Baby
lambs and goats seen along my journey to church each sunday herald the
Resurrection. The Voice that wakes the
dead unfolds new life now in our valley in magnificent abundance. Wild flowers in
bloom along the roadsides, migrating songbirds, and rows of new crops turn the
landscape green --all gifts of assurance that everlasting life is a present
reality. G.K. Chesterton, in his poem,
The Convert, said it best:
“The
sages have a hundred
maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
That rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me,
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.”
Brooks
Atkinson, writing a half century ago, rates high among my favorite nature
essayists. His lyrical portraits of the four seasons focus on the wonders of
Creation. Here he sings the glorious and
special praises of Spring:
“...Although
I had sworn to play no favorites, to study the texture of each season
impartially and to transcribe its symbols without prejudices, I found myself
dissolved by the spring. Now the green
began to edge the woods with color, the violets, bloodroot, arbutus, and wild
geranium sweetened the ground, and the birds went by in a mysterious wave of
motion until every thicket, field, and glade rang with song. Lounging on a hill
behind the cabin one March
evening I heard bluebirds, song sparrows, juncos, red-winged blackbirds, blue
jays, crows, meadowlarks, and the fragile luminous aria of the fox sparrow –
all these songs simultaneously so that it was difficult to distinguish them as
individual voices. Collectively they
were the grand summons to spring like the ringing of many vesper bells in a
mountain village. Long before our
ancestors travelled this country, these birds made their way north each year
and serenaded the valley with the same purity.
How do they know when to come or when to go? Why do they follow the same
courses? None of us knows. But
to quiet every worldly alarm it is
sufficient to know that they do come.
When the bluebird fails to leap out of the sky, when the bloodroot no
longer pushes through the dead leaves, then it will be time to stitch up our
ascension robes for immediate and serious action. Brooks
Atkinson in an essay, Smoke From A Valley Cabin
“...Here stands the cross of Jesus. Here
is the sign that gives the lie to the
plausible wisdom of material security.
We are being told today that scientific humanism holds the key to
security. We are being told that words
like faith and providence are now unintelligent sentimentalities which we must
leave out of the reckoning. We are even
told that as long as we can build bigger and better ballistic missiles than
other nations nothing else matters: this
is our best security. What a hope! Men
are beginning to see through that
decrepit philosophy. For in fact it is
the bankrupt logic of fatalism and despair: ‘mind at the end of its tether’,
to use H. G. Wells’ phrase. Here stands the cross of Jesus – this
essential insecurity, this foolishness of faith, this hope strained to the
breaking-point, this love despised and rejected. This is the wisdom of God. And it is quite certain that life will work
no other way.” James S. Stewart in his
sermon “The Cross as Power and Wisdom” published in River of Life, Abingdon Press, Nashville and New York, 1972
“With one voice all the saints proclaim it,
that there is no nook or cranny of life which is not crowded with light and
flooded with sunshine, no dull stretch of the road which does not grow
romantic, no common task or lonely way which is not marvelously transfigured,
no human friendship which is not hallowed, no heavy cross which does not begin
to shine with glory, when once Christ and His glad tidings have gripped and
held the heart.” James S. Stewart in a
sermon “Triumphant Adequacy of Christ.”
