Image by Janyka Mitchell from Pixabay
Easter Year B
4 Apr 2021
Spring
Mary Oliver
Faith
is the instructor.
We need no other.
Guess what I am,
he says in his
incomparably lovely
young-man voice.
Because I love the world
I think of grass,
I think of leaves
and the bold sun,
I think of the rushes
in the black marshes
just coming back
from under the pure white
and now finally melting
stubs of snow.
Whatever we know or don’t know
leads us to say;
Teacher, what do you mean?
But faith is still there, and silent.
Then he who owns
the incomparable voice
suddenly flows upward
and out of the room
and I follow,
obedient and happy.
Of course I am thinking
the Lord was once young
and will never in fact be old.
And who else could this be, who goes off
down the green path,
carrying his sandals, and singing? (1)
The long winter is over and I am seeing the daffodils getting ready to bloom in all their golden glory. The goldfinches have turned and the chipping sparrows are making their presence known at my feeder. All that is missing are the choruses of frogs shaking off the lethargy of hibernation and singing for all they are worth.
We are finally gathering after the dark night of the soul. The last year was full of so many dark moments and there will be dark moments to come, yet this Easter we celebrate two new lives, one with baptism and both with a welcoming into the fellowship and community of Christ.
Each year we re-enact the story of creation, the relation of hu-mankind to God, and the Christian story of the birth, the life and teaching, and the death and resurrection of Jesus. We are re-minded this is a circle and we may at times enter the circle at the cross or at the resurrection.
Easter is the ultimate God-is-with-us story. While other faiths teach eternal truths with which we have solidarity, ours in unique in that we believe that God became human and lived and died as one of us. Therein lies the heart of the matter: God so loved the world, each and every thing in the world: human, animals, plants, even the rocks and the waters, that God died for us to show us the way to overcome death.
Spring. Mary Oliver in Evidence, Beacon Press, 2009
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