Rebirth

Cliché though it might be, everyone knows spring is a time of birth and re-birth; the first blush of warmth regenerates you, pervades your limbs with something far more potent than the smell of a new car. Missouri has austere weather and tends to give you the worst of everything -- you may get a foot of snow in the winter and a summer that regularly tops 100 degrees, as we did this past summer and winter. The advantage of this is that you are kept in an almost constant state of longing. A few weeks ago, when I was shuffling around in a foot of snow with a beard of ice, carrying buckets of feed to pigs and chickens, I was longing for spring. A few months before that, I was running around a stadium with a case of beer in 110 degree weather longing for the fall.

Though I sometimes envy the perpetually perfect temperatures on the west coast, I'm not entirely certain such consistency is spiritually healthy. We need time to commune with the gloom of life, to walk into stiff, unfriendly winds, to get in touch with our inner puritan, to feel like sinners in the hands of an angry God. It's a safe trip as long as we get reminded a few months later that mercy wins in the end and the Sun eventually returns. It is no coincidence that spiritually we associate California with cloying answers and polyannaish philosophies. Evil, as Aquinas and Abdu'l-Baha agree, does not have an independent existence of its own, evil being merely the privation of good. Nevertheless, it is sobering to live for a time in the shadow of good.

Along with the seasons I am experiencing my own rebirth lately, and it has come by and large because of plans of mine God has seen fit to thwart. In hindsight, the things I am most thankful for are my plans that God foiled, or my dreams that He spoiled; God is the Great Planner and Dreamer, and we are merely amateurs--therefore, He must also be the Great Spoiler, the Great Burster of Bubbles. Those whom He loves, He chastises.

As Baha'u'llah says in the Hidden Words:

O SON OF MAN! If thou lovest Me, turn away from thyself; and if thou seekest My pleasure, regard not thine own; that thou mayest die in Me and I may eternally live in thee.

Christ reminds us that to lose our lives for His sake is no loss, but rather to be born again in Him; it is the promise of rebirth that makes the sacrifice of ourselves become our renewal.