The Seed Dies and Rises

 Happy Easter! 
 I love this season.  I love how long it is, how deeply the Church invites us to enter in to the Risen Life of Christ and to ponder this greatest joy of our faith.  We have all these weeks to rejoice in the spring air, the budding flowers and the truth of Jesus Risen!

I have been thinking of all the growth and the green around us and the reviving of the grayness of winter into such beauty and how it relates to Easter.

During Lent in the Atrium, the children receive a presentation of what we call "The Mystery of Life and Death."  It is the way in which we present to the youngest children, ages 3-6, the fact of Jesus' death and resurrection.   In the Atrium we do not present the story of the Passion of Jesus, we reserve the details of that event for an older age.  Rather, the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd "curriculum" (if you will), brings a specific line of Jesus' to the attention of the children.  These words of Jesus are found in John 12:24 :
 "Truly, truly I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat, but if it dies, it produces much wheat."

This, we tell the children, was said by Jesus to his friends when he knew that they might be afraid or worried about the fact that he would die on the cross.   This meditation is made concrete, as things must always be for the young child, by an exploration of the wheat seed itself -- first in its hard intact, un-planted state, then as a small shoot, beginning to rise above the dirt, the shell beginning to soften.  Then the shoot is taller, more green, the roots are long and the shell of the seed is falling away, very soft and broken.  Then, again, it is even taller and the seed is no longer visible, completely gone and given over to this new healthy life of the shoot.  What a great change!  We can see this transformation!  Then, as a final moment, we show the child the final stage of the mature wheat: a head full of many wheat seeds.

This presentation strikes me anew with its simplicity and richness every year.  What can be more simple than a seed doing what seeds always do?  And what can be more rich than this concrete example of the great mystery of death and resurrection?

Last year I was moved to tears as the catechist giving the presentation in our Atrium said: "Look at how the seed is breaking!  It is breaking open."  I was thinking of my Grandpa.

 I thought of the last months of his life as he was broken open.

I thought of the burial, when my hands gripped the wood of the shovel's handle and I let fall the cascade of soil onto his casket.

 I thought of my uncle's eulogy and his words: "We go to your land to lower your body into the ground like a seed, harboring under the appearance of your death and decay a far greater promise than that of any other seed we ever planted with you: the promise of eternal life." 

 I thought of Sunshine's gasp of dismay on that day in September (she was three) as she came back to the newly filled and level grave-site after running around elsewhere and said, her little voice, shaking: "Where IS he?"  I knelt beside her, looked into her sad face and said, with words that were not my own, "It's okay.  He's planted in the ground."

This year, as my children brought home cups of soil, their own little wheat seeds nestled inside -- Sunshine brought home several cups! -- I was filled with thankfulness.  I am thankful for my Grandpa's death.  I am thankful for this mystery that we can discover anew every year.    I am thankful for my children's introduction to this mystery through Grandpa's death and through Jesus' words, through their work with seeds and the silent fruit that it is bearing in their hearts, and in my heart.  It is because of this work that I have tried to change my own language about death to reflect more accurately the truth that we have Life, then we have Death and then we have More Life.   Turtle, now 9, and more able to articulate the fruit of her years of mediation on this work, repeatedly gives thanks at our prayer times for Jesus' dying and bringing us more life.
Death is the pathway to More Life.  Life is stronger than Death.

Happy Easter!  Christ is Risen!