The Eclipse of Hope

Yesterday was one of those perfect days here. The first day of spring was …promising. Warm sun promised of warm air to come. Softening soil promised of soft green growth. Green spears erupting promised of erupting crocus and tulip and day lily.  I remembered the look on our daughter’s face with the first snow six months ago. It was a Bergman face, making words unnecessary, opaque to a momentary darkness within. Recalling the relentless winter a year earlier, her normally joyful face had disclosed, for just that moment, dread.  Autumn and spring. Dread and promise. On Sunday we enter the deepest time of Lent, Passion Sunday, when the dreadful, promising journey of this Jesus begins.

The God I know is one who lays out divinity and humanity like a pair of socks on the bedspread of my life, laying them flat and parallel so it is clear to me that they are a pair. Yesterday when I came in from raking the last few leaves of the autumn – the ones that had spent the winter in the darkness under the bright, now-melted snow – I found a phone message from my doctor’s nurse – that my heart surgery is set tentatively for April 21st.
Last night Kathy courageously decided to join me as I watched the second of Bergman’s trilogy of spiritual films – "Winter Light". While the first, "Through a Glass Darkly", came to some resolution, some growth, this one was a relentless experience of desperation, of the absence of God, the inability to love. It was literally dreadful. Watching it brought to mind, on this day of promise of surgery and healing and new life, the dread of the threat insinuated in it all. When our daughter had looked at that that first snow, the promise of spring had momentarily abandoned her to despair. But yesterday she and Kathy were together for a vernal frolic in the warming woods, a perfect dance of the promise of life breaking through the last banks of melting snow.
Now we courageously enter the Passion, the part of Lent that is the dance of promise and dread. The spinning partners alternately eclipsing each other; we see alternately light and darkness, hope and despair. At times, as in the aptly titled film "Winter Light", darkness and despair will tempt us to forget the hidden dancer, the bright promise, the spring, the life, the love. It will be like that momentary look on our daughter’s face caught on camera interminably. How will we stand it?  While Jesus waited in full potential at the gate of life, the womb of the young girl, Mary was greeted by an angel.  The angel's words are appropriate for us as we wait to join Jesus at the gate to new life, which we call death: “Fear Not!” We will see, as we step however reluctantly into this Good Story that seems so bad, that Jesus in never abandoned by love, though he experiences the moments when in this dance when the light is eclipsed and seems to have been extinguished.

Fear not! Pull up your socks and Enter the Good Story firm in faith in goodness, in the relentlessness of Love. The dark Winter Light is an illusion. This Gospel is too long to memorize; read until something moves in you; stop there and stay with it until you feel like going forward. (Click for the text of the Story)

 

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.