Lent 4 | Beloved from Afar

“The LORD appeared to me from afar, saying, ‘I have loved you with an everlasting love; Therefore I have drawn you with lovingkindness.’”

— Jeremiah 31:3

When Lent feels long, take heart! Look up: the Lord appears on the horizon and draws you near, dissolving the desert distances with divine lovingkindness. Hear God’s words to you this day, “You are precious and honored in my sight, and I love you.” (Isaiah 43:4)

The lengthening Lenten days announce the earthly assurance of new life as buds and blossoms unfurl. “Cold’s empire has not yet been undone, but the cardinals have begun loudly to declare its undoing.”

Believe this: You are beloved. Salvation is at hand. Resurrection is near.

“God loved us before he made us; and his love has never diminished and never shall…and in this love our life is everlasting…In our creation we had beginning; but the love in which he made us was in him since before time began; and in this love we have our beginning. And all this shall be seen in God without end.” Julian of Norwich

“Spring Forward” by Abigail Carroll

The crocuses have nudged themselves up
through the snow, have opened, never
are opening,
always daring, Ephemeral prophets,

first of the sun’s spring projects, purple-
throated chorus of will-have-beens—
year after
year, their oracles outlast them. Cold’s

empire has not yet been undone, but
the cardinals have begun to loudly declare
its undoing,
which is as good as the thing itself, as good

as the gutters’ wild running, the spilling
of rain down the tar-slick roof, the filling
and pooling,
the annual re-schooling of earth

in the vernal properties of water. A bud
both is and is not a flower: furled flag,
curled-up
tongue of summer, envelope of fire—

What is this world but a seed of desire
some dream-bent farmer sowed in a field
waiting for
the end of winter, waiting to be getting on

with the business of timothy and clover?
Light sends itself, a missive from the future:
it’s shining,
a definite shined, a bold, unquestionable

having shone—this because of the paths
it travels, the distances it flies. The crocuses
shiver; still
they will not be deterred from their singing,

from the sure and heady prospect of their
having sung. The notion of green has not
yet occurred
to the ground—twig tips, bulbs, cattails,

bark: all stuck in a past perfect of gray—
but green has occurred to the sun. A kingdom
is in
the making—and in the making has come.

Image: Christen Yates ,“A Coming Light” oil on birch panel framed in pine. 12.5 x 12.5 in.