The Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, the Rt Rev Dr Derek Browning o ers an Easter reflection for readers.

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

THE lines are from T S Eliot’s perplexing masterpiece, The Waste Land. They allude to the fact that though, for most, the worst of the winter is past, spring is often tentative and we find ourselves taking two steps forward and one step back. Flowers bud, trees blossom; and then an unseasonal frost sets things back weeks, or a cold period of rain stunts growth for a season.

The miracle, however, is that lilacs do breed out of a dead land, and each year we marvel at the unstoppable power of snowdrops, crocus, dafodils and the rest pushing past the frozen soil, cracking earth’s hard crust, and reminding us that after the long bleak days, new life comes.

For me the symmetry of this imagery with Easter is powerful. The echoes are clear and true. After the hard bleak days of Lent, and the hot/cold passions of Holy Week, and inally the ‘null’ day that is Holy Saturday when, from the vantage point of earth, nothing appeared to be happening and God’s work was invisible to the human eye, inally, Easter.