Hallo again to all.

Spring has sprung in our part of the world. Temperate weather, gentle rains, and green shoots breaking through the firm soil. Flowers of varying types are beginning to bloom, our autos are covered in a dusting of light green pollen each morning, and we ourselves have begun planting herbs in our small garden.

We visited a farm recently. Baby chicks flitted around their house while small piglets and little lambs clamored around their mothers. The bright barnyard sounds and smells filling the air.

So too, have we begun sneezing and coughing, our eyes running and noses stuffed. Allergy season is upon us, brought upon by these lovely signs of new life.

The Easter metaphor for this timing is one we assume our readers know well. The coldness emptiness of winter leading to death and new life through the resurrection. 

The Revd John McCloud Campbell Crum (1872-1958), priest, poet, and theologian, who served, among other places as a canon at Canterbury Cathedral, said this simply, yet firmly in his Easter hymn:

Now the green blade riseth, from the buried grain,
Wheat that in the dark earth many days has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

In the grave they laid Him, Love who had been slain,
Thinking that He never would awake again,
Laid in the earth like grain that sleeps unseen:
Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.

Forth He came at Easter, like the risen grain,
Jesus who for three days in the grave had lain;
Quick from the dead the risen One is seen:
Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.

When our hearts are wintry, grieving, or in pain,
Jesus' touch can call us back to life again,
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.

This works in much, though certainly not all, of the northern hemisphere. What is the Easter imagery where you live? Let us know.

See you next week, when it will still be Easter.

All of us at Anglicans Online

28 April 2019
http://anglicansonline.org