Simple: Flowers

"Death is something empires worry about, not something gardeners worry about. It's certainly not something resurrection people worry about." 

-Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday.

When I want to explain Lent and Easter to my children, I give them seeds.

"You bury these in the dirt," I tell them. "It's kind of cool and dark, and it's very hidden. You cover it and water. I wonder if the poor seed is lonely? Oh, but don't worry, don't worry. The sun and the warm will come, and the seed will break, have a little death, but then, the flower."

I am not a good or graceful gardener. My kids watch with a mix of wonder and confusion as mom huffs around the dirt, digging this and that, making holes, and inviting them to drop in seeds, or bulbs, or a tangled mass of roots from a plastic container. 

They are unimpressed. 

But now, the cold and dark and lonely they get, so they ask, "Will it come up? Will it grow? Will we see it?"

"Yes, we'll see it soon. I'm not sure when," I say. "Maybe in a week or so. It might take closer to a month, but we'll look for it. We'll keep looking."

Lent is like this, I say. It's maybe a little dark, a little cool-feeling, maybe lonely and sad in some ways. But we look for Easter, just like we look for the flower. And seeds, bulbs, these hunks of potato? They have a kind of death, very much like we believe Jesus had, but a new life comes.

I'm unsure if I'm carrying the metaphor forward 100% correctly, but we continue the conversation all season, talking about flowers and burial and death and resurrection nearly every day that we visit our planting spots, and that is something.

Like I said, I'm not a very good gardener. I'm clumsy and kill more often than I cultivate (there's a metaphor in that, too, I'm sure, and I'm trying to grow through that!). Mostly I'm a Believer who is trying to work out what resurrection means, what grief means, and what it means to hold death and life and brokenness and renewal in the same belief system. Flowers --the preparing, the planting, the waiting, the watching, and finally the joy!-- give me a good idea of what, in fact, it means.

The watching and waiting for flowers is so much like Easter for me that it's no surprise, I guess, how much waiting on flowers has helped during this season of Covid-19. This season feels so strange, lonely in so many ways, full of it's own deaths and griefs--deaths of actual life, deaths of little things and normalcies I know. 

Yet flowers teach me that there is life beyond the graves, even springing from them. So I trust, and wait, and hope. And I keep planting flowers.