[SB] Sabbath Blessing

[Molly Wolf]

Lilacs Redux

I don't know whether it was because last winter was brutal, or in 
spite of the fact that last winter was brutal, but I have never in my 
whole life seen lilacs bloom like this.

They escaped from old garden decades ago and have been swarming the 
landscape as farms that should never have been cleared went back to 
nature. You see them at the margins of woods, along driveways and 
roadsides, beside houses and barns, wherever. Some places, you see 
patches that have got to be in the half-acre league. We're not 
talking about the occasional bush; we're talking about massive stands.

Nobody looks after them or fertilizes them or prunes them back. They 
are not growing in a landscape with rich soil and a gentle climate. 
This is southeastern Ontario, a few inches of grey clay soil over 
limestone. They're tough, these lilacs.

And this year they are blooming as I've never seen them bloom before. 
They are ablaze with flower. They stop you in your tracks. Driving 
between two long patches of them, I felt as though the landscape 
itself was shouting in celebration.

It's not just the lilacs, by any means. The magnolias were 
spectacular a couple of weeks ago; the ornamental cherries and 
crabapples are magnificent. I've rarely seen such a spring for sheer 
abundant beauty.

Which is odd, because it's been such a dark time, these last months. 
What with the economy and natural disasters in Burma and China and 
war and general tribulation and the terrifying prospect of world food 
price increases, not to mention American politics and the cost of 
gas, it feels like we're going to hell in a handbasket. I've got to 
the point where I switch off the news as soon as it comes on and only 
skim the headlines. I know this is cowardice, but I had a hard winter.

What's happening, of course, is that we're reaping the consequences 
of human greed, self-interest, hatred, fear, and just plain pigheaded 
bad judgment. "Acts of God" have nothing on acts of humankind, when 
it comes to making people suffer. (It does not help that I'm 
currently editing a book on the evolution of American policy in the 
Middle East from 1974 to the present.)

But it feels almost as though the lilacs are making a point. Or 
rather, something behind the lilacs is making a point. Whether that 
something is Creation or Creator, I neither know nor care. Maybe it's 
an illusion on my part. Maybe I'm reading meaning into something that 
is essentially meaningless. I have no way of knowing for sure.

It's a choice to believe that "all will be well and all will be well 
and all manner of things will be well". We can choose to see that 
belief as sweet self-delusion, or we can choose to walk in trust and 
hope. The latter choice is harder in days like these, when reality 
seems to be pushing faith into the corner, but it's not impossible.

It may also be that some of us have a feel for forces that are very 
real but not easily quantified -- for a spiritual reality that's out 
there but isn't the proper field (pun intended) for quantification or 
analysis. And maybe there are forces at play in that reality, forces 
of darkness, forces of light.

Human reality has a darkness to it these days that makes it hard to 
stay engaged with this suffering world or to believe that things will 
indeed come round right, if we can learn to walk with more humility 
and love -- and even if we can't, the Light will prevail in the end.

But the lilacs are blazing with light; they are a shout in the 
darkness that the darkness will not prevail and that sooner or later, 
if we hang tough and have faith, love will spread like lilacs, just 
as tough, just as persistent, just as bent on spreading itself as far 
as we'll let it go.



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A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in 
no other way. -- Mark Twain