God the Child in Spring

In Eastertide, God is no longer willing to restrain his abundance. It pours out on us as we sleep, on the cold, fresh wind that does his will. 

It begins with a mist of green. 

A trickle of purple henbit. 

A steady rain of dandelion and daffodil. 

Then, a deluge: Violets. Toadstools. Spring beauties. Forsythia. Spirea. Cherry blossoms. Dogwood. Redbud. Worms. Ants. Toads. Lambs. Calves. From the first morning chickadee to the evening’s last frog, the earth is singing. His measure for us is pressed down, shaken together, and running over. 

Many of us can no longer see or feel this God-magic. We have been prevented from noticing or have trained ourselves out of doing so. The lawn is for mowing, the dandelions for spraying. Ants are a nuisance. Lambs are a petting-zoo treat. We take our shears and prune violently at God’s grace, in the name of order and control. 

That is, until a child brings us a dandelion. Or a handful of shiny acorns. A striated piece of gravel. A trembling frog. A maple key. A broken blue robin’s egg. A feather. 

“Look what I FOUND!”

We will not have peace until we acknowledge and enshrine the magnificent bit of nature. There must be a jar of water for the bedraggled weed, a “cage” for the frog, a place of honor for seeds and curiously-shaped rocks. 

“Do you like what I brought for you? Do you like your present?” the child asks, happy and expectant, again and again and again. 

This is God speaking to us. 

“Do you like what I brought for you? Do you like your present?” 

He tugs insistently at the hem of our souls, pointing to a bloom or bud that’s long been beneath our eye level. 

“Look what I FOUND!” 

In Eastertide, we are given to meditating on Christ as the Risen Man, an adult with a glorious body and shining wounds. But ever ancient, ever new, he is also the Child of Spring. 

G.K. Chesterton’s full mystic wisdom was on display when he wrote of  God’s “eternal appetite of infancy,” his tireless wonder, and his “exultation in monotony.” For our Savior repeats again and again with the same joy every spring, never tiring, pouring and splashing grace everywhere. He is never deterred by our inattention or our ungratefulness or our pruning shears. His hands are full of gifts, and he will not stop pestering us until we’ve given them notice.