“My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.” (Song of Solomon 2:10-12)
This passage from the Song of Solomon speaks to us of rebirth and resurrection as surely as any passage from the Gospels that is likely to be read this morning in churches around the world. It is no accident, I think, that the Christian story of resurrection is set in the springtime, when the whole world conspires to burst forth in the renewal of life. It is, however, an accident of geography, I suppose, since this linkage of springtime and resurrection only works in the northern hemisphere. And it works best in those latitudes and years where the first buds and blossoms emerge right around the time of Easter itself, which is a variable celebration, occurring anywhere from March 22nd to April 25th, depending on the timing of the paschal full moon. (The range for Passover is nearly as long at 30 days.) This is what happens when theologians and astronomers hang out together and compromise: it’s scheduling chaos, or at least confusion. While the spring equinox has only varied by four days since the implementation of the Gregorian calendar, Easter can fall on any day over a five-week span of time, which is more or less one-third of a season, if you’re under the illusion that the seasons are of equal length this far north. So the warmth this day brings generally depends upon how late it falls.
Still, I can feel springtime in the air, and I sense that nature is rising again from its winter rest, although the Earth is never quite dormant – not even in winter. But the snow is melting, the air is warming, sap is surely beginning to rise in the trees, the birds are returning from their winter nesting grounds, and the first crocuses will soon lift their heads above the ground. The winter is not quite past, but it’s losing its grip on this part of the Earth and the weather seems increasingly fair.
“I will wax romantic about spring and its splendours in a moment,” wrote Parker Palmer, “but first there is a hard truth to be told: before spring becomes beautiful, it is plug ugly, nothing but mud and muck. I have walked in the early spring through fields that will suck your boots off, a world so wet and woeful it makes you yearn for the return of ice. But in that muddy mess, the conditions for rebirth are being created.”
Whatever else it may mean to is, springtime is the season of resurrection in both the popular imagination and the history of our religious culture, whether or not you believe the biblical account of the death and reputed resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. Like springtime itself, the final days of Jesus were something of a “muddy mess” before they were a triumph. He sank as low as it was possible to sink before achieving victory, whether we consider the story history or folklore, literal fact or literary device. The power of familiar stories to inspire and motivate, to stir our hearts and minds, is not dependent on their historicity. Sometimes we abandon ourselves to imagination because our aspirations transcend everyday experience, whether at the cinema or in the church.
“To be [resurrected] in the noblest sense is to undergo that transformation of interests and loyalties by which one can live not only for the highest fulfillments of [their] own time, but for the highest fulfillments of all time,” wrote Henry Nelson Wieman and Regina Wescott Wieman in their landmark work, Normative Psychology of Religion. “It is that reorganization of the personality which enables one to live for those unexplored possibilities which transcend all time, but are nevertheless, real possibilities of existence …” They are real possibilities because we can approximate them, to greater or lesser degrees, as individuals and even as whole societies. In past centuries, this unrealized possibility was called the kingdom of God; in the twentieth century, advocates of the Social Gospel saw this realm of possibility as a redemption to be achieved in this world through human effort, some calling it the Cooperative Commonwealth while others named it the Good Society.
“Jesus stands out in human history preeminently as living for a realm of value called the kingdom of God,” declared the Wiemans. “It was highly impractical. His highest loyalty was given to values which cannot be actualized in any one particular form of existence or any one epoch of history, … Nevertheless, the kingdom of love for which he lived was and is a possibility of existence in the sense that it can be approximated to some indefinite degree.”
Even though it may be quite impossible for us to accept the physical resurrection of Jesus as a fact of history, we may yet embrace the Easter myth as it has come down to us – a curious mix of pagan rites and Jewish festivals, Christian legends and folk traditions – as a reminder of the everyday resurrections we experience: the constant rebirth of the world and its creatures, the cycles of life which assure us of the unending possibilities for beginning anew, our daily rising above despair and defeat and, yes, even death.
There are countless when we may burst forth with a new sense of being alive following a period of difficulty, even despair. And while we commonly think of Ebenezer Scrooge as a character who belongs to Christmas, did his transformation at the end of A Christmas Carol not bear the marks of a resurrection? His encounters with spirits through a frightening dreamscape led him to become a new person, a restored soul, a man who transcended what he had become to emerge as someone else, someone better.
