spring gonna spring

To hear Brandi read the essay instead, click here: https://youtu.be/iQMJ-dkg-hA

Spring is trying to spring, but the cold is putting up a fight. My hook by the door is loaded with all the seasonal gear at once: thick puffer coats and wool hats, light rain coats, heavy vests, and sunny visors. It is basically nonfunctional, and spits things on the floor after I hang them there, precariously. The American South, where I live, is nearly groaning for the release that dependable sunshine and warmer weather will bring.

My parents love Spring. They come home from working days to spend another shift outside. They weed beds, prune trees, spread mulch, cultivate vines, and plant a massive garden. Determined to grow 80% of what they eat most of the year, they don’t plant plants. They plant seeds. My mom—who calls herself a “domestic goddess,” and is one—has a work table in her sun room. On it, she grows fruits and vegetables from seeds in old strawberry containers. (She has 13 grandchildren, but she is always hungry for more.) She plants her little seeds, coaxing them to life in the warmth of her house, praying over them as she moves them outside, burying them in the earth. The infuriatingly relentless cycle of April frosts have killed some of her seed babies, but she persists. The work table again becomes full of soil, then sprouts, then thin green stalks, reaching for the sky.

Spring is hard for us, full of memories that brought bad news. “This was the day they told us…” “This is the month it felt like we raced death to find more life, more time together.” It isn’t surprising to me when Mom, hands in the dirt, cultivating life, looks up and shares that death is on her mind. It often is. This weekend, she showed me her little green wonders, growing up and away. She has a magical gift about her, and can access awed excitement about nearly anything. She demanded I come closer, wanting me to catch her amazement over the plant she helped grow. She soon reached a new level of joy, turning toward me, her face inches from a fragile stalk of oregano. “Look! That is a part of the dead seed, sitting on top of the highest little leaf. She wears it like a hat, the seed that died to give her life. Isn’t that amazing? All the little deaths we face have the potential to grow a new thing within.”

She talks like that, part oracle, part enchanted pied piper, part nomadic weirdo in the desert. This weekend, I was here for it. She found the little dead seed hats all over her plants, and she kept reminding me that we are people made for cycles who prefer straight lines. Most of us don’t get to know the why or pick the when of our stories. As Spring keeps peeking through the clouds only to hide away again, I’m trying to remember that on most days, the best I can do is to show up for the glimpse of the sun. To pay attention as my energy and work and mood and relationships cycle through. To grieve the small deaths and to celebrate the tiny new life. Enjoy the small wins, dear friends, and keep looking for Spring.

on Easter

At Radnor, a State Park in Nashville, tiny buds and opening blooms sprinkle the ground and sky. I cannot scan any part of the landscape without being accosted by the green. New growth is nearly neon, glowing in intensity, while the maturing buds settle into a deeper, less pretentious green. It is gorgeous, but feels particularly aggressive on an early spring morning when the temperature is so low that such signs of life feel out of place. Walking in the cold, seeing my breath, surrounded by dead things, new life assaults the eyes.

My favorite thing about the Torah is the way God chooses unexpected people to lead and become heroes of the story. Jacob, a greedy liar who doesn’t understand family, becomes the selfless Father of the nation of Israel. Joseph, a self-centered jerk, given to hyperbolic delusions of grandeur, is mistreated terribly as God teaches him to embody patience, forgiveness and restraint as he saves a nation from starvation. Moses, adopted, a felon, and not great with words, is chosen by God to speak up to Pharaoh and lead Israelites out of slavery and into freedom.

The trend continues in the New Testament of Christians, as a random group of diverse and disagreeable men are united by Jesus to change the world through love. Jesus consistently elevates unexpected folks, from having dinner with greedy traitors, to often telling stories where the hero was a person shunned out on the street. Indeed, Jesus regularly invested in women, teaching them as if they had the intellect of rabbis, charging them as if they had the courage of warriors, and trusting them as if they had the loyalty of a close brother in a time when women had little to no legal or cultural standing.

Jesus consistently found value in folks overlooked or ignored by others. Like God in the Old Testament, the Christ saw value where others did not. It seems to me that the modern American church has lost sight of this core consistency strung through Judaism and Christianity. Most of us seem to have traded the God who crafts a story around a person usually pushed to the margins by making her the hero, for a God who backs the biggest, strongest, meanest guy in the room. Rather than going into the world with nothing, depending on our Creator to meet our needs, our Father to guide and comfort us, and our Messiah to justify and protect us, we horde wealth, blame others with fear, and pretend like God hates all the same people we do. We are, I’m afraid, terrible at bearing witness to the life and passion and purpose of Christ as the embodiment of the Holy Scripture.

This is why I love Passover and Easter. The central holidays of the Jewish and Christian calendar are about hope existing in the midst of death. For Jews, Passover reminds us that even when all seems lost, God will somehow provide protection. It reminds us that the way to be in the world is not to shout louder or to get a bigger gun, but to huddle close with those you love, share a fabulous meal and pray that God will protect you. Likewise, Easter reminds Christians that the way the God of the universe decided to take care of God’s people was through sacrifice. In the Christian story, pain and suffering are not meaningless, but are shared with hope. Death is not the end, but a natural part of a cycle always leading back to life.

The natural world reveals to us that there is no birth without rebirth. We do not live independently, but as part of vast ecosystems that follow a pattern: death and decay leading to nourishment and life. This Passover and Easter, I am thankful I follow a God who doesn’t ask me to win. Instead, God reminds me that getting low, being overlooked or betrayed, feeling wounded beyond repair, hurting deep in my secret places, is not the end of the story. In God’s telling, these places of pain and death are inhabited by the God who made us, and whose very world is predicated on the idea that death leads to life.

Easter, for me, is not about victory, or winning, or power. It is about a God who sends a tiny bud of neon green to light up a death-ridden forest floor. It is about a God who chooses a hero from a group of outcasts. It is about a God whose death destroyed his closest friends, but whose miraculous resurrection soon gave them hope, as he fed them a meal and gave them a communal purpose, inviting them deeper into the mysterious ways of God than they thought they could go.

This week, when the ubiquitous green catches you off guard, or when an overlooked colleague finds recognition, or when you find comfort in a painful moment, or when you feel solidarity with an ostracized person, I hope you will remember the arc of the story of the Judeo-Christian God is actually a cycle, where death is never the end, but a pathway to new life.