Winter Before Spring: the Fourth Sunday in Lent

"Before spring becomes beautiful it is ugly, nothing but mud and muck...The word humus, the decayed vegetable matter that feeds plants, comes from the same root that gives ride to the word humility. It helps me to understand that the humiliating events of my life...may create the fertile soil in which something new can grow."

--Parker Palmer, contemporary Quaker author

"Everything you need to know about life--about the mysteries of life, about the secret to life--can be learned in a garden, if you pay attention. For those of us hostage to the urban landscape, who pay little attention to the seasons...those of us who proceed from one appointment to the next oblivious to our environment, oblivious to the turning seasons, oblivious to the colors of plants--for us the church's recognition of the forty days of Lent becomes a reminder that we cannot experience the Easter tide of resurrection and renewal until we first go through a period of disequilibrium, of dying, of shedding, of letting go, of winter. You cannot experience spring until you have first experienced winter. You cannot experience Easter, Resurrection Sunday, until you first experience Lent."

--The Rev. Dr. Renita J. Weems, contemporary teacher & minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church

"I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds." --John 12:24

"I have awaited a storm that should deliver me or pluck me away, and now it has come softly, even without my knowledge. But it is here. While I was despairing, thinking everything lost, it was already quietly growing...And now I know that all life is a process of getting ready, of ferment...If the cells and channels but take up and carry the onward surging sap, there will emerge at last rustling, leafy branches--a crown of sunlight and freedom."

--Erich Maria Remarque, German author of All Quiet on the Western Front (1898-1970)

"The goal of human life is not death, but resurrection."
--Karl Barth, Swiss Protestant theologian (1886-1968)