There was an incident years ago while I was driving. It was nearly a disaster. I hit a patch of ice and began sliding across the road. Another car was coming toward me. I turned the wheel to the right to avoid it, which only exacerbated the spin, and while thoroughly helpless, I knew I was out of control as the car rolled around. It eventually stopped when it hit a tree. The other car went by. I was safe. I felt spared, delivered. I suspect, on life’s journey we’re spared more than once as I was again after undergoing medical tests
If you’ve undergone medical tests and waited a couple weeks for results you’ll know exactly what I’m about to describe: I first discover how time, that I always thought flew by, now crawls. It barely creeps along while day-by-day I try guessing what my tests may have indicated. You’ll know exactly how my mind does a number on me worse than my enemy ever could; it conjures up the darkest thoughts, the grimmest scenarios while I feel only helpless anxious, uncertain and vulnerable. A week later the phone rings. The doctor says, “It’s benign, nothing to worry about.” I’m not sure whether I want to kiss him or kick him.
I did feel a rush of relief, giddiness, followed by intense gratitude. It was as though I’d been delivered, freely offered a fresh start and another chance at life.
Most have had moments like this. If you are my age, my guess is that you’ve had thousands of such moments. Some moments of deliverance can seem epic while others while nevertheless fresh starts, go unnoticed. The feeling of gratitude lingers. Deliverance and second chances are life’s main rhythm. Spiritual journeys often begin as fresh starts. As a boy, I knew mine had begun, when shortly after the death of my father whom I idolized, my parish priest stepped in to become my surrogate father and help me heal from my loss. It was like finding life after death the way people speak of
As a boy, I knew mine had begun, when shortly after the death of my father whom I idolized, my parish priest stepped in to become my surrogate father and help me heal from my loss. It was like finding life after death the way people speak of resurrection.
Nature, too, witnesses to deliverance. In spring, signs of a fresh start begin appearing – the crocuses here, the daffodils there, later the tulips and then the din of chattering birds checking out real estate for their new home sites. The first lawn cut always smells to me like fresh onions and while the air may remain cool, the sun caresses on my skin, tenderly. I know life is returning. I’m grateful for it. I’ve enjoyed another year of deliverance from winter’s assaults.
And speaking of deliverance, and new beginnings, it’s in the spring that we observe two signature religious festivals: Passover for Jews and Easter for Christians. They are narratives about second chances and fresh starts.
In the Jewish epic of Passover, God sends the angel of death to visit all the first-born children living in Egypt. God instructs Jews to place the blood of a lamb on their door lintels. That way the angel of death will know not to stop there, thus the name, Passover. Close calls like that will always warrant gratitude.
Easter is the festival in which Christians celebrate their belief that Jesus, who was crucified, dead and buried has risen from the grave. It’s called the feast of the Resurrection. It’s another story of a second chance and a new start. We celebrate it by participating in communion called the Eucharist, a word that means, quite literally, to give thanks.
Gratitude, perhaps the closest emotion to love that I am aware of, instinctively makes me want have for others some of the second chances I have been given.
Passover and Easter are ritual expressions of faith journeys and, interestingly, they share a similarity in performing their separate liturgies. Each takes what’s so common to daily life, like eating and drinking, and transforms the table into an act of pure thanksgiving for what the community has received. It’s not so much the food that the food is satisfying but what’s heavenly is gratitude that the communities feel.
Religious rites don’t satisfy many people but there are many other venues in the spring for being grateful. Notice when you begin seeing blue eggs in tiny nests freshly woven from cellophane, sticks and pine straw. What do you think of the first daffodil rising from the ground after its long winter hiatus? And when the tulips come in a little later their color is dazzling. Their simple majesty seems right and good and, as everyone knows, anything right and good is something to be grateful for.
And by the way, that’s why, after a long six-day week, God finally rested, looked at everything that he had made and said, this is good. Did you suppose God finished up in the spring? It could be since we know Adam and Eve weren’t properly dressed for winter.
George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
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