God of all our growing,

take our roots down deep

in the long, dark winter season of our grief.

Nurture the resurrection life in us,

in the secret places of the soil,

in the barren, frozen earth, underground,

where no eye can see.

Send your Spirit where the cold season rages

and speak to us the promise of spring.

Nicola Slee

This prayer is from Easter Garden in which Nicola Slee, finding in the rhythms of the seasons a fertile image of God’s constantly transformative work, explores the connections between two Marys in two gardens - Mary Lennox, the sad little orphan in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and Mary Magdalene in the garden of Jesus’ burial.

It is winter when Mary Lennox first discovers her ‘secret’ garden. It seems as miserable and lifeless as she is. In the keening of Vivaldi’s solo violin below (lamenting the winter and longing for spring, while other strings evoke the frozen wastes of a shivering world), we hear the soundscape of Mary’s own lament and longing.

She doesn’t realise that it’s in darkness that new life begins, that seeds and roots lie hidden underground, waiting for their moment. Nor, today, does Mary Magdalene know that buried in the dark of the tomb is much more than a crucified human body. Broken and bereft, she reels with despair.

On Holy Saturday, our job is to reel with her. To wait with the crucified one but also with all that is dead in ourselves. To eyeball the metaphorical ‘winter’ which seals us off from ‘spring’. To hold in the dark of the tomb our own despair, and as much of the world’s despair as we can bear to grasp. And there, to let God ‘nurture the resurrection life in us.’