Let me go where’er I will,
I bear a sky-born music still:
It sounds from all things old,
It sounds from all things young,
From all that’s fair, from all that’s foul,
Peals out a cheerful song.
It is not only in the rose,
It is not only in the bird,
Not only where the rainbow glows,
Nor in the song of woman heard,
But in the darkest, meanest things
There alway, alway something sings.
’T is not in the high stars alone,
Nor in the cup of budding flowers,
Nor in the redbreast’s mellow tone,
Nor in the bow that smiles in showers,
But in the mud and scum of things
There alway, alway something sings.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson
The other day my dog Clara, for reasons only a Lab would truly understand, dove head first into a mud puddle. While spring is almost here, it hasn’t arrived yet. The weather is warm enough for mud, but too cold for our garden hose to work, so we reluctantly marched an even-more reluctant dog indoors for a bath. Bathing a 70-pound lab in a bathtub is a messy business, with the mud, the soap, the hair clogging the drain, and the dog spreading this soapy-muddy mess each time she shakes.
Nevertheless, in this month of March, we eagerly watch the snow piles and cold recede and await the sporadic signs of spring—the extra hour of light as we set our clocks forward, the daffodils and crocuses beginning to sprout, or those blessed warm, sunny days that seem to banish winter. Yet, against our pining is the inevitable reality—in New England—that March is predominantly the season of mud, a transitional season, and a limbo in which we are caught between winter and spring.
In seminary, I remember lamenting to my CPE group about the uncertainties around the end of school, graduation, and job prospects. One of my former colleagues, a Jungian psychotherapist and chaplain, emphatically reminded me: “we’re all in the mud season—our souls need this time to deal with messiness, in order to regenerate and create new growth and change.”
As such, the mud season becomes an appropriate metaphor for where we are relative to this past year. Everywhere people are queuing up for vaccines, awaiting the reopening of safe gathering places, for religious institutions to open, and schools to reduce restrictions, or for an end to racial and gender-based violence as witnessed in the horrific shooting this past week in Atlanta. We are still awaiting the dreams of the prophet Amos who declared so long ago: “Let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.”
Lent, like the mud season, is a long season of reflection, marshalling our spiritual resources as we prepare our souls for Easter. It’s been a long winter and healing is slow going. The buds of spring are emerging, but the blossoms feel far, far away.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, a native New Englander, reminds us that hope doesn’t only come with the arrival of the Easter lilies or the verdure of summer, but in “the mud and scum of things,” in the grit, resilience and grace of uncertain and challenging times. We may have to look harder for meaning in the mud season, but when we find the moments of grace that can sustain us until the arrival of spring, we must hold onto those moments with both hands. Emerson reminds us, fumbling our way through the mud and scum to find something that sings can be a challenging, artless business, just like zoom classrooms, the spiritual life in Lent, or the long fight for justice. Nevertheless, we can discern music and beauty, however fledgling and fleeting, in even the ugliest and messiest of moments.
--The Rev. Katie Solter
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