Passion Sunday in a Woodland....

I sat this morning before a wintry woodland. The trees stand tall, stark, and naked but for the wisps of burnt orange blossoms crowning the tips. The delicate blooms stand in contrast to the powerful energy pumping from the soil, resurrecting life as winter’s cold prison collapses under the under the solstice sun.

Today, Lent moves to Holy Week. It is Passion Sunday to be accurate. The trees seem a fitting meditation in a silent moment. I plan to paint the woodland scene and I’m sketching the trees, perplexed as to how to capture the gnarly bark. I noticed the shadows that play up and down the limbs on their northern sides. They play then across the trunks in overlays of breeze blown movement of trees playing and dancing with the wind for yet another new season.

The seasonal cycling of Lent and Holy week creates a season set apart. The Lenten journey winds through the lengthening sunlight of the day. Lent, lengthen, the same word. I’m wondering about how my life is stretched, lengthen by Lenten disciplines. I am not easily moved by God’s season of life it seems.

Maybe I am like the leaves on the oak tree outside the window. Seven months ago the leaves turned from a soft, pliant green to yellow, orange and then brown. Amazingly, most of the leaves still cling to the mother branch, delicate shards, shredded banners of a life past. If I were to touch them, the leaf would crumble to dust, humus, “from dust we were created and to dust we will return, were the priest’s words as he marked the cross on my forehead six weeks ago. I wonder if I cling too tightly to the life just past?

Yet these leaves cling through winter’s harshest coldest storms. While others drop, these frail oak leaves hold on. Maybe it’s the tree that clings tightly, or are they caught in some eternal embrace of celebration? Perhaps the leaves are in perennial advent, waiting, expecting, desiring to be midwives birthing new life through their stemmed branches.

As Holy Week parades it’s story through our faith lives today, we remember that we cling to Jesus and he to us as we follow in the shadow of his cross. He is the branch and we are the vine. He will never let us go. And so we are content to cling, shriveled, dry, and brittle awaiting our resurrection.

Bob Anderson