I’ll have more to say about my intentions for this blog later on. But for my first post I want to direct your attention to an essay called “Ver Erat Aeternum” that I wrote for Ad Fontes this past winter on Christians as people most at home in the season of spring. For spring is a divinely ordained metaphor, built into nature, for who and what we are. It is “the originary state of the world.”

But it is more than metaphor; it is also premonition. The natural adumbrates the spiritual, sketches the supernatural. Because this is so, glimpses of it were seen by poets before Christ and were reflected upon by sages after his appearance. I hope you enjoy it. To close this little introduction, I leave you with a passage from Book 1 of Clement of Alexandria’s Paedagogus, not included in the essay, on Christian childlikeness and our “lifelong spring-time.”

In contradistinction, therefore, to the older people, the new people are called young, having learned the new blessings; and we have the exuberance of life’s morning prime in this youth which knows no old age, in which we are always growing to maturity in intelligence, are always young, always mild, always new: for those must necessarily be new, who have become partakers of the new Word. And that which participates in eternity is wont to be assimilated to the incorruptible: so that to us appertains the designation of the age of childhood, a lifelong spring-time, because the truth that is in us, and our habits saturated with the truth, cannot be touched by old age; but Wisdom is ever blooming, ever remains consistent and the same, and never changes. “Their children, it is said, shall be borne upon their shoulders, and fondled on their knees; as one whom his mother comforts, so also shall I comfort you.” (Isaiah 66:12-13) The mother draws the children to herself; and we seek our mother the Church.

And in “our mother the Church,” we find new birth; we find resurrection. Spring was the season at the creation of time, and spring will be the season in eternity.