All Things New

Church of All Saints, Siddington, Cheshire

‘Every year... there is a happy coincidence between nature and grace. The resurrection of the year silently makes itself felt just when our minds are full of Resurrection; new life springs from the dead stock of an earlier growth, and when St Augustine salutes the newly baptised as the “fresh buds” of Christendom, you picture him as looking out of the window and pointing to the trees. And then the scruple assails us: Can it really be a coincidence, this harnessing of April and May to the symbolism of Easter-tide? Or did the whole Christian tradition spring out of some nature-myth, and was the story of the Resurrection, like the story of Adonis, only the reflection of a human mood, transposed into a divine setting? 

A doubt which might be plausible, if it were to be imagined that the Resurrection took place in England. But the synchronisation is all wrong; in Palestine the fig-trees were so fully in leaf by Holy Week that you might affect to look for fruit on them; in Palestine they celebrated their harvest-home at Pentecost, just when we are beginning to despair of the hay. No, whatever theories the anthropologists may propose to us, they cannot rob us of this comforting illusion about spring-tide and Easter-tide; it was, after all, a coincidence. Or perhaps a special providence, designed for the benefit of unimaginative Northerners like ourselves.

No, in the spiritual as in the natural world there is recurrence, there is revival. The fields which looked as if they must for ever remain dingy and browned-off, the trees that seemed to be all dead wood, were the fitting symbols of our unjustified despair. When we renewed our baptismal promises at the Easter Vigil, it was not mere make-believe, we were catching at a fresh opportunity of grace, just when nature itself echoed the conviction we were trying to capture, “Behold, I make all things new”. For the elderly, for the disillusioned, there is something auspicious about the slow coming of spring, and its sudden recovery’.

from Lightning Meditations, 1959, by Mgr Ronald Knox, 1888-1957