Mid March, halfway through Lent. Hobby Lobby shelves a pastel bouquet of Easter kitsch. Target aisles stocked with Reeses bunnies and Cadbury eggs. The sun’s more concentrated rays stir the listless to life in the slumbering ground.
In our California backyard, a soggy winter gives way to blooming calla lilies, daisies, trumpet vines, bougainvillea, azaleas, and just about anything else we put in dirt. Bees swarm around our blueberry bushes to pollinate the newly blossoming buds. Anna hummingbirds show up often to raid the camellia flowers. The sudden onset of fragrant orange blossoms gives an olfactory reminder of the cycle of life: barren death to seeds of life to fruitful fullness to death again. Repeat.
Spring's arrival, in other words, doesn't let us hide from the temporal rules and rhythms of God's creation. To everything there is a season. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted.
This is reassuring, because it’s a rhythm I can’t control and a seasonality that ceaselessly speaks hope: life after death. But it’s also bittersweet, because the cycle phases are all too fleeting. Every bright-eyed, sweet-smelling orange blossom will, within a year, be a plucked piece of perishable fruit—its flesh sucked dry, its peel discarded as compost. Every vibrant growing season in summer will eventually fade into autumn harvest. So it will be with us. A hard thought—but true.
On a Wednesday night at my five-year-old son’s baseball game, I watch his team (the Bulldogs) chase balls and swing bats with gleeful innocence. Just a handful of springs these sprouts have been alive—and it shows in their wide-eyed wonder and sweet cluelessness. Everything is new to them: not only the rules of this game, but also the rules of nature, both beautiful and cruel. The soft caress of green grass. The hard dirt of an awkwardly attempted slide. The sunset’s sublimity and gravity’s cruelty.
In the span of a 90-minute little league game, several of Chet’s teammates are in tears at various points, for various reasons. But minutes later they’re laughing and all smiles, bouncing around the dugout and only intermittently clued in to what’s happening in the game. They’re still waking up to the world, still figuring out its fundamental nature. A mystery to fear or a gift to embrace? The more they live, the more they see it’s both.
Four decades of life beyond me, I sit in the stands and conjure foggy memories of my own little league days. The Easters and azalea festivals of my Oklahoma childhood. The glee of that realization that the school year’s end—and summer’s arrival—is in sight.
My graying beard and sore back signal that I'm now somewhere between a verdant orange blossom and a decaying orange rind. Which is probably why, when I look at my lefty son swing his bat and slug his first few baseballs in this adventure called life, I’m filled with mostly joy but a also little sorrow. For in a nanosecond he will be me, sitting in the stands watching his own son take his first swings. And where will I be then? Maybe a grandpa at the same game, cheering on the innocent ritual playing out atop soft spring grass.
But I may well be in another place, my body bearing silent witness below some other soft spring grass. Bearing witness to what? Not just baseball games and orange blossoms—and their whispers of summer's approach—but something deeper and wider: a renewal that eclipses the magic of all previous newness. The final resurrection. The fragrant warmth of an infinite spring. The perpetual dawn of a summer that never ends.