Now the Green Blade Riseth

1.

Now the green blade riseth, from the buried grain,

Wheat that in dark earth many days has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.

("Now the Green Blade Riseth," lyrics by John Macleod Campbell Crum, tune Noel Nouvelet [French traditional carol])

I noticed the breeze tonight.  It was blustery--it played havoc with the Easter fire, making it hard to keep things lit.  But what I noticed most was that it was a spring breeze.  It certainly wasn't warm, but it also wasn't cold, either.  It was cool and refreshing, but more importantly it carried with it the promise of something new.  You could feel, in a strange and inchoate but nevertheless real way, that warmer days were actually, truly on the way.  It was as if the breeze was an omen, "I'm not all that, but I bring confirmation of what is to come."

I understand completely why most human cultures once thought of the seasons as being controlled by the gods and goddesses.  When you are in the middle of winter, you know intellectually and experientially that the summer is necessarily and invariably going to come in due course.  But it that intellectual construct doesn't feel real when you are in the midst of it; winter seems permanent and omnipresent.  But then, without necessarily noticing every step of the change, something happens to alert you to the fact that winter is over.  The first signs may be subtle, so subtle that you miss them.  But eventually the unmistakable, if often faint, sign comes, and then you know for sure.  It's not a complete shift and it is not without seeming backtracks and false starts (early spring, at least here in the Midwest of the United States, often has terrible weather).  But even if the road is not smooth, once you get that first sign, that first spring breeze, warmer days stop being theoretical or a product of memory and start seeming real.

The breeze points to something that is happening, truly happening, even if on the surface it doesn't appear to be having much of an effect.  The breeze is a sign of hope, something you can put your trust in, even if you can't see the tangible effects clearly or consistently.

2.

It's common these days to talk about the people who are "spiritual but not religious."  I don't want in any way to pass judgment or make commentary on those folks, only to say that I am not only not one of those people, but actually exactly the opposite.  It has become clear to me, no more so than during this Holy Week, that I am a religious person who, on a good day, is somewhat spiritual.  Many days, my emotional and visceral connection to a world beyond that we can see and touch is at best tenuous.  I have felt an experience that I would describe, in the most halting and tentative way, as supernatural exactly once in my life, and I have never been able to replicate it on any level.  I am, as strange as this concept might seem to some, bad at praying--it doesn't come naturally or easily to me at all, no matter what form or mode I try.

And, yet, it is the ritual and the practice of faith, in its "high" Western form (here, my Roman Catholic original background and current Episcopalian home are functionally the same), that has always been real and meaningful and resonant for me.  Insofar as there is any consistency in my spiritual life, it is to be found where and when I enter into the story of the life of a very strange 1st Century Judean rabbi and the even more unlikely group of folks that formed around His person and message.  Liturgy works for me because it provides space to participate in and recreate and re-enact that story.

The magic of Liturgy, the magic of the cycle of these stories expressed in a ritual way, is that it is both the same every time and completely different every time.  The services of Holy Week have been the essentially the same every year that I have really engaged with them (basically since college--call it 20 years).  But every year there is a different emotional resonance to them, a different set of things that jump out or have an impact or come into focus.  You would think that, since the stories are the same every year, you would more or less have the same experience.  But that is not my experience.

Whether it's I am in a different frame of mind each year, and so bring something different to the table (surely at least partially true), or whether God shows me something new every year (I think likely true also, but who knows?), the absolutely essential place where I come in contact with something beyond myself is in the liturgical services of the church.  But maybe more importantly, it smooths out the rough places.  If I had to rely on my "spirituality" all the time to drive the entirety of by relationship to the divine, I would have burned out long ago.  Even when I am "not feeling it," I go and sit and participate and it is enough to get by through the rough or uneven patches. 

For me, the idea of giving that up and taking on a "freelance" search for spirituality strikes me as bizarre and and insane.  Being spiritual but not religious seems like climbing Everest without any gear. and in any event far harder than what I am doing.  

3.

When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, ‘Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?’ When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, ‘Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.’ So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. (Mark 16:1-8 [Gospel for Easter Vigil, Year B]).

Most people who go to church on Easter go on Sunday morning.  As a result, if they attend a church that uses the Common Lectionary (basically Roman Catholics and Mainline Protestants), they hear the same Gospel passage every Easter--the story from John where the resurrected Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene (John 20:1-18).  But, if you go to the Vigil service for Easter on Saturday night (as I did, and almost always do), you get a rotation of Matthew, Mark, and Luke on the normal 3 year cycle.  2018 is Year B, the year of Mark, and so we got the really weird Mark version of the resurrection account.  Notably, we never actually see the resurrected Jesus--we get some ambiguous figure (an angel?) telling us that Jesus rose from the dead off camera and that He is totally going to show Himself to Peter at some future date.  Also, the line that the women "said nothing to anyone" is mysterious--if they didn't say anything, how to we know this story?  Plus, according to the scholarly consensus, Mark essentially ends with this story, as the last lines are the perhaps more perplexing statements "And all that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around Peter. And afterwards Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation."  This ending was so weird and unsatisfying that later Christians "beefed it up" by adding material from the other Gospels where Jesus physically appears to the disciples in various places.

In some years, Mark's Gospel would have been just as unsatisfying to me as it was to whoever decided to splice in the other material.  But, for this year for me, it was perfect.  "I don't know, man; some weird shit happened that I can't explain."  That's basically where I am right this moment.  The doubts I had a couple of days ago have not so much gone away as become integrated into a broader understanding (perhaps).  Sometimes I have come out of Holy Week with a firm conviction about the triumph of the resurrection over death.  But sometimes those firm convictions are more like hopes and possibilities.  I loved Mark's take because he gives us space for a more ambiguous conclusion.  Sometimes, and some years, you can't bring yourself 100% of the way there, and so Mark gives you just enough of the sugar to get you by.

"Some guy in white told me Jesus rose from the dead" is enough light to walk by if you are willing to walk in the moonlight.  The full summer sun is all but assuredly coming, but it is not here yet, at least not for me.  But it doesn't have to be here.  All I really need is a bit of the breeze, and the promise of spring.