resurrection and refugia
Dear friend,
We have just entered Holy Week here in Romania as we set our eyes towards the blessed Pascha (the Orthodox Christian Easter) that will be celebrated this coming Sunday. This past weekend on Palm Sunday (Duminica Floriilor here in Romanian—literally, “the Sunday of flowers”) we received blessed willow branches, sweet-smelling and green, as is the custom in this part of the world. The willow is the first tree to bud here, the first sign of life after a long winter—or sometimes, the first sign of life within the lingering winter, as we have experienced this year.
At our final Lent meeting this past Friday morning, my friend Brandi mentioned the ways that the springtime—especially when it is labored and struggling to bloom—mirrors the miracle of the Resurrection. At the end of winter, everything looks dead. Completely without life, without hope. And yet, this miracle: every spring, life bursts out of these dead things. I often recall this phrase my friend Becca said once when marveling at the mini miracle of a sourdough starter: “life is so insistent!” Because it is! Have you seen life? Have you seen the way it pulls itself out of death again and again and again?
I just so happened to be finishing up a book that spoke exactly to this point that Brandi made, and so I pulled it from my backpack excitedly, happy as I always am when things in life overlap in unexpected ways. The book is called Refugia Faith: Seeing Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders, and the Healing of the Earth and it was written by one of my favorite college professors, Debra Rienstra. (Side note: it’s a lovely read and I recommend it to Christians struggling to respond to the climate crisis.)
Rienstra opens the book with the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens—a complete devastation to the mountain and its surroundings. Or was it? It only took 40 years for this dead landscape to flourish into a space teeming with the insistence of life. But what made this insistence possible? Refugia, as it turns out, a lovely scientific term for “tiny coverts where plants and creatures hide from destruction, hidden shelters where life persists and out of which new life emerges.”
(Another side note: I was immediately taken with this idea of refugia and the ways that we can apply it to our lives, our experiences, our communities…it applies itself particularly nicely to our responsibilities as people of faith, as Rienstra demonstrates over and over throughout her book. “God loves to work in small humble hidden places…The refugia model calls us to look for the seed of life where we are, concentrate on protecting and nurturing a few good things, let what is good and beautiful grow and connect and spread.” She explores what it means to be people of refugia, an idea that is capturing my imagination…)
We see in so much of the world that when everything seems to be dead and done, new life is lurking just beyond what we can see. And so it was in the Resurrection.
During that same Lenten meeting, another friend Persida (recalling the way the Resurrected Christ appeared to His fearful disciples in the locked upper room and offered them His peace) said this really lovely phrase, something along the lines of, “the peace of God is the gift of His death and resurrection.”
Peace must come after. Peace before the worst has happened cannot fully be peace because there is still that question lingering in the corners of the heart…”what if? What then?” Christ must descend to the very depths of hell so that He might respond: “Not if but when. And yes, even then.”
After celebrating this Palm Sunday and draping my willow branches in my icon corner, I looked up what the word Hosanna means because I had forgotten the actual meaning. And when I looked it up I realized that maybe I had never known the actual meaning. I had always thought it was something like “Hallelujah,” a joyous exclamation of praise and adoration. And while it is that, it’s also more. The actual meaning of Hosanna is this: “please save us!” It is a cry for deliverance, a desperate plea for salvation. And yet, it could be uttered with such joy, as if what was being asked for had already been received…insistent hope in the face of desperate need.
All of these ideas—refugia and resurrection and hosanna—circle around these parallel paradoxes: life in death, hope in desperation, rebirth in devastation, joy in need. This is the good news of Pascha—-that it’s all possible, and it’s all here.
With joy!
Xenia
