Look for the Crocuses. Look for Spring. Dare to Hope.

How to Welcome Spring Back to New England: A Personal Checklist

1)Hang Red Sox flag on the garage mounted flagpole just before Opening Day.

2)Listen to the robins and chickadees who’ve returned to sing of spring.

3)Clean out garage from its salty and muddy winter clutter and mess.

4)Pack away gloves, mittens, hats, scarves, and union suits.

5)Wait with anticipation and joy for the crocuses, the blessed crocuses, to blossom, and then remember to take a photo of the very first one to pop.

That last tradition is one I enjoy and certainly anticipate the most.  Every year in spring, beginning in early March, each morning when I leave from home or at dusk when I return to my suburban house I look in the bare and brown flower beds for the crocuses. These faithfully blossom this time of year as the very first sign of natural life returning to my front yard. Some years there’s still small piles of dirty snow that stick around, as if these too are waiting for those shoots of green to push up through the chilly ground, delicate buds of purple to open up.   

I’ve got a photo of the years’ first crocus going back many years. Chronus vernus is its official botanical name.  I think it should just be called hope. Hopus springus.

Because by the end of a snowy, chilled to the bone kind of winter that we are just now emerging from, I know I need hope. Hope that believes and trusts in the power of the universe and God to spin the world back around to a more favorable angle, so this part of the planet warms again.

But this spring in particular I really, really need to have hope and not just in nature and the environment but in life itself. I need to have hope that the darkness and chill of war and human cruelty that has infected our world in the past year will give way to a new season of light and non-violence.

I need to hope that we will one day enjoy a springtime of a world renewed. A springtime where violence wilts and withers away and peace blossoms again, everywhere from Minnesota to Iran, Venezuela to Washington, D.C.

Some might see such hope as naive, or pollyannish or just not tough enough or hard enough to send away the evil and violence that seems to be running the show in much of Creation these days.  And yet it is claiming hope, more than any other emotion or belief, that has sustained and yes, saved humans for thousands of years, especially when the winters are the longest and the nights darkest.

In a way the worse that the world gets the more we must hope, and not just in words or prayers but in action too. Hope that embraces each and every child of God, no one left out or left behind. Hope that is merciful and compassionate especially towards those who live on the margins of life: the innocent, the stranger, the sick, the very old and the very young.   

Hope that just refuses to die.

That hopeful spirit is the essence of my faith tradition, especially in spring. When Christians celebrate Easter, when we emerge from a Good Friday of death and despair, we dare to trust that the sun will come up on Sunday, that evil will be defeated, and that love is finally the most powerful force ever, and not just on earth but in the entire universe.

That’s why I choose to look for and to trust in the crocuses and in spring itself. God is good. Life is good. Hope will win. The buds will blossom again.

So, welcome back spring.  Welcome back crocuses. May you dare us to hope.  

(The views expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect the views of the people and church I serve nor the United Church of Christ.)

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

 

 

 

  

 

Read a Book. Change Your Life. Change the World.

"The right stories, read at the right time, can be as important as shelter or food. They can help us to escape calamity, and heal us in its aftermath.” --Terri Windling, American fantasy author

Can books save us? Save our world?

If one could be saved by, say, the sheer volume of books consumed and collected, then “Hallelujah!” I’m saved! You see, I kind have a book accumulation…well, problem. I’m not a book hoarder but I do have something like 1,000 books, probably more, scattered all over my house. Books on bookshelves and end tables. Books piled high upon a bureau I long ago stopped using. Books on the dining room table and the kitchen table, on the shelves in bedroom closets. My nightstand groans under the weight of four stacks of books and yet, I still buy more books. 

I’m definitely a bibliophile which means “a lover of books.” And yes, a bibliomaniac meaning a person who, “has an insatiable desire to collect books.” The Japanese have a wonderful word for folks who acquire books and then let them pile up all over the house—tsundoku.

Now that is absolutely me. Maybe you too.

I have lots of family and friends who are book crazy. My colleague Scott and I used to go to preacher’s conventions (there is such a thing!) and he’d buy so many books on the art of homiletics (another cool word!), that we’d have to visit the local post office before going to the airport. With so many tomes purchased, he needed to mail them home, lest he get penalized for overweight luggage!

Some folks read with a Kindle, or Kobo or iPad and don’t own too many volumes. But I need the feel and the heft and tactile activity, the physicality needed to read a paper book.

Which brings me back to my original questions.

Can books save us? Can books save the world?

Creation certainly needs saving: from wars of bombs that hurt and kill and wars of words that hurt and kill the spirit. We need saving from the fears and suspicions that separate us from fellow children of God. We need saving from staying on our own little islands of identity and beliefs.   We need to be reminded of the goodness of the world and its citizens, the common good, and God’s good too.

And all of this can be found in books.

Books and the stories and ideals they contain can teach us, inspire us and empower us. Rescue us from our worst impulses. Books can give us the wisdom and resolve to resist Herodian wannabee kings and their sycophantic minions.  Books feed our spirits.    

Read or reread the science fiction of George Orwell’s “1984” or Margaret Atwood’s “A Handmaid’s Tale” and get a glimpse into the powers and principalities we are called to overcome. Read Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and remember the eternal need for compassion and simple human decency.  Read Alex Haley’s biography of Malcolm X’s or Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and learn that resistance against oppressive institutional and individual racism has been going on too long and must go on. Poetry can save our souls too, by Maya Angelou. "You may write me down in history, With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt, But still, like dust, I'll rise." By Emily Dickinson, ““Hope” is the thing with feathers - That perches in the soul - And sings the tune without the words - And never stops - at all.”

Read a book. Have hope. Rise up!       

So many books, old and new, dogeared from so many readings or fresh off the shelf from your local independent bookstore…these are waiting to change you, me, and this world, of that I am sure. So, let’s buy them and borrow them and lend them. Then with a favorite beverage at hand, read. Just read. Read as we lean against the pole on the subway. “Read” as we stream an audio book in the car. Read in bed each night, and pick up where you left off the night before, and turn the pages and be transported somewhere else.

Books have always changed this world, challenged norms, and started revolutions. Think of the Bible or Thomas Paine’s booklet “Common Sense” or “The Diary of Anne Frank.” Books expand our minds. Enlarge our hearts. Shape our souls.

Can books save us?

I think so.

I know so.

God, I hope so.

(Two world changing books I am reading right now: “Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad" by Eric Foner and "The Ragged Edge of Night" by Olivia Hawker, a story about the German resistance to Nazism set in a small rural village.  What are you reading that helps you change the world? Please let me know!)

(The views expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect the views of the people and church I serve nor the United Church of Christ.)

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.