For the Spring Holiday service
A service and reflections by F. Jay Deacon
For the Vernal Equinox
At the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
March 20, 2005
At the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
March 20, 2005
Annie Dillard:
Cold sun lighted the snow in the mountains.
People became fitful, bold, or melancholy.
Spring pried open their jaws and poured sunlight down their throats.
The light picked them up and floated them as spring tides lifted logs on the beach: lightly, taking their heaviness from them, and setting them free.
Max Coots, Seasons of the Self
Voice 1
We never seem to know just when it comes —
You'd think we would after so much Winter-waiting, but we never do.
By surprise, one day March moves.
Not by the calendar. I do know that,
Because the hollyhock was still caught deep in ice on the 21st of March.
It began behind my back while I was too engrossed with
Winter-weariness.
What made it move is quite beyond my knowing.
Maybe it was rain — cold to my face — too cold, but warm enough
to shrink the snow.
Really the snow went down, and ran in rivers in the road to be
whispered away under the passing wheels to wherever it is that
old snow goes.
It's all a mystery to me.
It's quite enough it went.
I'm satisfied!
Voice 2
The snow-melt is like an attic door unlatched to show its
insides out;
To show the lawns as catch-alls for forgotten things:
Brown leaves October rakes had missed,
Sodden papers spelling out last December 5th, as if the
English sparrows cared to read our past,
Broken toys,
Last Fall's jacket buttons.
A Spring surprise of dirty things.
For us, April rain is not always kind.
It makes our lawns look like our lives:
Unkind memories,
Old guilts,
And last year's shames.
But lawns, like lives, need seeing to —
Need cleaning up.
At least in Spring there is the will for it!
So soon we turn to raking up and burning up.
Spring is a courage after Winter-weakness that sends us to cleaning out.
Spring is a courage.
Spring is a courage that lets the old things die and scatters them
across our eyes — the things that ought to be done and over with.
Spring is not so much a dying time as it is a time that shows what
has already died.
It's not an easy sight!
There ought to be a season when we have to recognize the
living from the dead.
We can turn our eyes away, I guess, and let the later grass grow
up around the time-lost things,
And fool ourselves.
We can,
But come another Spring and there they'll be,
And more besides.
Spring is a finishing,
But it is a beginning too.
Our hearts have been gladdened by days of sun
Light whose brightness blinds the sun
Light that is everywhere even in the dark and cold
Illumine our minds and shine in us.
Divine wind, breath within us, — find the pores of our beings open to you
Water —
Fire — passion of life, crucible of transformation —
Earth — dark soil, decay from which springs life and renewal —
Mystery beyond our naming
Life of our lives and life of all Being —
Great deathly powers have passed:
The black and bitter cold, the wind
That broke and felled strong trees, the rind
Of ice that held at last
Even the fleshly heart
In cold that made it seem a stone.
And now there comes again the one
First Sabbath light, the Art
That unruled, uninvoked,
Unknown, makes new again and heals,
Restores heart's flesh so that it feels
Anew the old deadlocked
Goodness of its true home
That it will lose again and mourn,
Remembering the year reborn
In almost perfect bloom
In almost shadeless wood,
Sweet air that neither burned nor chilled
In which the tenderest flowers prevailed,
The light made flesh and blood.
Mary Oliver
In spring the blue azures bow again
at the edges of shallow puddles
to drink the black rain water.
Then they rise and float away into the fields.
Sometimes the great bones of my life feel so heavy,
and all the tricks my body knows —
the opposable thumbs, the kneecaps,
and the mind clicking and clicking —
don't seem enough to carry me through this world
and I think: how I would like
to have wings —
blue ones —
ribbons of flame.
How I would like to open them, and rise
from the black rain water.
And then I think of Blake, in the dirt and sweat of London — a boy
staring through the window, when God came
fluttering up.
Of course, he screamed,
seeing the bobbin of God's blue body
leaning on the sill,
and the thousand-faceted eyes.
Well, who knows.
who knows what hung, fluttering, at the window
between him and the darkness.
Anyway, Blake the hosier's son stood up
and turned away from the sooty sill and the dark city —
turned away forever
from the factories, the personal strivings,
to a life of the imagination.
