Frost's little piece reads like a nursery rhyme with a depressing moral, at first glance. "Nothing gold can stay"-is he saying that nothing good lasts, that everything beautiful eventually withers and dies?

We're all tempted to believe that, especially when we're confronted with the reality of death. But at the core of the poem is a hidden message of burning hope.

"Nature's first green is gold," he says, and he's quite right. Every plant puts out flowers first, and leaves second.

The golden forsythias in early Spring are breathtaking, until the flowers drop off, and then they become ordinary green, pretty, but nothing special. It's just the natural progression of the year.

Not just of the year, though. That's what happened to mankind, too.

The Garden of Eden was the Spring of mankind, but it didn't last forever. Man fell, and "Eden sank to grief." Suffering and winter entered the world.

Spring reminds us of that original, short-lived paradise, and it's bittersweet, because now we know "nothing gold can stay."

Except then, Frost throws a really confusing image into the mix. "Dawn goes down to day." I wanted to say, "Wait a second. Dawn goes up. The sun rises up."

This metaphor is flat-out inaccurate, because as the the sun rises, it grows in heat and brightness. What's going on here?

The image of a flower doesn't match the theme of diminishing beauty either, actually. If that's what Frost wanted to say, he should have talked about ice that melts, or a fire that reduces a log to ash, or any one of a million images.

But the thing about a flower is that it isn't attractive for its own sake; it's trying to attract a pollinator. Every fruit and seed has to begin with a flower. That flower produces fruit, which in turn, produces many new flowers. Continue reading

• Anna O'Neil is a graduate of Thomas More College of Liberal Arts. She likes cows, confession and the color yellow, not necessarily in that order.

"Money is still something that we don't touch. And yet, as I talk in churches so many people are so behind the eight ball on their retirement, on their homes," she told me. "In churches people are just barely holding on financially—we've got to find a way to speak to this in a direct, biblically-based, powerful way."

As a Senior Fellow at American Progress, a theology professor at Chicago Theological Seminary and its former president, Thistlethwaite has seen, firsthand, how money and power have not only influenced the political and financial system, but how it has affected those at the bottom of the economic scale. Her forthcoming book is: #Occupy the Bible: What Jesus Really Said (and Did) about Money and Power.

"Statistics show that 50% of Americans own 1% of the wealth of the country. That's a shift on the one percent, but that's the one percent that has nothing. We can't let this happen under the radar anymore, so I developed a thesis that Occupy is a sign from God that we have to take this seriously. I hope this book will get progressives to start talking about money in the way we've just begun to talk about human sexuality in justice-making ways. We're not there yet on money," she said.

We talked more about these topics, including a look back at her most recent book—on tech, sin, and the myth of Eden—during a recent conversation. Read more

Sources

• Religion Dispatches
• Image: Patheos