By Stephen P. White
I have what I like to consider a healthy obsession with bulbs. I’m not referring to the ones that screw into an electric lamp. I mean flower bulbs: tulips, jonquils, daffodils, crocuses, snowdrops, and the like. I bury them in the ground in the fall. And as soon as the frozen ground softens into mud, green things start to sprout.
While the rest of the world (including the snow that lingers by the curb) thinks it’s still winter, the bulbs won’t hear of it. Bulbs are unstoppable. Once they emerge—those little green tips, sometimes tinged with a vinous red—there’s no turning back. Winter is over, and all the cold snaps and late-season snowfalls are in vain.
As we say in our family every year when the first crocuses appear: «Aslan is on the move.»
The arrival of spring, of course, is a metaphor for the resurrection. Here we are in Lent, and what we see around us in nature parallels our Lenten journey. The first spring flowers are harbingers of the coming joys of Easter. The bulbs that «died» and were buried have emerged more glorious and alive than ever.
And every child knows this. At least, that’s how it used to be. I hope children still learn such things.
Right now, winter is losing the same battle it loses every March. And just like every year, the bulbs are pushing aside the sodden earth and emerging clean, surprisingly green, and swollen with new life. Somehow, the arrival of the spring bulbs, their sheer novelty, is always astonishing. I know from the calendar that spring is coming, of course. And I planted those bulbs precisely so I could see them in the spring.
Yet spring arrives, and these living beings that weren’t there before (at least not to my eyes) push through the cold, sweet-smelling earth with a contagious and irrepressible vitality. One could almost believe that the spring sun warms more because of the emerging flowers, and not the other way around. Every spring feels, in some way, like the first.
I remember some verses about spring by Gerard Manley Hopkins:
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden…
But it happens again and again, repeatedly. Every year, the bulbs drive winter away. Every year, these little floral gems emerge, looking like the newest things in all of Creation. Every year, nature’s metaphor for the resurrection is enacted in full view. Every year, it’s astonishing to see something so absolutely new under the sun.
And here’s another metaphor, one that’s more subtle and harder to learn than the first. A metaphor that has taken me many springs—many Lents and many Easters—to understand. It’s a metaphor about old things and new things. About past things made present. About grace and nature. About creation and repetition. About the shocking novelty and gratuity of something totally predictable and expected.
The Lord said:
Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.
The seed goes down into the earth. It dies. But then it rises again to bear much fruit. The bulb is buried under dirt, snow, and ice. From that death emerges a new and glorious flower. So far, so good. If we saw this happen once, and only once, we would think it a miracle. If it happens again and again and again, is it any less miraculous?
The Lord said:
Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life.
An innocent man gives up his life. He dies. He rises to new life, to eternal life. A man takes bread and wine, blesses them, and gives them to his disciples; his body and his blood. If it happens once, it’s a miracle. But what if that same miracle is made present to us, not once, but again and again and again?
This metaphor, if you can follow me, comes closer to what I love about spring bulbs. This relentless repetition of the miracle, the scandalous made so everyday that we might hardly notice it, is why I love those soft green and red tips that poke through the ground and seek the sun.
They are a miracle in themselves. But they return again and again every year. Without fail. They come whether I notice them or not. The miracle is tireless. The miracle pursues us. And despite all that repetition, it never loses any of its freshness or novelty. Every spring might as well be the first spring. Every miracle might as well be the act of Creation itself.
If I had only seen one tulip or one crocus in spring, I would know the miracle. But knowing that it repeats, repeats with purpose and patience, again and again, dazzles the mind. If I had been there that Friday, so many years ago, and if I had only seen the empty tomb on Sunday morning, I would know the miracle. Yet I find it there on the altar—I find Him there—day after day.
To say «dazzled» is an understatement.
About the author
Stephen P. White is executive director of The Catholic Project at The Catholic University of America and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.