"Coming Back to Life"

Those of us who find ourselves observing Easter every year without a Christian faith to explain it probably shouldn't try to think too hard about why we do. We're likely to get caught vacillating over how far to take the idea of coming back to life. It's one thing to assert confidently that the earth renews itself each Spring. It is quite another to declare that people come back from the dead - or even have a fair shot at starting over while they're still alive.

At Easter, I always debate with myself whether to emphasize nature or human nature in my Sunday message. "Which is it this year, people or flowers, people or flowers?" I came across an Easter meditation recently that confused me even more: "people are not flowers," I read. The difference matters enormously to some people. It's not enough at Easter to be happy the flowers have come back. Or is it?

I was in the park early one morning this week, walking my dog and thinking about this Sunday, milling around with other dog walkers before I've had my coffee. Conversation at that hour of the morning tends not to be too deep. Recent topics have included the Michael Jackson trial, the Rolling Stones, and high definition TV. But I never know where I'll find my inspiration.

This morning I joined two regulars in an animated discussion about flowers: the desert flowers. They had each been to the desert to look at the glorious, unprecedented crop of Spring wildflowers. "You have to go," one of them told me. "This year, they're going to last a long time."

I could hear poignancy in that joyful remark. "They're going to last a long time." I realized that the annual event of flowers blooming in the desert touches us urban Californians tenderly. It made me think back to my one pilgrimage to see the flowers several years ago. The day I went, it was so windy and cold that the poor little poppies were curled up in a flower fetal position. I could see I would have to wait for another year. How fleeting, how sad, the flowers can be.

People aren't flowers, but we are more affected by nature than we realize. Thousands of people are driving to the desert this weekend for the thrill of seeing rare and beautiful blooms, an experience any of us would welcome. We feel a kinship with nature that makes us more than mere spectators at such events. Easter does have something to do with people and flowers. The differences between us are not so great.

"Regard the bud," wrote poet Diego Valeri. "It's a mere dot, a nothing. But already it's a flower, already a fruit, already its own death and resurrection." What is alive is ready to grow and to die, to wither and to come back to life. The cycles of life belong to life, all life. That is why we know - whether we know it by intellect or by creaturely intuition - that we all come back to life, no matter where we have been.

"The dead shall rise again . . . . We know, because we've seen it." Let's think for a moment about all the ways we know and see this truth.

As I planned for Easter this year, I realized how much I yearned for the sun again. These days of heavy rain and dark skies have taken their toll. Winter was hard in more ways than the local weather. The endless war. Christmas brought to a crashing halt by a tsunami. The deaths of beloved members of our congregation. The endless dying of a woman in far away Florida. Broken hearts, broken homes, people struggling to be whole. There is death in life all the time, in all the usual ways as well as the occasional tragedy. Sometimes death is too much with us, so that we forget we will come back to life, the same way Spring will follow Winter. It is that way when we are grieving. It is also that way when we feel discord, or dread, or despair. We forget we will come back to life. Only faith can help us remember. Or flowers.

"We don't know, and never will, where the leaf's strength comes from in the spring," writes Victoria Safford. "We don't know, and never will, entirely, where our own strength comes from." But we have seen it happen and know it will again.

How many times have we reassured each other that life will go on, that we will heal, that love will come again? Not often enough, perhaps. Because we know it's true. The evidence is as spectacular - and as simple - as wildflowers. Time gently moves us on, making grief a memory. We find love again, even when we thought we might not. We rebuild our lives in small ways, each step a minor miracle, taking us where we need to go.

Some have sorrow so deep that no one can know where it will take them. There is grief that never ends; there are deaths that change lives forever. I know. I have known people for whom this is true. So have you. We cannot say that life will take us back to where we started. We can only say that we will come back to life. And any of us can carry on from there.

It was in us all along, our death and our resurrection. Just as it is in flowers. After this hard winter, how glad we are to know that the flowers will last longer than usual. That deceptively simple Easter story we heard earlier tells the travails of one bunny who couldn't find Easter anywhere he looked. He couldn't find it, that is, until new life came to him, and with it, lots of new little bunnies. "The bunny felt his little bunnies around him and the earth blooming beyond them, and all things growing," the story goes. "And he understood at last that Easter was not a placeafter all, but atimewhen everything lovely begins once again."

It begins once again each Spring - in the flowers and in ourselves. It begins when we see how lovely life is, wherever we are and wherever we have been. However long it has taken us to get there. I heard more about the desert flowers the other day. According to a report on the radio, some of the flowers that are blooming this year have not bloomed in a decade. They require certain conditions, and a lot of rain, to grow.

The flowers have made me think about the winter in a different way. All those dark and rain days may have been hard on some of us, but they meant life for those precious desert flowers. Some of you probably knew that. Perhaps you looked out the window as the rain poured down and realized what a beautiful spring would follow. You knew the earth would awaken with something lovely we had to wait a long time to see. That was all the hope you needed.

But some of us had forgotten. "Perhaps when we least expected to feel anything at all," Victoria Safford writes, "[we felt] our own slow blood stir . . . and something small and tight within begin to swell and open up, urgent, imperceptible at first, then undeniable . . . ." It is hope. That life comes back. It always comes back. It comes back even after the worst thing can happen.

That is why we have Easter for people. The flowers already possess all they need - as Diego Valeri writes, there is both death and resurrection in a single bud. But we people, as delicate as wildflowers and as strong as seeds, need to remember, each year, what is true. We will come back to life.