Spring is the season when the world's religious traditions make the most noise. March and April fill the calendar with festivals across nearly every faith, and what is remarkable is not their variety but their convergence. Almost every tradition finds in spring a time to mark the same themes: death giving way to life, darkness retreating before light, the past released so that something new can begin.
Passover arrives in late March or April. The story it tells is about liberation from bondage. The Israelites who were slaves in Egypt did not gradually improve their circumstances. They were delivered suddenly, dramatically, through forces beyond their own power. The spring timing is not accidental. The Exodus is narrated as happening in the month of Aviv, the word that in modern Hebrew means spring. Freedom and spring arrive together. The bitter herbs of the seder plate are balanced by the sweet haroset, suffering is held alongside hope, because the tradition insists that neither can be fully understood without the other.
Easter falls in the same window. The theology is different but the seasonal logic is the same. Death is not the end. Something is buried and something rises. The empty tomb on Easter morning is an announcement that the final word has not yet been spoken. The spring timing is so embedded in the holiday that many of its symbols, the egg, the lamb, the flowering garden, are images that the natural world provides every year as if on cue.
Nowruz, the Persian New Year observed by Zoroastrians, Iranians, Kurds, and others, falls precisely on the spring equinox. It is the moment when light and darkness are in perfect balance before light begins its slow conquest of the year. The Haft-sin table, set with seven items beginning with the Persian letter s, includes sprouted wheat or lentils as a symbol of new growth. The fire that is jumped over on the eve of Nowruz is the same impulse that animates every spring festival: the past is burned, the new is welcomed.
Holi, the Hindu festival of color, celebrates the victory of good over evil and the arrival of spring. The story behind it involves fire and survival and divine protection. The colors thrown at Holi are the colors of spring flowers. The laughter and play of the festival is a direct expression of what the season asks people to feel.
Ram Navami, celebrating the birth of Lord Rama, also falls in this spring window. Rama is the embodiment of righteousness who faces every kind of trial and loss and does not surrender to darkness. His birth is celebrated when the earth itself is returning to life.
The thread connecting all of these celebrations is not theological agreement. The traditions disagree about almost everything at the level of doctrine. The thread is something older and deeper than doctrine: the recognition that winter ends, that death does not have the final word, that renewal is built into the structure of the world, and that this is worth gathering to mark.
Spring comes. The traditions gather. They have always known something about this season that we spend our whole lives trying to learn.
Traditions Covered