Already Rising (Easter Day)

The osprey are back. I heard them before I saw them — that high, sharp cry cutting across the pond like an announcement nobody asked for and everybody needed. The forsythia is on the edge of erupting. The tulip magnolia buds are fat and furry, holding everything they have, not quite open but unmistakably ready. Two juvenile bald eagles have been showing up at sunset, wings still ragged and unfinished-looking, like teenagers who have grown too fast and haven't quite grown into themselves yet. And the red wing blackbirds — they have been conducting what I can only describe as choir practice at dusk, erupting in loud, overlapping song that fills the whole yard and makes no apologies.

The pond didn't wait for Easter morning to begin its resurrection. It started without us.

I keep thinking about something my mother used to say this time of year, every year, as she knelt in the garden on Good Friday. Anything you plant on Good Friday is bound to rise. She said it the way people say things they know to be true because the earth itself has told them. She has been gone over a year now, and I am planting with renewed hope.

The poet Siddharth Pandey writes that everything is alive and everything is speaking. Standing at the pond this week, I have no argument with him. The water is speaking. The osprey are speaking. The magnolia buds, still sealed but straining, are speaking in the only language they have — the slow, certain language of becoming. The mosquitoes arrived this week along with the warm weather. Every silver lining has a cloud, I guess.

Easter is the church catching up to what creation has known all along: that the ground holds life even when nothing is visible, that burial is not the end of the story, and that what is planted in darkness rises toward light with a fidelity that has never once failed.

The first disciples came to the tomb expecting death and found it empty. I suspect the garden around them was already in full voice — birds, new growth, the smell of turned earth — and that they were simply too grief-stricken to notice it. The creation was already singing the answer to the question they hadn't yet thought to ask.

The osprey knew. The robins knew. The tulip magnolia, every bud a sealed promise, knew.

Christ is risen. The pond has been trying to tell us that for weeks.

A Prayer:

Gracious God, who planted life in the darkness of the earth and called it good, who laid your Son in the cold ground and could not be held there: teach us to trust what we cannot yet see opening. The osprey have returned. The buds are straining at their coverings. Everything is speaking, if we have ears to hear. May we plant what we are given to plant, and trust the rising to you.With Christ, who was buried like a seed on Good Friday and rose as the firstfruits of a spring that will never end. Amen..