From Fr James
“Arise, my beloved, my dove, my beautiful one, and come! For see, the winter is past, the rains are over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth.” - Song of Songs 2:10-12
Spring may still be a way’s away, but the spring of which today’s first reading and the Scriptures speak isn’t one that’s bound by the season. Just as the growing presence of the sun, the warmth of the day, the thawing of the earth, and the coming of the rains prepare the way for a new fullness of life in nature, the scriptural spring also heralds the coming of a new fullness of life, albeit of a different nature. Rather than longer days, warmer weather, and water from the heavens, this new life is presaged by the light of God which darkness cannot overcome, the all-consuming fire of His love, and the Spirit from Heaven which fills the hearts of men to proclaim God’s salvation for His people. And rather than the simple recognition of yet one more stage in the endless cycle of subsequent seasons, the new life of the scripture’s spring is something entirely new: something the world has never seen, but has been prepared for since the days of our first parents; something which will irrevocably change and bless the entire created world and everything in it until the end of time.
The Creator has become part of His creation: God has become man.
It is through the coming of the Son that avenues of grace and new life are torn open and poured out upon the world and its peoples. All of human kind, struggling under their self-forged chains of sin, is offered salvation, new-found freedom, and the fullness of life, by the self-humiliating love of God. This True Spring of Eternal Life (of which the yearly season is only shadowy sign and poor imitation) comes to us slowly, humbly, and hidden, made possible by one girl’s life opened to God: blessed in belief, blessed among women, and blessed in the fruit of her womb. By her will united to God’s, mankind’s New Life enters the world, which she holds in her arms, wraps in cloth to keep warm against the winter’s cold, and lays in a manger to rest. This New Life would not find its work of salvation fulfilled until many years later when His body would once again be held in His mother’s arms, wrapped in a cloth, and laid to rest in another man’s tomb, but at least that work could begin, all because of a life open to God.
Every Christian life is called to this: to receive the Word of God, to carry it within them, and to give new birth to God’s salvation in the world. But it all begins with a life open to God…