Especially in Minnesota, it’s so easy to understand why so many of the world’s religions have rites around spring. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if spring itself were the phenomenon that inspired the religious sense. Who doesn’t look at the buds on trees that were skeletons a week before and think “miracle!” You can just imagine crops growing where nothing grew two weeks before, and people standing around and knowing that this was nothing less than miraculous, even if the mechanisms that prompt it can be described.
Spring arrives here later than most of the country, so we’re just starting to get those remarkable tiny leaves that are so brilliantly green. Everywhere I look, which was so recently either brown or iced over, the green is taking over (except, of course, my lawn, which needs some major TLC if I don’t want to be known as “the gal who lives in the crackhouse on the corner”). This is the kind of thing that makes even a hardened agnostic think, “Go, God! Take State! Spring rules!”
Spring is a wonderful time of rebirth! No accident that Easter is right at the begining of spring. Easter is the ultimate story of rebirth!
For centuries, philosophers and theologians have argued for the existance of God (ontology) based on design of nature. Did man invent a god to explain the unexplained or is the balance of nature and universe evidense of a pre-existant and creative God? Spring is a good time for everyone to revisit this subject. For me, it’s hard to imagine that things got thrown together by chance just to exist for a limited reason or purpose.