The Chaos of Resurrection
on Easter and snow in March
By late February, I am fantasizing about the first signs of Spring- the wildflowers on my walk, the money I’ll save on my gas bill, the families in the park across the street from my doorstep. In reality, this March I got a taste of all these things- all these nice things abruptly followed by white-out conditions. It is one thing to wake up to snow and rush to the TV to wait for your school district to roll across the bottom of the screen in the long list of closures. It is another thing to wake up to snow and know you still have to go to work because this is Buffalo and two-three inches of powder is nothing. The bitterness of that disappointment is confounded when you remember that it’s March and just some days ago you were practically in short sleeves. And now you have to scrape ice off your car??
I was complaining about the weather (I’m so unique!) at lunch in the office and a friend told me about the phrase “in like a lion, out like a lamb,” used to describe the weather in March- terrible in the beginning and beautiful at the end. This March has been more lion-lamb-lion-lamb(?) but I’m still charmed by the phrase.
I think about lions and lambs and the Easter season upon us and I think about resurrection, and I wonder if my experience with the subject is not too far off from my experience with March’s clumsy ushering in of Spring.
When I stepped out of my office on the second day of Spring, I was hit with sub-freezing winds that kindled a burning rage inside me. I wasn’t dressed warmly enough, not because I hadn’t looked at the forecast before leaving the house that morning, but out of pure indignation to nature’s back-sliding. Around this time of year, I begin to dress with aspiration instead of with sense.
I grumbled to myself and shoved my hands into pathetic jacket pockets: “happy Spring, I guess.”
Less than a week later, I walked to pick up dinner in a sweatshirt without a jacket on (not even a pathetic one) and was a little warm. I wore sunglasses as I walked towards a bright orange sunset. I called my sister with my take-away salad in hand and admitted I was just calling because I felt, and I quote, “euphoric.”
Lion-lamb-lion-lamb. Resurrection, too, usually takes a more turbulent path than I fantasize it will.
Even if you don’t subscribe to Christian theology, it’s easy to see how appropriate it is to dwell on a famous resurrection at the same time you’re seeing the world bloom again. Out of the cold and quiet ground, something new and alive happens. Miraculous. Easter is about celebrating the promise of new life, and the transformation of the natural world around us into green out of grey is an apt illustration of this very hope.
So what, then, of a stuttering, chaotic start to Spring? Spurts of victory washed out with frost? I don’t believe it dilutes the metaphor- it only makes it more comforting.
I’ve prayed for transformation for as long as I can remember, begging God to make me more like him. I wanted to burst out of the tomb with a newfound ability to walk through walls, too, the material world no longer as substantial for Madelyn 2.0. And in many ways, he has-just not in the same three days it took him. I can look back at younger versions of myself and am grateful for how I’ve grown in compassion, thoughtfulness, patience, etc. When I look at the timeline from a distance, I can appreciate the vibrance where there once was silence. I recall many sweet memories coated with a sheen of miraculous new life.
But I can also tell you plenty of points on that same timeline where I was crueler than I’d ever been, saying words that still haunt me. I can remember the faces of people I disregarded. I can hear myself spewing crass opinions. What of all that spiritual growth nonsense? Were these the behaviors of someone transformed?
Resurrection? I throw the shameful recollections into my own face and grumble: “Happy Spring, I guess.”
But I’d like to take a cue from March and believe that resurrection, the transformation from something dead to something alive, is more chaotic than I want it to be. Perhaps the random snow flurries do not negate that Spring is, indeed, on her way, and the out-lashes of my angry tongue cannot stop Creator from molding me into a kinder person than I believed I could be.
Lion-lamb-lion-lamb.
On one of the lovely days in early March, I noticed the daffodils had bloomed beside my driveway. I love them because they remind me of an old college friend who loved them, too. When it snowed days later, I looked at the faint yellow, all crumpled up under ice, and mourned them. It made me sad to think they had bloomed thinking it was their time, just to be struck down by the cold.
But I was surprised to find how quickly their petals were wide open, again, when the sun came back out and the temperature rose again. No shame, no embarrassment, they didn’t seem to bear even a memory of the snow. They were simply back and glorious again. Spring is here, even if her arrival has been a stuttering and awkward one. So I want to take comfort from this Spring, and know that the resurrection of my own soul has the stamina to be ambushed by a snow day and still come back, yellow as ever.
I’m reminded of one of my favorite verses from the Bible, one that has accompanied me in my darkest moments of resurrection-frustration. The paraphrase from the Message version of the Bible includes a word that makes a case in my point:
“There has never been the slightest doubt in my mind that the God who started this great work in you would keep at it and bring it to a flourishing finish on the very day Christ Jesus appears.” Philippians 1:6
March’s Spring may be riddled with depressing bursts of cold, but the flourishing is imminent.
In my life and yours, may it be so.