It is not easy to convey a sense of wonder, let alone resurrection wonder, to another. It’s the very nature of wonder to catch us off guard, to circumvent expectations and assumptions. Wonder can’t be packaged, and it can’t be worked up. It requires some sense of being there and some sense of engagement.
― Eugene H. Peterson

A single forsythia bush is blooming along the path at the Nature Center where I walk each morning. Canadian geese have paired up and nest in the inlet of the pond along the trail. At dawn, the trees, just beginning to bud, are alive with birds. After months of walking in the dark and silence, all this seems a miracle. Of course, I’ve anticipated the arrival of spring. I’ve known that it will come, and that the earth will green again. Still, as pastor, theologian, and poet Eugene H. Peterson claims, it’s the very nature of wonder to catch us off guard. And each morning when the sun blooms above the hills–all orchid and rose–I find myself thinking: how could I begin to put this into words? It seems that I should try. And, as a poet, I do. But this kind of wonder requires some sense of being there, some sense of engagement.

Years ago, I bought a bag of tulip bulbs from one of my children’s school fundraisers. Eager, but naive, I planted them in a bed just outside our backdoor, imagining the riot of color that would bloom in spring. When my tulips didn’t bloom, I asked friends if they’d ever had this happen. One friend asked me to recount how I’d planted them. What do you mean? I said as I felt a growing sense of shame. I just planted them. Tenderly, she suggested that I may have planted the bulbs upside down. Later, I learned that bulbs can bloom regardless of how they’re planted, but for whatever reason, mine didn’t. Until one morning, I looked out my kitchen window to find that–against all odds–one bulb had broken the earth and stood alone in the flower bed. Days later, there was a glorious pink bud and then a blossom. I recall thinking that this was resurrection wonder. From an empty bed of earth, from seemingly hopeless odds, a tulip broke free. I was sorely amazed.

The earth, by its very nature, grounds us in our mortality. Like the flora and fauna around us, we live and die. And yet, the earth gives us glimpses of immortality, as the death of winter gives way to the abundant life of spring. And this abundance, this victory over death, astounds me. Every time.

In an epitaph for his wife, Joy Davidman, author and theologian C. S. Lewis writes:

Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hopes that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.

This is resurrection wonder: that we might cast off our clothes, that we might be re-born from holy poverty, that we might have our Easter Days. Wishing you a blessed Easter.

Resurrection

A wood thrush has thrown itself against the window
and sits stunned now on my front porch.
It must have seen a way through 
into the day that was blooming so brightly over the hills.

It must have felt a quickening 
in its small bird bones, a joy flickering
through its small bird wings, building

into a desire so great that it must have flown 
without thought, just given itself to the air,
as birds will. 

And wingless now,
it works to quiet the riot of heart 
threatening to undo it.

What must it take to pull yourself in like this? 
To pull in and down,
to shut out light and flight,

to move deeply into the core
where all-things-bird germinate.

Now, it drops its head.
It’s so still that I think it must be dying.
So, I close the door on a life that’s been
and might be. 

But an hour later, it’s gone.
Not even a feather marks the place where it fell.

And I’m senselessly happy that it’s risen,
finding a way through to the sky and the day
and beyond.

          --Shannon Vesely