Home from the city on a Friday evening, just at dusk... This time, there were only a handful of geese, clearly latecomers, flying in to the staging grounds by the river. Instead, the Natural Feature that picked me up and grabbed me was a luscious full moon, dull pale copper, hanging like a huge new penny so close to the horizon that it seemed you could touch it.

This is an odd time of year. The daffodils have started blooming and in the city I saw a flush of about-to-bloom tulips (the city is very big on tulips). If you look for budding leaves, they're there, and Allergy Season is clearly closing in. But it still looks like Mud Season for all intents and purposes, probably because we need rain very badly.

I feel an inner division here. On one hand, I have kicked around this planet for the best part of 50 years by now, and I know that the seasons turn, sure as shootin', spring following the vernal Mud Season as naturally as gravity pulls things toward the earth's centre. Thus it has always been.

On the other hand, I'm a Canadian. Naturalized, true, but still firmly Canuck. A small mystical part of me, something in my very bones, is positive that there's a moment at this time of the year when maybe this whole leap-towards-spring thing could fall flat on its tushie and we could slither backwards, flailing wildly, into late winter. It feels like a struggle in which spring might just possibly lose, at least for another six weeks or so. Yes, I know that's silly. You guys live with these winters for a while, and trust me, you'll know what I'm talking about.

I was thinking about that, and it occurred to me that if shad flies lived at this time of year, they would only know this to-the-mat wrestling match between winter and spring. Shad flies swarm along the St. Lawrence River in late spring, in clouds so thick that they almost blind you and make driving very difficult. They're innocuous enough, if annoying. They live maybe a day or two, emerging only to breed and die.

Of course, in the great scheme of things, our lives are longer than shad flies' lives, but they are still too short for any real perspective. We have been around for maybe a million years, no time at all, and we've only been recording our experiences for, oh, less than 6000 or 7000 years, and for all but the last few hundred of them, the record is distinctly spotty. We can say, surveying the general messiness of human affairs, "thus it has always been", and thus it has. But if shad fllies swarmed at this time of year and were capable of speech and perception, they too could say of spring Mud Season, "thus it has ever been" and of course, they'd be right too. That's all they'd ever seen.

The last little while, there's been (it seems) more than the standard amount of Evil manifesting itself around the world: big melodramatic outrageous Evil in Kosovo; chilling inexplicable Evil in Littleton, Colorado; intensely sad Evil in tiny Taber, Alberta. I've seen some grievously ugly outbursts around my own town, for that matter. As usual, Evil's getting up to things wherever human beings are, which is most places outside inner Antarctica.

The human equivalent of the shad fly--someone who takes the very short view--would sneer, "well, what do you expect?" In the short view, Evil sometimes seems to be winning the battle. Mind you, taking the short view is among the greatest sources of human Evil I can think of, from ethnic cleansing, to cutting programs for high-risk children, to fleeing one's own inner dragons instead of dealing with them.

Take the short view and faith looks ludicrous in the face of reality. We think we're too smart to be taken in. But we only think we're wise because we refuse to admit how little we know. In fact, those who actually raise their eyes and *really look* around the cosmos are the first to say that we don't know a fool thing, outside our tiny, limited reality. We can see so very little in space and time, only a tiny patch, and even that patch is brimming with mystery. If taking the short view is one of the roots of Evil, so is this failure to look around in wonder, openness and deep, joyful humility. Both are really arrogance; they say "we know better than God."

But faith takes the long view. Faith says that the season turned already, 2000 years ago, at Christ's rising again--and how far past is that in the great scheme of things? "A thousand ages in thy sight/ Are but an evening gone," the hymn says. Yes, we may seem to be stuck interminably in Mud Season, and especially in that moment when it feels like the whole world could slither back into winter. But that's only because we can't see past today and where we are, and we can't see the future at all.

We have God's assurance, through the Resurrection, that "all will be well and all will be well and all manner of things will be well," regardless of how bleak things sometimes look in the immediate future. We have to drop our arrogant assumption that we know what dismal future is coming. We don't even know what next week could bring. We don't understand God's time, or the implications of God's time for our own souls. And we don't have a clue how much we are loved--that God, instead of seeing us as so many shad flies, sees every single human soul as God's best-beloved.

I know--*really* know--that by this time next week, there will be a haze of green washing through the woods down by the creek, which today are a discouraging grey-brown. Those daffodils have to be listened to; they're saying "It's coming; it's coming." I see that the dandelions are coming out in all their guttersnipe glory. There's no doubt what is about to win.