This past Sunday was a beautiful day, and I went on a walk with some friends in the New York Botanical Garden, which is across the street from Fordham's campus. The Bronx River runs through the garden, and there was still a thin coating of ice in some sections. This formed a contrast with the clear arrival of spring: the sun was shining, birds were everywhere, and flowers were beginning to bloom.
The coming of spring (and its final full flowering) always makes me think of the "Lusty Month of May" sequence in the musical 'Camelot". That might be a sentiment more suited to Mardi Gras than Lent, and the austerity of Lent certainly must be amplified for Christians in the Southern Hemisphere as it arrives while their year is, so to speak, dying. Our English word "Lent", though, is etymologically linked to springtime, and it's no accident that the church year (which, of course, originated in the Northern Hemisphere) has preparation for Easter culminate at the beginning of spring and climax, more or less, at its culmination.
This past Friday, I went to a Fordham Mimes and Mummers performance of the musical 'Pippin.' One of the messages of that musical (with some nice nuance at the end) is essentially "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may": life is short, so make the most of it. G.K. Chesterton astutely pointed out that such a sentiment is ultimately a sad one because one cannot escape the certainty of future misery. At any rate, the character Bertha in 'Pippin' asserts that you're only as old as you feel. The half of the world that's now experiencing the onset of fall might be sobered by the death of the year. As we in the Northern Hemisphere experience spring (and Christians experience the onset of Lent/Easter), may we be full of zest and new life. What else is there?
