Lent 3 | Unfolding
The Word
““The unfolding of Your words give light; it imparts wisdom to the simple.” - Psalm 119:30
“How does the Meadow-flower its bloom unfold?
Because the lovely little flower is free
Down to its root, and, in the freedom, bold.”
The Wondering
Here in Charlottesville, spring unfolds, more lovely each day, lending an assurance that beneath the surfaces of fearsome events in the world and our lives, God is moving by means we don’t fully fathom. To live in deep hope requires patience: a consideration that what unfolds is already there, hidden and waiting for soil, sun, water, the fullness of time, the propitious circumstance, the appointed moment.
All of this natural, seasonal unfolding is testimony to how the Spirit works within us and among us, urging, allowing, opening a way, nudging us forward, inviting, preventing, making us willing to stretch and open and receive and reveal what unfolds. Yes, sometimes we decide and determine. But sometimes we simply have to witness and receive.
So let us seek out God’s illuminating words, words made new in each circumstance, and train them, like lamps, on what we face or fear. And then let us watch for what unfolds.
What signs of spring remind you of the Spirit’s work?
What words from Scripture might help you face your fears?
*adapted from Marilyn McEntyre in Where the Eye Alights: Phrases for the Forty Days of Lent
The Wisdom
“Spring Forward” by Abigail Carroll
The crocuses have nudged themselves up
through the snow, have opened, never
are opening,
always daring. Ephemeral prophets,
first of the sun's spring projects, purple-
throated chorus of will-have-beens--
year after
year, their oracles outlast them. Cold's
empire has not yet been undone, but
the cardinals have begun to loudly declare
its undoing
which is as good as the thing itself, as good
as the gutters' wild running, the spilling
of rain down the tar-slick roof, the filling
and pooling,
the annual re-schooling of earth
in the vernal properties of water. A bud
both is and is not a flower: furled flag,
curled-up
tongue of summer, envelope of fire--
What is this world but a seed of desire
some dream-bent farmer sowed in a field
waiting for
the end of winter, waiting to be getting on
with the business of timothy and clover?
Light sends itself, a missive from the future:
it's shining,
a definite shined, a bold, unquestionable
having shone--this because of the paths
it travels, the distance it flies. The crocuses
shiver; still
they will not be deterred from their singing,
from the sure and heady prospect of their
having sung. The notion of green has not
yet occurred
to the ground--twig tips, bulbs, cattails,
bark: all stuck in a past perfect of gray--
but green has occurred to the sun. A kingdom
is in
the making--and in the making has come.