Spring Again: The Battle and the Glory

As we saw with the destructive tornadoes last night, Spring does not arrive with a whisper. It is no soft unfurling, no tender courtesy. It is a rupture—a violent clash of frost and thaw, shadow and radiance, death and life wrested from the grip of winter’s inertia.

I don't know if it is getting older (or the jab LOL) but pollen knocked me down harder this year than any I remember. I think it started with a grandkid cold, but at some point it changed to sneezing and wheezing and a night cough that has robbed me of sleep for two weeks.

I'm better, and hopefully the storms washed the air....... even as morning prayers go up for those devastated by the fury of forces that reeked havoc in the south yesterday.

I never get close to April and spring without thinking about Eliot. I also have earlier posts about him.

Remembering English Poets

of all his poems- I tend to always go to "The Wasteland" and it's famous opening line:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

That opening hit me like a thunderclap when I first read it—a jagged, beautiful mess that somehow made sense of the world’s brokenness. They say it’s the 20th century’s greatest poem, and I get why: it’s not just words on a page, it’s a heart cry of the American modern movement (this poem right after WWI in 1922) and it still rings in my ears, mixing old myths with a raw, modern ache. Eliot's friend, Ezra Pound, called it a triumph, and for me, it’s like a friend who’s been through the dark and come out wiser. It’s messy, it’s alive, and unlocked the entire movement that helped me see how people can live in a land of prosperity and hope but still feel pressed in the shadows of despair.. it definitely helped me understand a little better.

For Eliot, spring is not a simple renewal, a pastel promise of better days. It is a summons—an insistent, almost brutal demand. It dredges up memory, sharp and unbidden, stirring the ache of desire in a heart grown dull. It pierces the numbness of winter’s retreat, forcing life from a soil that would rather sleep. Spring, in Eliot’s hands, is both miracle and wound, a season that refuses to let the world lie dormant.

This war within spring mirrors the war within us. The voice of disillusionment—Eliot’s early muse—hovers close, murmuring that hope is a fool’s errand, that all striving ends not in triumph but in exhaustion, “not with a bang but a whimper,” as he wrote in The Hollow Men. In The Waste Land, he painted a fractured world: a heap of broken images, a dry riverbed, a civilization too weary to rise.

And yet, Eliot’s own story did not end there..... hope couldn't stay buried in the despair of winter.

T.S. Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism in 1927 was a seismic shift in his life and work—less a simple balancing of The Waste Land’s despair and more a radical reorientation that turned its wasteland into a landscape of potential redemption. Before this, Eliot’s poetry was steeped in a modernist sense of fragmentation and spiritual desolation—a world of “hollow men” and “broken images,” where meaning seemed shattered beyond repair. His conversion didn’t erase that vision but reframed it, as if he’d found a compass in the rubble.

Eliot joined the Church of England at age 38, a decision that stunned many of his literary peers, who saw it as a retreat from the avant-garde into tradition. But for Eliot, it was no retreat—it was a plunge into a deeper reality. Raised in a Unitarian family in St. Louis, he’d drifted through a secular, intellectual life, dabbling in Eastern philosophies and wrestling with existential unease. By the mid-1920s, though, he was drawn to Christianity’s promise of order and transcendence. He was baptized quietly in a London church and soon after took British citizenship, rooting himself in Anglicanism’s rituals and theology. This wasn’t just a personal pivot; it was a poetic one. As he later wrote, “The Christian faith is not a denial of human experience, but a fulfillment of it.”

Did it turn The Waste Land on its head? Not quite—it’s more like it planted a seed in that barren soil. The Waste Land doesn’t get rewritten; its despair remains raw and real. But in his later works, especially Four Quartets (1935-1942), you see the fruits of that seed. Where The Waste Land ends with a fractured soul-Four Quartets seeks a stillness amid the chaos: “In my end is my beginning.” His faith didn’t cancel the struggle—it gave it purpose, a narrative arc bending toward grace.

Eliot himself described this shift in a 1931 letter, saying his Christianity was “a way of putting my worldview in focus.” It wasn’t a rejection of the wasteland’s truth—people still live in desolation—but a belief that something could grow there. So, not just balance, but transformation: the hollow men might yet find a voice, and spring, cruel as it is, might still win.

The Biblical Spring: Nisan and the Resurrection

This rhythm of struggle and victory is not Eliot’s alone—it pulses through the Biblical narrative, etched into the very seasons of sacred time. In the Hebrew calendar, Nisan ushers in the new year—not with fanfare, but with deliverance. It is the month of Passover, when Israel staggered out of Egypt’s shadow, the blood of the lamb marking their doorposts. It is the month of the Resurrection, when the true Lamb shattered the tomb, turning a cross of shame into a throne of glory.

This morning, I will be teaching Sunday School in my series on Biblical Hope- in today's lesson, Moses is at the Red Sea’s edge, the horizon choked with Pharaoh’s chariots, the water before him an impassable wall. Death looming on both sides—behind, the spearpoints; ahead, the deep. Yet in that crucible of impossibility, he spoke words that ring like a battle cry through the ages:

“Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today. The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.” (Exodus 14:13-14)

Hope, here, is no fragile wish. It is not a passive drift toward better days. It is defiance—a planting of feet in the sand, a refusal to yield, a trust that the sea will split when the moment demands it.

Israel did not perish that day; the waters parted, and they walked through on dry ground. Nor did the story end in a Jerusalem tomb, where a stone rolled shut seemed to seal all hope. Three days later, the earth shook, the stone rolled back, and spring erupted in the flesh of the risen Christ. The Resurrection is the ultimate rebuttal to despair—the proclamation that winter’s reign is broken, that darkness bows to light, that life, not death, speaks the final word. Where Eliot once feared a world fading into a whimper, Scripture unveils a cosmos remade in fire and glory:

“Behold, I am making all things new.” (Revelation 21:5)

The Triumph of Spring

Spring returns each year as a living echo of this truth. It is no gentle guest—it is a warrior, breaking the ice, clawing through frozen earth, driving blossoms upward through sheer force of will. The lamb rises, the wasteland recedes, and the world remembers what it was made to be. Eliot’s lilacs bloom not as a taunt but as a testament: life persists, even through cruelty, even through pain.

This is the glory of spring—not a fleeting reprieve, but a permanent promise. The battle is real, but the victory is certain. Not a whimper, but a shout. Spring wins.