The newness conveyed by spring is first tactile. There is a texture there, jots and jogs, a gothic world of formal abundance packed into delimited spaces. Buds break the skeletal stillness, and the Delaware is chocked full of marathoning shad, tiger moms and dads of the Atlantic straining to give their offspring the benefit of an inland peerage. Is it any surprise that the mind conceives new projects, if inchoately, and, higher still, new graces are gifted to men?
Of course it is now May, and spring is an established fact. Clouds no longer mirror the shaggy forms of the first buds, but billow luxuriously, dissipate and darken erratically like miffed sultans. The hammered look of an embattled sky is gone and we are ready for the big arcs of summer, but let’s not be caught too thoroughly in time. Let’s remember God the same, yesterday, today, and forever, the permanent Newness of which newness is a fleeting shadow. That’s man’s job, hammering discursive loops between ductile time and serene eternity.