Spring
Spring is the season of exuberant celebration of new life and new hope. As winter loses its icy grip on the land and on our hearts, our naked selves are robed again in the finest of all vestments, weaved by the pierced hands that know the deepest pain of winter and the highest joy of spring. In spring we, like the land about us, receive a foretaste of Resurrection. Spring is the Eastertide of our souls as we burst forth from the crucifixion and the tomb of winter, stirred by the holy wind from heaven to new life.
In spring, the heavens are marvelously, gloriously, extravagantly open. Fresh rains water our souls, both washing away the barrenness of winter and bringing forward fresh fruit out of the moist soil of ourselves. Golden sunshine follows refreshing rain, warming our hearts with the intimate, tangible presence of the Holy One himself cradling us against his motherly bosom.
Spring is the season of an explosion of fruitfulness, of new life. In spring, our hope for redemption begins, only begins, to be realized in an extravagant way with an explosion of triumphs, of new growths, of new beginnings. Spring is the season given to celebration of the eruption of new joy, new hope and new and fragile glory.
Winter
Winter is the season of barrenness. We stand, like the denuded branches of the trees, stripped of our coverings and exposed to the harsh winds of frigid and aridness northernness. Barren, we become strangers even to ourselves. Our imperfections, now exposed and visible to the world, seem to become the whole of our identity. Lost in a world of monochromatic silence, like the silence of a snowy day abandoned by all of humanity, we perceive that we stand alone in the elements that batter us-- the snow, the ice, the howling wind.
No voice speaks from on-high in winter. The heavens seem shut except for the falling snow and the icy gusts of wind. And so we retreat deep inside ourselves, like the trees whose bruised and battered trunks still harbor green life within them. We retreat into ourselves, retreating in hope and not in despair, retreating in order to fortify ourselves against the elements that lash about us in our lonely, empty solitude. We fortify ourselves to wait. To wait, even in seeming abandonment, to wait in hope for the redemption of our bodies. This is the true grace of winter: like trees long exposed to the harsh winter winds, we become strong and sturdy in the hope of spring.
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