Jones Very, 1840:
The morning's brightness cannot make thee glad,
If thou art not more bright than it within;
And nought of evening's peace hast thou e'er had,
If evening first did not with thee begin.
Full many a sun I saw first set and rise,
Before my day had found a rising too;
And I with Nature learned to harmonize,
And to her times and seasons made me true.
How fair that new May morning when I rose
Companion of the sun for all the day;
O'er every hill and field where now he goes,
With him to pass, nor fear again to stray;
But `neath the full-orbed moon's reflected light
Still onward keep my way till latest night.
The Buddha
Everything is extraordinarily clear. I see the whole landscape before me, I see my hands, my feet, my toes, and I smell the rich river mud. I feel a sense of tremendous strangeness and wonder at being alive.
Today, the Vernal Equinox: from Winter into Spring.
There are winters many kinds. There are stubborn winters.
Every day we feel that we're in a kind of national winter, the country in the control of a noxious partnership of fundamentalist religious extremists and shameless politicians; — where the United Nations, its Secretary-General, are seen as the Antichrist prophesied in the Biblical books of Daniel and Revelation; where tonight, here, on Main Street, we mark two years of a war is fought not for any of the reasons we were told, but to secure the fortunes of the oil industry while helping fulfill Bible prophecy — because in the end-of-the-world schema of the fundamentalists, Iraq is Israel's final enemy which must be defeated so that Israel can expand to its full biblical borders, not for the sake of Jews but to open the way for the Second Coming. And so 25,000 horribly injured young Americans are flown under cover of night into Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the press forbidden to report it or show us images of them, and 1,500 are dead, and uncounted thousands of Iraqis; while at home the fundamentalist moralistic vision of a past era is enforced. It may not be that springtime yet; but we must go on doing the things that must be done in winter, under the ground, so that in Spring the fresh shoots may break through the barren ground and blossom.
But there are many other forms of winter. In our lives, we know those winters well, when Spring feels as remote as it did last week. In our life together, as communities of friends, as a congregation: — times of testing and difficulty. And then comes the Spring.
Sam Keen:
A moment comes when there is a shift
from destruction of the old
to borning of the new.
The crisis is over.
Once I decided to go all the way
the road turned downhill toward home.
The renewal of the self has always been described by metaphors:
The process is poetic.
it is like:
a butterfly emerging from a cuccoon;
coming out of a dark cave into the sunlight;
waking up after a nightmare;
an unexpected armistice ending an undeclared war;
energy surging up after a long illlness;
shedding an old skin;
breathing deeply of fresh air;
being born again;
a bud emerging from the humus;
a second childhood;
becoming your own father and mother;
an ember bursting into flame;
dis/illusionment;
an alchemical transformation of dross into gold;
homecoming.
Maybe you know this Buddhist-Hindu thing:
The witness.
As Sam Keen reminds me, whenever I'm in some internal disarray, distress, maybe blinded by infantile emotion or blindsided by an emotional storm or despair,
I can take a psychic elevator into this observatory and observe what's going on. I can see it all with detached safety, with kindness, with objectivity.
We have some choice about our own consciousness; how we perceive the world out there and the world in here. I am more than my moods, feelings, possessions, relationships, thoughts, pains, expectations, ideals. We can live in hope of Spring, live by a vision of Spring, have eyes to see it when it comes. We can be bearers of the new life. Rabindranath Tagore wrote:
Faith is the bird that feels the light
and sings when the dawn is still dark.
And when the Spring is still snowing. The snow, which seemed prepared to stay forever, begins to melt. You see what's there, hidden since last Fall or maybe longer. Forgotten things, broken things, things that belong only to the past, now exposed where the snow retreats. "Spring," says Max Coots, "is not so much a dying time as it is a time that shows what has already died."
A courage after Winter-weakness that sends us to cleaning out, raking, burning, making space for what is yet to burst from this soil.
Spring, he says, is a courage, and a will to begin again.
In the Winter of life things happen underground and unseen. In Spring those things may germinate, unless we didn't deal with the junk that's in the way.
Junk is what gets in the way. Some of it must be removed gently, kindly — removed.
Spring is for all the work of creation that has been hidden under the hardened ground to break through, show itself, come into its own, new, fresh, probably surprising.
Rabindranath Tagore
Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.