Having come out of a sudden and wicked cold snap, it’s almost alarming to see a clear blue sky, hear birds singing, note the first buds of new growth forming. Omigosh, is it possible that spring will come this year?

What a silly question. Of course it will, but it snuck up on us this year, and so I imagine that everyone in the area is delighting in being able to go outside in a sweater rather than a coat. The air outside has a wonderful crispness to it, and the early morning stillness of winter is replaced with stirrings of wildlife poking its head out.

When I sat in the den this morning, a grackle was outside on the garage roof singing as if its heart would burst. Grackles are such ordinary-looking birds — even their name is drab and unlovely: grackle. It sounds like a bad guy in a Star Wars movie. They don’t have the brilliant prettiness in the looks or the song of a cardinal, and they don’t have the brassiness of a robin. But they seem to want to make up for it in volume, variety and sincerity, and you can see their blunt brown little bodies all inflated with the effort of the constant flow of cheeps, chortles, twerps, skeerts and other vocal embroidery. If they are a character in Star Wars it would have to be R2-D2, just based on the sound effects.

Revelling in the possibility of spring as I was, it was delightful to read a passage in “Orthodox Spirituality” that sounded as if the author had suddenly gone for a walk in a springtime garden. The book is subtitled “An Outline of the Orthodox Ascetical and Mystical Tradition”, and it would be too difficult for me to make my way through if the author — “a monk of the Eastern Church” — didn’t go light on the theology. All the same, it isn’t light reading, and so I was surprised when the author followed up a passage about theosis by saying:

This relationship established between our Lord and the human soul is most intimate. It must not, however, be mistaken for the full summer of spiritual life. It is the transition from the winter of sin to the spring of the redeemed existence. It is the morning dawn, not the splendor of noon. The green buds blow, the flowers open, but the fruits are not yet ripe. It is a spiritual adolescence, sometimes anxious and emotional, full of transports and outburts, yet not without timidity and hesitation — and seldom without falls — but always with a keen feeling of discovery and the breathing in of a great breeze of hope. Piety then assumes a strongly affective coloring. The words of the Song of Songs (those expressing the quest rather than the full union) become actual: “Draw me, we will run after thee; As a lily among thorns so is my love among the daughters … He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love … The voice of my Beloved! Behold, he cometh … For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth. (2: 2, 4, 8, 11, 12).”

That just seemed like a fitting sentiment for the beginning of this Lenten spring.