I don't know how you feel at this time of year. For me, Easter, with its echoes of the immemorial Goddess rites of spring, is a time of fresh emotion. In fact, the word Easter itself is simply the name of the old Saxon Goddess, Aostre. The old Saxons and Anglo-Saxons gave the name of their spring Goddess to the new Christian celebration of resurrection! Jewish Passover celebrated at the same time of year — the deliverance of the Children of Israel from Egypt — had its roots in the fertility cults of the ancient Hebrews. Thus, Jewish Passover, Christian Easter, and the pagan Goddess, Aostre, are all joined at the hip in the complex psychology of the ancients.
The exact naming of the season can never be that exact. Christians will see the celebration of the resurrection as central. Pagans will stress the celebration of the Goddess. For Jews, the celebration of Passover is what matters. For us, the discussion of the differences may or may not matter. We must celebrate or choose not to celebrate the season in our own way. We're Unitarians and Universalists after all. Whatever the season may or may not mean religiously, everyone is free to understand and acknowledge it in his or her own way. There's something to be said about UU's with different religious backgrounds getting together to recognize the end of winter and the renewal of life in springtime.
I invite you to try to think of the feeling and meaning of springtime that you most cherish, especially with a sharp sense of the renewal of nature. I can speak to a particular time and place in my own life when I felt that the arrival of spring was more than just a metaphor, but an almost transcendental event! I took a journey just after Easter from my home in Scotland to begin my second term at Oxford. It was bright enough when I left home for the 400 mile trip. The border hills were bare, but beautiful with a few remnants of frost and snow. The trees were quite bare; it seemed, though, here and there I could see buds on the trees. Yes, it was the edge of spring and in the fields and the early lambs were lambing! It was very touching.
When I reached Oxford around five in the evening, the college bells were ringing the hour. When I reached the gates of my own college, it seemed that all the flowers and foliage were blooming at once. Undergraduates were walking the streets dressed in white for tennis or cricket or just because the sun was out! It was certainly an epiphany of youth, beauty, and celebration that I'll never forget. This was springtime and the testament of youth! I don't believe that until that time I had felt so alive. I was much moved and the moment carried for me the deepest kind of happiness. Certainly, a memory to comfort the winter evenings, dark and soggy, that would come with the fall. The memory did not dominate my life, but for me it was the most accessible memory of what springtime meant and means in my own life.
There are no morals or metaphysics in this. It was for me the simplest fact and image of nature's beauty — the kind of experience that precedes the coming of Passover and Easter or even the naming of the ancient Goddess. The naming does not really matter. What does matter is each person's inner experience of this incredibly lovely time of year. We think of the theme of springtime woven into the poems of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Emerson, Whitman — in fact, any poet worth his salt. There are all the ancient songs of springtime and works like Ivor Stravinsky's, "The Rites of Spring." The point is simply enough made — that we inherit the meaning of springtime in our very genes and that it is perhaps the very highest symbol of human hope — hope in a world where there is so much mayhem, death, and ugliness. Springtime persuades us that there is hope for the flowers and hope for our humanity. Perhaps, psychologically, it is springtime that is the deepest ground of human hope. After the chill beauty and death of nature, springtime brings a new, refreshed, sense of what it means to be conscious and to be human. Human not just as a member of the collective human race — we can hardly escape that — but individually human. Without you to see the world, there is no world! The important thing is that as life goes on, we should think and feel and see the world from our truly unique point of view, out of our unique individuality. What the great artists and poets express is their own unique vision. Nobody else can be you looking upon the world, no one else can feel or think for you. The miracle of springtime helps our own self-confidence. Faced with springtime, artists and poets speak most eloquently about life and that which transcends human life. The notion of Christ's Resurrection or Plato's immortality of the soul are not objective certainties, but the kind of symbols that may give us hope for a finer self, and finer world.