Dying Alongside the Seeds We Plant

The Jerusalem Cross Garden has lain dormant all of winter. Nothing has been planted, nothing harvested. There has been nothing even to look at in a normally lush garden that has reverted to being a side yard of the church, frigidly white and singularly uninteresting. (How often that can be a reflection of the state of our souls).

That is until the sanctuary Christmas tree (picture left) was placed there after Christmas to, epiphany-style, announce to the world that the Light of the World, having been born, was now moving out to shine in the world.

But still, the garden was bleak and uninteresting.

All that is about to change in our little village. With the winter snows quickly receding - earlier than usual this year - my walks with a wide ranging Gill (my Brittany Spaniel) have taken me back to the forested trails of Ski Hill. The little yellow Avalanche Lilies, the first to bloom each year, are beginning to color the forest-litter of pine needles and mulch. And as I hike with Spring in my steps, the call of the returning songbird is joined in my mind by the signature song of our valley, soon to be sung each summer night during Summer Theater. We all know it well. And it speaks of Spring...of life returning to our mountains and valleys.

The hills are alive with the sound of music. With songs they have sung for thousand years. The hills fill my heart with the sound of music. My heart wants to sing every song it hears.

My heart wants to beat like the wings of a bird that rise from the lake to the trees.
My heart wants to sigh like a chime that flies, from a church on a breeze.
To laugh like the brook as it trips and falls over stones on its way.
To sing through the night like a Lark that is learning to play.

I go to the hills when my heart is lonely.
I know I will hear what I've heard before.
My heart will be blessed with the sound of music.
And I'll sing once more.

As a Spring rite, soon we'll have "Maria" celebrate this song in worship one Sunday. And her singing of it will be an invitation for us to engage again with the Christ who plays in creation - the forests, the mountains, the rivers, our gardens - and invites us to do likewise. We will prepare the Jerusalem Cross Garden beds. We will sow the Spring wheat, from which will come our communion bread come Harvest Sunday 2010. We will plant the seed starts to give our growing season an early beginning. And in doing so we will engage the Lenten truth, as Good Friday approaches, that a seed, to do any good at all, must give up its' life.

Perhaps our souls can be engaged yet again as we seek to be inspired by the Jerusalem Cross, calling us to die to self alongside the seeds we plant and regularly find ways to do acts of compassion and acts of justice, even as we do acts of devotion and worship.