Eternal Blessings of Spring

March 20, 2005

The Boston Herald

Two snowstorms ago, when the trees were sealed in ice and car doors were frozen shut and car windows glazed, when everything looked as dead as Jack Nicholson at the end of  “The Shining,'' a friend said,  “If these trees bloom after all this, I am never again going to question the existence of God.’’

The trees haven't bloomed yet but crocuses and daffodils are pushing their way through the soil at my daughter's house, just inches away from a snowbank. And there are small patches of green on everyone's lawns. And mud on shoes. And last week, on a drive home from New York, there was a sudden haze of spring green on the tops of some trees.

Winter hadn't killed them. They'd appeared dead but they weren't. Neither are the trees my friend lost faith in. She believes in God most of the time, but has doubts about a divine being, as many of us do when the going gets rough. Why do people suffer? Why do they die? What if this is all there is? What if winter never ends?

She knows for now, anyway, on this day, at this moment, that winter does pass and that life is strong and resilient and maybe even eternal.

She is constantly looking for signs: Show me that life goes on.

The Earth spins on its axis and is tilted at 23 degrees. If it were tilted any more or any less, the Earth would burn up or be buried under of tons of ice. The moon is 240,000 miles away. If it were closer, tides would flood the earth.

Signs are everywhere.

“When I look at the sky, which you have made, at the moon and the stars, which you have set in their places. What are human beings, that you think of them; mere mortals that you care for them?'' - Psalms 8:4-5

This winter, a tsunami killed hundreds of thousands of people. In Iraq, soldiers and civilians alike are still being killed. Loss and death are everywhere, down the street, next door, at the door.

Today, this first day of spring, is no small miracle. It's God tapping us on the shoulder, reminding us that life and death are part of a circle, like day and night, like youth and old age, like summer and winter and spring and fall.

You wish it could be a straight trajectory from here. You wish that every day from now could be just a little longer and a little warmer, too.

But spring will cross back into winter many times before it meanders toward summer. This is life.

“I found Him in the shining of the stars. I marked Him in the flowering of His fields,'' Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote more than 150 years ago.

I hope my friend finds faith today in the slant of the sun, in the scent of the air, in the newly soft ground and in the trees still bare, but destined to bloom.