A green shoot grows
out of an old tree stump
announcing to the world
that power lies within death
All the resurrections
ever birthed in this world
find a sister in this green shoot growing
from the old wooden stump.
Things in me that have died,
They are waiting to give rise
to some green shoot
of a sister.
They are inviting me
to faith in resurrection
and reverence
for old tree stumps.
Joyce Rupp, Rest Your Dreams on a Little Twig, Sorin Books, 2003
One year, for my springtime birthday, David gave me
a new pot. In the pot was a crack, a wound he had
torn into it before the firing. Through the crack
grew a green shoot of ivy he had planted in the
hollow of the vessel. It sits on a bookshelf as a
reminder, a witness to the ways that new life seeks
its ways through the wounds.
"Anticipate resurrection," Terry Tempest Willianms
urges. In the deepest depths, in the hollws of our
lives and of our own flesh, there are luminous
thresholds whose edges we find only by tracing the
openings they offer. Christ, who in his
resurrection still bore the wounds of his
crucifixion, stands ever at the threshold. He is
both a tough and graceful companion, given as he is
to offering both challenge and comfort for the way.
Anticipate resurrection. Surely it comes.
Door by door, it comes.
Jan Richardson, Garden of Hollows: Entering the Mysteries of Lent & Easter,
Wanton Gospeller Press, 2006
