The Instant They Surrender

I have been enamored lately with spring: trees bearing green buds, crocuses announcing the beginning of a new season, tulips springing up, and bright yellow daffodils greeting me on my walks. Every year the wonder of spring amazes me. As I prepare for Holy Week at the monastery, I am aware of how nature parallels the Easter season and the Paschal mystery. Life comes from death. Death cannot overpower life and resurrection. Amazingly, our spirit witnesses that same process in conversion and the journey of our lives.


In a reflection titled, “The Courage of the Seed,” Mark Nepo writes:

All the buried seeds
crack open in the dark
the instant they surrender
to a process they can’t see.
                                                  -- The Book of Awakening

Spring discloses a powerful lesson. All around us, everything small and buried surrenders to a process that none of buried parts can see. And this innate surrender allows everything edible and fragrant to break out of the dark and damp ground into a life we call spring.

Quietly, nature offers us countless models of how to give ourselves over to what appears dark and hopeless, but is really an awakening beyond imagining. Moving through the dark into more abundant life is the Easter of our soul. Like a seed “cracking open” in the process of becoming, may Holy Week open us to the mystery of God’s love blossoming into divine beauty.