Christian fiction; Neighborhoods -- Scotland -- Fiction
“But to return to the resurrections we see around us in nature. Look at
the death that falls upon the world in winter. And look how it revives
when the sun draws near enough in the spring to wile the life in it once
more out of its grave. See how the pale, meek snowdrops come up with
their bowed heads, as if full of the memory of the fierce winds they
encountered last spring, and yet ready in the strength of their weakness
to encounter them again. Up comes the crocus, bringing its gold safe
from the dark of its colourless grave into the light of its parent gold.
Primroses, and anemones, and blue-bells, and a thousand other children
of the spring, hear the resurrection-trumpet of the wind from the west
and south, obey, and leave their graves behind to breathe the air of the
sweet heavens. Up and up they come till the year is glorious with the
rose and the lily, till the trees are not only clothed upon with new
garments of loveliest green, but the fruit-tree bringeth forth its
fruit, and the little children of men are made glad with apples, and
cherries, and hazel-nuts. The earth laughs out in green and gold. The
sky shares in the grand resurrection. The garments of its mourning,
wherewith it made men sad, its clouds of snow and hail and stormy
vapours, are swept away, have sunk indeed to the earth, and are now
humbly feeding the roots of the flowers whose dead stalks they beat upon
all the winter long. Instead, the sky has put on the garments of praise.
Her blue, coloured after the sapphire-floor on which stands the throne
of him who is the Resurrection and the Life, is dashed and glorified
with the pure white of sailing clouds, and at morning and evening
prayer, puts on colours in which the human heart drowns itself with
delight--green and gold and purple and rose. Even the icebergs floating
about in the lonely summer seas of the north are flashing all the
glories of the rainbow. But, indeed, is not this whole world itself a
monument of the Resurrection? The earth was without form and void. The
wind of God moved on the face of the waters, and up arose this fair
world. Darkness was on the face of the deep: God said, ‘Let there be
light,’ and there was light.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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