Most of us live through challenges and changes, difficulties and despair, disappointment and defeat, many times through the course of our lives – and more often than not, we emerge clearer, wiser, stronger than before. Sometimes the change in us is so dramatic, that we emerge on the other side feeling almost as if we had become a different person that the one whom we had been. Or perhaps we simply come to know how blessed we are for the experience, even if we wouldn’t have chosen it, and wouldn’t want to live through it again. What is true for individuals can be true for whole societies.
There is nothing quite like the experience of rising again after some great difficulty or disappointment. We have faced a trial, we have been tested, we have endured, and then we rise again. When the muck can no longer suck our boots off, or when we have developed the strength to resist it, we rise again and move forward.
In a documentary about the late Canadian singer-songwriter Stan Rogers, One Warm Line, Robert Cusick, told the story of the sinking of the S.S. Marine Electric, a cargo ship that went down off the coast of Virginia in February of 1983. Cusick was the chief mate aboard the 605-foot vessel and one of only three out of 34 crew members to survive the disaster. Passing through a fierce storm, the crew noticed the vessel going down by the head and radioed for assistance. After a couple hours, the ship to broke up and rolled over. Hitting the four-degree water, Cusick swam had and fast to avoid the ship’s vortex, eventually reaching a swamped lifeboat. But even in the boat, he was far from safe. “As the night wore on, and the seas kept smashing down on top of me, and I finally got the feeling that I just couldn’t make it anymore. And I was just about ready to give up when all of a sudden the words came into my mind, ‘Rise again, rise again.” … He sang it and shouted it in between the waves that crashed over the lifeboat, this song by Stan Rogers that he had learned only the year before.
Rise again, rise again—
Though your heart it be broken
And life about to end;
No matter what you've lost,
Be it a home, a love, a friend:
Like the Mary Ellen Carter, rise again. (Stan Rogers)
Bob Cusick later reflected, “I firmly believe that, if it wasn’t for that happening to me, I just was in a position where I couldn’t have come through. And that song made the difference in me living through that night. There isn’t any question in my mind whatsoever about it.”
Another Maritimes songwriter, Leon Dubinsky, captured the essence of the human triumph over adversity when he composed this morning’s anthem, “Rise Again,” for the Cape Breton Rise and Follies some four decades ago. Seeking “to inspire resilience and solidarity” during a period of economic upheaval that was faced by the people of Cape Breton Island. Dubinsky sought to remind folks, in his own words, of “the cycles of immigration, the economic insecurity of living in Cape Breton, the power of the ocean, the meaning of children, and the strength of home given to us by our families, our friends, and our music.” The song took on a life of its own beyond the Follies – and far beyond Nova Scotia. It became part of the repertoire of Anne Murray and Rita MacNeil, the Rankin Family and Men of the Deeps, and has circled the globe in its appeal to a remarkably diverse group of people.
If “The Mary Ellen Carter is a sailors’ song, then “Rise Again” drops us into the midst of nature and the cycle of the seasons, finding meaning in our children and companions, even in the face of stormy skies and the unrelenting forces of creation.
As sure as the sunrise,
As sure as the sea,
As sure as the wind in the trees. (Leon Dubinsky)
And this brings us back to springtime, the season of song and renewal, resurgence and resurrection, a reminder the life eternally begins anew and our lives are but a single generation within the sweep of time, all the more precious because we are each unique and unrepeatable.
“Though spring begins slowly and tentatively, it grows with a tenacity that never fails to touch me,” wrote Parker Palmer. “The smallest and most tender shoots insist on having their way, coming up through ground that looked, only a few weeks earlier, as if it would never grow anything again. The crocuses and snowdrops do not bloom for long. But their mere appearance, however brief, is always a harbinger of hope, and from those small beginnings, hope grows at a geometric rate. The days get longer, the winds get warmer, and the world grows green again.”
For us, the resurrection within is an everyday experience: as common as mud and as refreshing as a spring stream. And beyond our individual experiences of renewal, which can come to us at any time, we are best reminded of the resurgence and renewal of life each year in the springtime, when the green Earth returns following the winter and the great outdoors beckons us to leave our burroughs and our homes to venture forth into the world, embracing all that life has to offer. We rise again – day in, day out – in the renewal of our lives, and of life itself.
We rise again in the faces of our children;
We rise again in the voices of our song;
We rise again in the waves out on the ocean,
And then we rise again. (Leon Dubinsky)
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