It is happening again…new life stirring up and against the cold that now is beginning to lose its grip. There are signs of life everywhere; the earth awaking from dreamful sleep. There, narcissus is blooming in a vacant lot; gold finches and robins carried in by the south wind twitter among the cherry laurel; the rust red of silver maples spangle the leaden swamps along the interstate…outward and visible warrant that life will and forever shall find a way…that renewal is the rhythm of existence…so why do we fear what is next? Have we forgotten?
Stanley Hauerwas, noted ethicist at Duke University, among other scholars and theologians, argues that it is our fear of death that motivates our actions in life. Many religious skeptics argue that it is the fear of death that has motivated the religious consciousness in humankind; that we have invented religion to stand between us and our mortality. I beg to disagree. Could it be that it is not death that we fear, but life? Could it be that what daunts us is the possibility, the invitation to live life fully…to live it as God means for us to live it…we can feel it awaken again deep within our souls just now, a renewed invitation, in this the warming juvescence of the year, as Eliot puts it…he who dubs April the “cruelest month”, ( had he written The Wasteland in Mobile instead of England it would have been March) …the cruelest month because the world must awake from the cold forgetful torpor of winter, and life beckons again, calls us to ourselves; nature herself rousting us from sleep to live into the heaven that we call earth.
To live into heaven is to live into our true selves, and that is to be life bearers to the dead of our world….raised life for those laid low. The reason we gather as a community of faith, a community of conscience, is that together there is courage…the courage to be the people of God…the courage to live for the other…so that all may become the signs of Spring…outward and visible warrant of the promise of life and life abundant…that the days do lengthen yet again….as they forever shall in due season…The season is now…It is happening again, remember?… life come round again blooms in mad ecstasy, all mortality aside…just look at it everywhere, the truth of it… and take courage….the courage to live….the courage to be.
