Gods of Spring

Gods love good stories, and the ancients told the best ones. Three to four thousand years ago, those fabulists knew how to spin a yarn. How did it all begin? Why doesn’t it rain? When will it stop? Our tribe is better than your tribe. What's with this eclipse? What happens after we die? Behold this spring garden!

Homer and the Hebrews, separately, took a collection of tall tales, songs, imaginings, and assorted folk lore, from sages, pranksters and hallucinogenic gurus…. anything that encouraged the tribe to cohere around a shared ethos and answer the overwhelming questions.

The pivotal moment in human history was when stories were recorded rather than just told. The alphabet took the oral tradition and set it down for evermore. The book solidified male dominance. Greeks let theirs wither into myth. Jews held theirs as sacred and Christians concocted a sequel complete with cheek-turning, crucifixion, resurrection and an edifice complex. However, embedded in these parables are wisdom and conundrums sufficient to ponder over three millennia. 

Athenians of the day took on the story of Persephone who returns from the underworld just about now on the calendar for a six-month sabbatical. She was the offspring of Demeter and Zeus. You’d have thought with parents like that she wouldn’t have been snatched by Hades, brother of Zeus, but she was apparently very snatchable. So it is that bulbs burst and spring flowers bloom right on time and therein lies the seeds of eternal life. 

Jews celebrate the season horizontally rather than vertically. They fled ahead of the pursuing Egyptians and trekked across the desert to their freedom from bondage, only to enslave the Canaanites when they got to the Promised Land. More important is the summit meeting along the way with Moses and Yahweh in the room where it happens. Admittedly, most of what I know comes from Cecil B. DeMille and memories of seders before I was disinvited for heretical thoughts and possibly misbehaving. 

I might add that I do not believe place is sacred. The claim on so-called holy spots became the unholy and senseless reasons for the crusades and today's religious divide. Only human life is sacred, love and the natural world.

Insurrection or resurrection, spring is sprung. Jesus and Moses went up the hill to fetch the Word. Too bad the eleventh commandment wasn't: It's OK to eat shellfish but not OK to hold slaves or oppress others.

The Jesus myth is far bloodier, but blood is merely wine after all, and the narrative had legs. Easter is like yeast rising and the resurrection a bit of a stretch signifying, again, the bursting forth of poppies, daffodils and a havoc of petals painting the desert floor.

Whether up or across, the holidays all go back to pagans (peasants) and the natural world which deserves any attention it can muster in this age of neglect. The fables need to be reconsidered not as literal truth but as literature pointing us to pay attention to the cycles of Nature and blessings it brings. Miracle enough for me. Paying attention, as Simone Weil observed, is a form of generosity and in its purest form, akin to prayer. 

Now that I've offended everyone, I'm going out to smell the flowers and lick some honey off the thorns.