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.