"After the Rain "

READING

[Excerpt from “The Flower,” by seventeenth century priest and spiritual writer George Herbert]

How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! Ev'n as the flowers in spring;
To which, besides their own demean,
The late-passed frosts tributes of pleasure bring
Grief melts away
Like snow in May,
As if there were no such cold thing.

Who would have thought my shrivelled heart
Could have recovered greenness? It was gone
Quite underground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root when they have blown;
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O my only light,
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night.

SERMON

Winter is a perilous time of year. It brings icy roads and snow storms in some parts of the world. The cold slows everyone down. Some freeze – or come dangerously close, like the birds on their migration south. Winter is dark; it makes people depressed and think about death. Here in California we contend with our version of the season: the long nights, the flu and the rain. When rain comes in a downpour, pounding the roof and flooding the roads, springing leaks and causing mudslides, it can be dangerous too. But since we need the rain, we welcome it.

When I first moved out here, one of the children in our congregation told me how exciting rain was. “When it rains,” she said, “we run outside and play in it. And then after it’s over, everything is clean again.”

I have always remembered that. It seemed strange to me at the time, how rain could be such a novelty that it would be cause for a child’s celebration. As for me, I was one of many people who wanted to live here because of the sunshine. Rain was something to escape. But now I too love the way the rain washes everything clean. Rain is good.

Even so, when spring arrives, as it did this week, people are glad winter is over. This year Easter, the first day of spring and the Persian new year all land within a few days of each other, each celebrating in its own way that new life has come again. Christian Easter layers the death and resurrection of Jesus onto earlier celebrations of rebirth rooted in the cycles of the earth and many ancient stories. The Persian new year, No Ruz, coincides with the first day of spring. Why not start the year with the equinox, with the return of light and life? The stories we tell, the beliefs we hold, and the origins we have may vary from each other, but not the cycle of renewal that is creation itself. We all take this comforting truth from our experience of the season: you can’t get to spring without going through winter.

Here in California, I just learned, the worse the winter, the better the spring. According to a “Los Angeles Times” article about viewing the wildflowers this year, we are going to have a very good spring.[i] “Particularly good,” said a wildflower expert, because of all the winter rain. Not only rain, but fire. Apparently certain species of wildflowers germinate only after a fire, when the chaparral is leveled. Then there is room for more diverse growth and a “spectacular bloom.”

The implication seems to be that bad winters are good. I am drawn to this fact because human beings have a spiritual response to the cycles of the seasons. It is easy enough to celebrate spring, after all, but no one looks forward to a harsh and punishing winter. Yet nature requires it. We need the rain, the fire, and the darkness in order to have the spring.

I wonder how true this is for people. We humans mirror the change of seasons through our emotions. Winter passes; we forget how hard it was.

Seventeenth-century poet George Herbert wrote, “Grief melts away/Like snow in May/As if there were no such cold thing.” He makes the connection between outward death and rebirth and inward renewal and asks, “Who would have thought my shriveled heart/Could have recovered greenness?” He thought he had lost it forever, but life came back, just as it does in spring.

Spring is our assurance that even after the hardest of seasons, even when we have become dead to ourselves, life can return and make us new again. Herbert writes, “And now in age I bud again,/After so many deaths I live and write;/. . . /O my only light, /It cannot be /That I am he /On whom thy tempests fell all night.” The rain is over; we begin again.

If you come to this spring with a heart full of grief, you may not want this message. Even the most beautiful weather cannot assuage a profound loss or heal a broken spirit. Perhaps it is enough to know that whenever your personal winter is finally over, you will come back to life again – not the same as you were, but changed in ways that allow you to go on. This is the knowledge that gives people hope, but only once they have experienced it themselves.

We know that winter is good for the earth, with its life-giving rain and rest from growth. Why shouldn’t it be the same for us? But it isn’t, at least not while we are suffering. The winters of the spirit are long, bleak and lonely; they don’t trust the future, and pain keeps us in an eternal present. There is nothing good about any of that.

What’s worse, some people do not recover. They never make it to spring, like birds that freeze in the snow. Not everything in life – or nature – turns out all right. But if we get through it and spring finally arrives, we have gained not only survival but the ability to look back and give meaning to where we have been. We have changed; but we are still whole and clutching what has become, for us, a hard-won truth.

The lessons of nature for the human spirit are not always straightforward or simple. Winter is good and winter is bad. Winter gives life and takes it away. A harsh winter may be good for the wildflowers, but it can be bad for other living things. These contradictions are also part of our experience of the seasons. Once spring arrives, bringing the assurance of our survival, we can take the time to look back and ask what kind of winter we have had. What we conclude is up to us.

What happened to his “shriveled heart” during winter, George Herbert wonders, “It was gone/Quite underground;” he writes, “as flowers depart/To see their mother-root when they have blown;/Where they together/All the hard weather,/Dead to the world, keep house unknown.” It was gone like a flower, dwelling in some unknown place.

Winter shelters the heart and the flower, keeps alive the root of life to surface again much later. Perhaps when we face our bad winters of the spirit, we can think of the mother-root of our healing waiting for the time to be ready and break through. Where it is now, we may not know. But it is there just as it is for the flowers. And in some places, the harder the winter, the more beautiful the blooms.

Spring is the proof of what was there all along. Life resting and preparing to renew itself in the growing light of day. The more winters we survive, the more we trust that spring will come.

Amid the disappointments and contradictions of life we find comfort in nature, not because it is always good to us, but because it is part of us. Even those of us who are urban creatures ebb and flow with dark and light; feel good when the breeze is soft and warm. And after the rain is over, the streets are washed clean, we go out into the world again, ready for another year.

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[i] http://travel.latimes.com/articles/la-tr-wildflowers9mar09