Lent: Living

The view from my window is as bleak as it gets. 

There are no flowers lining the driveway that we may marvel at, no red-breasted robins sitting astride the branches that we may espy as they sing. No butterflies flitter past on wings of bluest gossamer. Even the feral cats that slink after their prey in deadly poetry are missing. There's just snow, endless fields of it. All I can see sticking out of it is this brown stick.

I'm on a spaceship 3 million years in the future, lost deep in space, and the computer is talking to me. "They're all dead, Dave," the computer says as it tries to get through to me. "Dave, they're all dead."

Myth tells us that when the god Hades abducted Persephone and took her away to be his wife, will she or no, Persephone's mother went mad. For six months Demeter walked the earth, filled with a parent's grief and fear as she sought her daughter, and during that time nothing grew.

This myth is one of the crueler mystery stories the ancients told about the cyclical passage of the seasons. Even children's versions of the story can't fully paper over what happened when they say Hades fell in love with Persephone and carried her away to marry him.

Because of what Hades did, for six months every year Persephone is found not in golden fields but within the halls of the dead. For six months of the year, no flower blooms, no stalk of wheat grows, no trees bud.

Dave. they're all dead. They're all dead, Dave.

Or are they?

The mystery is cyclical and the story continues. Demeter finds her daughter who is returned to her. In the world of mortals, seeds germinate, and with a sleepy yawn new shoots stretch their way upward while roots reach down into the soil in search of nutrients and water.

So it is with us. In the Lenten season we wait and watch for the first signs of a spring that will heal the wounds brought by Hades. And that old brown stick? Green oak leaves will appear in the spring and we'll find that we numbered it among the dead like Persephone, but it was living all the time.