“April is the cruelest month,” wrote English poet T.S Eliot.
I think he’s right.
It’s the intensified contradictions. The promise of the perennials pushing through the earth, the delicate beauty of the bleeding heart already blooming in the garden, everything greening up. But also the specter of yard work in the heat of July, the fact the deck needs repainting before the pots can be brought out and the geraniums planted, the illusion that everyone else will be enjoying picnics, barbeques and trips nonstop, and the daunting mandate felt by many of us Minnesotans to “make the most of every weekend,” makes spring well, complicated.
Wonderful, but complicated.
This glorious spring Easter season at St. John’s is also is a time of difficulty for many in our community: illnesses, surgeries, hospitalizations, family stuff, even the loss of a beloved 19-year-old nephew. We stand in the light of the resurrected Christ, but life can be brutal. The Cross showed us that.
The picture is from an article in a recent Star-Tribune on the 20th anniversary of the siege of Sarajevo, the start of the Bosnian War. There are 11,541 chairs in 825 rows, each representing someone killed during the siege. Hundreds of the chairs are small, many with teddy bears or plastic cars placed on them, representing the 825 children killed. It is a sobering red carpet running through the heart of the city.
Joseph Stalin observed, “A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” So while we feel the strain of the ongoing stress of a world where so much is brutal and cruel, the pain of those in our midst – as well as our own angst — is less easy to dismiss.
The call to reach out to each other in love sounds loudly to those of us who follow Jesus. We know this.
But we are also challenged to live in hope as we grieve for whatever it is that we have lost or that is changing, despite our most heartfelt efforts to prevent it. In her magnificent book Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, Sister Joan Chittitser says this:
“There are times to let a thing go. There is a time to put a thing down, however unresolved, however baffling, however wrong, however unjust it may be….There is a time to let surrender take over so that the past does not consume the present, so that new life can come, so that joy has a chance to surprise us again.”
Nowhere is that new life more apparent than in this glorious season, complicated and rich in promise
See you in church.
Barbara
