spring will come again

The garden is drifting to sleep.

Sheets of cold dew and coverlets of mist wrap around the still-green foliage. Patches of yellowing and mildew form like age spots on the leaves, reminders of a life-cycle coming to its end, and despite their weakening stems and the disappearing daylight the dahlias keep thrusting forth buds. It is a silent form of “rage against the dying of the light,” but a rage all the same—a refusal to go submissively to winter’s sleep.

First frost looms in the shadows like the Angel of Death. His cold touch will instantly and irrevocably turn the green of life to the black of mourning.

But even the Angel of Death can only kill the body. The soul—the nephesh, the life-conduit—is cradled safely in the hidden place, waiting for resurrection. The roots and seeds lay at peace in the earth, waiting for spring.

We might think of death-and-resurrection as a pattern started by Jesus, but it has been with us since God first divided light from darkness and set the times and seasons into motion. Day gives way to night and then dawns again. A full moon wanes until it disappears in shadow, and then waxes again. Growing-time becomes harvest-time becomes dormant-time before everything wakes up to grow anew.

The ceaseless liturgy of the created order mirrors the life, death, and life-again cycle—a cycle that first-fruits in Jesus, yes, but is sketched and hinted from Genesis 2, when the First Adam falls into a “deep sleep” to be awakened into a new Adam-and-Eve humanity, and is brought to fullness in Revelation 21 when the Last Eve—the Church, including all the saints and martyrs who have died from her inception—descends from heaven as the glorified Bride, the New Jerusalem.

In that day, death will be such a forgotten enemy from our long-ago past that we’ll no longer need reminders in the form of daily, monthly, or yearly “little deaths.” There will be no night there, no daily sleep of unconsciousness to remind us that our bodies will soon enough sleep with our fathers. We will have no need of sun or moon, for God’s light will shine perpetually, everlasting as our lives. The tree of life will yield its fruit every month; there is no winter, no season of dormancy, no Angel of Death to bring frost, only a better-than-Eden flourishing that is both endlessly productive and endlessly restful, somehow.

This is the hope I find in the garden drifting to sleep: not that I relish in small deaths, not that I won’t profoundly miss my flowers, but that for now it’s an irrefutable reminder that God is trustworthy and faithful. As I have no doubt that the sun will rise after tonight’s small death of night, or that the spring will come after this year’s small death of winter, or that the plants destroyed by frost will grow again next spring, I need have no doubt that my own mortal body is safe in the hands of the One who wove death-and-resurrection into every thread of Creation.

Paul wrote that “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26), but the destruction of death is one of the very first things written into the ordering of the universe. It has not yet come, but it is coming. From even before death was a threat to the Garden-dwellers its destiny was defeat.

There is a beautiful service on All Souls’ Day at my church in which we commend those who have died into the hands of God. We take down a list so we can commend each by name. I love this practice of opening our hearts to give our departed loved ones into the divine care of God, trusting that He—the first Gardener—knows how to tend them safely through the winter. Following the pattern of all Creation since before time began, spring will come again, and soon—when the last enemy is destroyed under Christ’s feet—we’ll get to worship Him together, in everlasting summer.

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So will it be with the resurrection of the dead: What is sown is perishable; it is raised imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power.

1 Corinthians 15:42-43

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Alleluia!

at 31

I asked Sam the other day who the “child” was who was rolling hose at the fire station. Apparently that child was 23 and has already gone through medic school—older than I was when Sam got hired. Did I look that young, once?

I spend a fair amount of my time with people older than myself, but none of them has mentioned the weirdness of being a business owner in a networking group run by fellow 1990s-born peers, of taking your kids to a pediatrician younger than yourself, of realizing your husband is now the senior person on his shift when just the other day you were the newlyweds and newly-hireds meeting the veteran lieutenant for the first time.

And then Charlie Kirk was murdered.

Thirty-one years old.

Parent of two.

This is life now in the middle place, not young, not yet old: watching faces fade out of family photographs one by one, watching your baby morph into a toddler and then into a kid, every day feeling like you’re meeting someone new and losing someone old. Childish romanticization of young death gives way to a desperate prayer that God will have mercy on your family for another day, that the inevitable shattering loss will stay its hand for just one more hour of the present tranquility.

Time pulls like a riptide, and perhaps the lesson is that the harder you resist, the more likely you drown. Breathe. Don’t try to swim to shore. The waves will always win.

He was 31. So am I.

He was a parent of two. So am I.

He was mortal, fragile, always just one breath away from God taking His breath back. So am I.

At 31, a Levite man might have been a priest for a year. At 31, Jesus was one-third of the way through His ministry and two years away from death. At 31, my husband had already been bereaved of his mother; at 31, my mom became pregnant with me; at 31, my cousin Megan had just one year left to live.

In this state we live and endure, somewhere between certain death and eternal life, between paralyzed fear and a frenzied sprint, not young anymore but not quite old. Like wildflowers doggedly fighting for survival, we stay productive and pretty and try to forget that it’s all because we know winter is coming and we are going to die.

We don’t know when. But we can sense the angle of the sun is changing.

as a beautiful olive tree in the field

I type this while intermittently staring at “Our Lady of the Olives,” which rests against the wall just above my computer screen. It’s a print of a painting by Nicolò Barabino: A white-and-deep-blue clad Mary holding an infant Jesus on her lap, framed by olive branches and a floral-wreath border. The top of the painting says Quasi Oliva Speciosa in Campis.

As a beautiful olive tree in the field.

Serendipitously, Trader Joe’s was selling little potted olive trees today. I bought one. Today is the anniversary of the day my girls and I went to the little white Anglican church for the first time.

One year of being weekly washed in the water of the Word.

One year of dwelling in the body of Christ, and inviting Him to dwell in me, at the sacramental table.

One year running free, unencumbered by the burden of needing to know and be right about everything.

It’s been a year of asking questions (so many questions), learning, and consistently being humbled by the rigidity of my paradigm or the incompleteness of my understanding. A year of noticing how many things I have gotten exactly backward, and never thought twice about before. A year of discovering—as if for the first time—who God is.

Thus, Our Lady of the Olives graces my desk. A reminder that God humbled Himself to come to us fully human: the kind knit together cell by cell in a mother’s womb, the kind birthed through blood and travail, the kind that becomes an inconsolable newborn or a tantruming toddler or a strong-willed child. A reminder that the Father crucially partnered with Mary—and many women before her, all the way back to Eve—to enact redemption, and that for a time, she was His very tabernacle dwelling. Somehow a holy God did not think Himself too good for us, even though we so often think ourselves too good for Him.

A reminder, too, that the Creation project began with a temple garden, lush with life and color and goodness, like the flowers that frame the figures in the painting. That the Creator delights with me in my garden’s blossoms, my children’s antics, my home’s sanctuary. He tabernacles here with us.

I went looking for Him in so many places—across the country, overseas, at a certain type of church, inside a certain version of the Bible, in my own ideas and projects and “glorious purpose”—and though He never abandoned me in any of those things, I found Him here.

Little old here.

Common and nondescript, but simultaneously significant. Like a beautiful olive tree in the field.

Like a little white church on the corner.