Resurrection Follows Every Death
Novena ritual, reflection questions, and prayers.
Easter 2020 is still days away but I think it’s important to begin this novena offering messages of hope in the midst of the destruction and desolation that’s happening in so many lives because of COVID-19.
During a dark time many years ago, I went hiking and found a tree growing out of an old, decaying, moss-covered cedar stump. I dubbed it the Resurrection Tree.
The new tree was not a cedar but some other kind of pine whose seed had dropped into the decaying mass to create a tenacious, determined new life. It was already about twenty-five feet tall and quite a few feet in circumference with its roots thick and draped over the old stump. The roots clung to the bark of the old cedar, nourishing the new tree as they reached further downward each year until they finally found purchase in the loamy earth.
The old cedar stump was a good ten feet high and at least 16 feet in diameter, the remnants of a massive, majestic tree that must have succumbed to old age, disease, or some force of nature that broke it and seemingly destroyed its life.
Yet some little seed, teaming with new life-potentiality and blowing quite high off the ground, settled nearly dead-center in the old stump. With the seedling so high off the ground, animals could not snack on it and so it grew. But rather than being able to send its shoots deep, it had to send them wide until they grew over the stump in every direction.
This image of resurrection reminds me that wondrous, and sometimes unimaginably strong, life takes purchase and grows in new and different ways beyond what I could have imagined.
The deaths large and small that our circumstances sometimes offer up do not have to be the last word for a tenacious, determined person. Like the seedling that found new life and reached out in every direction to ensure its survival, we too can not only survive but thrive as we send our roots out through the darkness of confusion, loss, and fear.
New life is sometimes found in the most unusual and unexpected places. All we have to do is keep reaching for it.