prayer Tent has been effectively midwiving: an energy of love and forgiveness and goodness which can begin to heal all that is hurt in us. She closed with a chant from a Quaker mystic and activist, whose words were these: There is a Spirit that delights to do no evil nor to revenge anyone. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention and to weary out all exaltation and cruelty. May that Spirit—the love of Christ, the hope borne of resurrection and springtime—infuse our consciousness, our words and actions, for the healing of the world God so loves.
With delight and wonder,
