Winter is a time when the earth seems dying and barren. The trees are shorn of their leaves by the howling winds, the ground is shorn of its color by frost or sucking mud. Nothing is growing, nothing seemingly is even changing. From the time the Christmas decorations are dunned away, the world takes on a dreary day to day sameness of cold and damp, relieved on in the forced fits of the crimson blushing of Valentine’s Day, or the unnatural kelly-green of St. Patrick’s Day. When Spring arrives, really arrives despite the occasional frost or last burst of snow, suddenly it is everywhere at once in a thousand flower beds both tended by human hands and otherwise. And then Summer works its way in, when the days are long, golden, and warm with activity. We can appreciate the Summer all the more by remembering how dreary the Winter before it was.

And yet not merely our years have season, but one can say our societies do too, and sometimes, when the winters of our societies’ discontents run long and deep, when all seems stripped away, the flowering Spring and energetic Summers that follow can be glorious, even so stunning that they seem to be spiting and damning the Winter out of which they arose. And even though these high Summers produce a harvest of culture that we remember for generations beyond, they also contain the hints of the Winters that will follow. Three such high Summers spring (as it were) to my own mind, one of which we will commemorate today, the first Sunday of Lent. In 1981, Ronald Reagan took office after the anxious 1970s; In 1558, Queen Elizabeth ascended to the English throne; In 843, Empress Theodora of Byzantium ended the second, and final iconoclasm in what is today called Triumph of Orthodoxy.