Spring Green

Easter Morning

“In others we meet ourselves in a thousand disguises.”

Marion Woodman (Bone: Dying into Life)

          The dogwoods are shedding their blossoms while leafing out in spring green. Thunderstorms moving through carry the possibility of tornadoes later today. The world is green, green, green this Easter Sunday morning. I will listen to an Easter cantata on-line and hear Andrea Bocelli’s Easter performance on YouTube, but no one in Birmingham will enter a church today. Coronavirus has cancelled the resurrection celebrations. But this much is true—the coronavirus has brought us to our knees in a way that nothing else has. This will likely be the most remembered Easter in modern history. No one in Christendom will forget the Easter we stayed home and prayed for deliverance.

          I flipped open my small book of Earth Prayers to this one by May Sarton that seemed written for today even though it’s decades old. I hope you read it as a prayer:

“The extreme delicacy of this Easter morning

spoke to me as a prayer and a warning.

It was light on the brink, spring light

after a rain that gentled my dark night.

I walked through landscapes I had never seen

where fresh grass had just begun to green,

and its roots, watered deep, sprung to my tread,

the maples wore a cloud of feathery red,

but flowering trees still showed their clear design

against the pale blue brightness chilled like wine.

And I was praying all the time I walked,

while starlings flew about and talked, and talked.

Somewhere and everywhere life spoke the word.

The dead trees woke, each bush held its bird.

I prayed for delicate love and difficult,

that all be gentle now and know no fault,

that all be patient—as a wild rabbit fled

sudden before me. Dear love, I would have said

(and to each bird who flew up from the wood),

I would be gentler still if I could,

for on this Easter morning it would seem

the softest footfall danger is, extreme…

And so I prayed to be less than the grass

and yet to feel the Presence that might pass.

I made a prayer, I heard the answer, ‘Wait,

when all is so in peril, and so delicate!’”

Time is delicate today, and there is great peril. I hope you stay home and stay safe and pray as you never have before. This Easter, think of your fellow human beings. If you can’t see them with your eyes, see them with your heart, and know that they are simply a reflection of yourself, as is that One whose resurrection we celebrate today. We are one people and we share one Earth. Let us rejoice and be glad in that understanding and let us pray for one another.

                                        In the Spirit,

                                        Jane