Sproutings of spring verify the nation's faith

Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

I didn't expect to see the tulips bloom this spring. Planting them was an act of faith. I dug 100 holes in a patch of dirt in my front yard, placed a bulb in each, shoveled dirt over them, watered them, then forgot about them. Maybe they would survive the winter. Maybe they wouldn't. After Sept. 11, everything was a maybe.

The day I planted them, there was a Sunday kind of quiet on my busy street, though it was a weekday and a workday. There were few planes flying, no people walking by and hardly any traffic. It was like that for weeks after Sept. 11. Strangely quiet, as if we were a nation of people on tiptoe, speaking in whispers so that we might hear the errant sounds of a plane flying low, or a bomb whistling down from the sky.

Now here we are on the other side of winter and on the other side of our fear. Traffic is back, planes are flying day and night, and our fear is where it belongs, hiding behind our bravado. And the tiny part of the world we call home is suddenly in bloom. If this isn't a miracle, what is?

Life is tenuous. That's what we learned on Sept. 11. It all can turn on a dime. Our feigned security, the shaky peace that isn't peace at all, that is only geography, the bustle that has replaced the sound of silence - we know that at any minute all this can end. But for now, these things are real and they're here.

Live in the moment. That's what we're told. Live this moment. Live this day. Spring came early this year, as if it were as eager for us as we were for it. We didn't earn it. We don't deserve it. We didn't suffer through a long, hard, cold winter. But here it is anyway, our reward. Why is that?

Neither war nor hate nor the many machinations of man can diminish this season. In fact, it's just the opposite. War and hate and all the bad news just make spring dearer. Trees that looked as dead as telephone poles a month ago are umbrellaed in lace now and in pink petals and swollen buds. Forsythia, brambles most of the year, are a bright yellow. Hyacinth and phlox have appeared out of brown ground. Lawns are green, the birds are back, the days are long, and the air is soft and full of the smell of hope and growth and life.

And it all has happened without us. Isn't that the real miracle? That everything we do, the cars we build, the planes we fly, the cities we design, the thoughts we think, all the books and symphonies and poems ever written, pale next to a single tree, a lone flower, one moment of a spring day.

After Sept. 11, faith was all we had going for us. Faith that life was stronger than death and that good was greater than evil. That's why we planted our gardens. Because the part of us that has nothing to do with reason, compelled us. And look at all the gardens now. They're everywhere, proof that this faith exists, that even in the toughest times, it was there, steadying us.

Do we doubt this faith now? How can we when out of the dead earth comes life again and again? Our faith in everything has been shaken since Sept. 11. The world is in trouble. Everywhere you look there is war and fighting, hate and deceit, people hurting people, people hurting themselves, and greed and self indulgence. And it seems more and more every day there is nowhere that is safe and no one who is trustworthy. And it weighs you down. And it makes you think, what's the point? And why bother?

Why bother? Because if the world were as bad and people were as evil as we are continually led to believe, we'd have destroyed ourselves by now. There wouldn't be a Colin Powell trying to broker peace. There wouldn't be more good priests than bad. There wouldn't be doctors in war zones. And there wouldn't be so many people like most of us, more good than bad, keeping a faith that is bolstered and sustained by spring.