ISSUES OF FAITH: Dig in to spring and faith
Published 1:30 am Friday, February 20, 2026
ABOUT A WEEK ago, I took advantage of a bright and dry morning and worked in the garden.
It was overdue, but the winter grays give me the blahs.
With fingers crossed that a hard frost wouldn’t come too soon, I even went ahead and pruned the roses.
I shaped the espaliered apple tree, too. It has four kinds of apples growing on it, but the tags have fallen off.
Oh well.
Two days ago, Christians began the season of Lent.
The season is named for the “lengthening of days” that happens this time of year as we go from winter to spring.
Nothing liturgical there in the name, but if you have decided to “give up” something for Lent, it can seem longer than the 40 days between Ash Wednesday’s reminder that “we are dust and to dust we shall return” and the exultance of Easter’s “Alleluia, Christ has risen.”
If you want to, go ahead, do the traditional “giving up” thing if it has meaning for you. But spiritually, prepping for Holy Week and the important meaning of Easter is not a “giving up” thing. It is a “digging in” thing.
Lent is like prepping the garden for spring growth.
Life’s leaves need to be raked.
Forgotten commitments can be refreshed and nurtured.
A bit of thinning, maybe, to make room for a new insight or just a clearer view.
As Christians, it is a time to renew our faith in Jesus from the ground up.
One of my favorite authors, Sister Joan Chittister, puts the purpose of Lent this way: “Lent calls each of us to renew our ongoing commitment to the implications of the Resurrection in our own lives, here and now. But that demands both the healing of the soul and the honing of the soul, both penance and faith, both the purging of what is superfluous in our lives and the heightening, the intensifying, of what is meaningful.”
The “implications of the Resurrection,” as Sister Joan further comments, are that God is with us, not just as a retrospective of Passover and deliverance from Egyptian slavery, but in the now and in the future through the life death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
I close with one of my Hildegardian Muses — poems I have written over the years in the thrall of the 11th Century mystic Hildegard von Bingen.
I call it “Lenten Garden.”
I prepare the Winter garden in the
Cool sun of lengthening days.
I spade, weed and turn the moist warming soil.
Herbs, brown in leaf but green in root
Remind me these dormant forty days will lead to
An interred three
Then to the one of ecstatic green emergence
And new aromatic life.
Take time over the weeks to Easter to weed what needs to be weeded, or needs to be thinned or pruned.
The meaning of life, death and resurrection will be literally at your fingertips.
_________
Issues of Faith is a rotating column by religious leaders on the North Olympic Peninsula. Don Corson is an ordained deacon in the Lutheran church (ELCA) and the winemaker for a local winery. He is also the minister for Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Forks. His email is ccwinemaker@gmail.com.
