Category Archives: love

Lazarus and Flowers

death, grief, love, quotes, ,

In the West it is the end of Good Friday as I write, but this year for us Orthodox it issymp white roses the beginning of Lazarus Saturday, when we remember an event that starts out very poignantly, with Jesus’s friends lamenting the death of their brother, and Jesus Himself weeping.

This story of a death and of friends and family sorrowing is timely in my own life right now, and of course I have done some weeping lately – but mostly I wanted to write about the flowers that have come to me, and I may be stretching a bit to connect all these thoughts together.

Flowers have been coming into our house nearly every day for more than two weeks. They are beautiful bouquets and arrangements and plants, and when the first one arrived, before my husband died and on our wedding anniversary, the circumstances made it obvious that God had sent it by the hand of an angel, to convey His love and to assure me that Hebouquet CMc 2 will be my Husband, as it says in Isaiah 54: “For your Maker is your husband; the LORD of hosts is his name; and your Redeemer the Holy One of Israel….” I cried a good deal over that bouquet, and as the florist delivery man and I became better acquainted day by day, I received every new gift with joy.

We know flowers not just as symbols, but primarily as real and exquisite works of art, lovely in themselves. I think the florist noticed the repeated name on each order and tried to make every creation a little different; we have been enjoying dozens of varieties and species of blooms, ferns, branches of shrubs, succulents in ever-changing combinations, all gorgeous.

Other friends brought their own original and unique arrangements, or sometimes just a contribution to a nosegay. Each was given a place in the house where it could minister to the crowd of family who were coming and going for a fortnight and often sleeping here (One night 15 of us slept under this roof.), but I think I was the symp mix w lupinemost nourished of anyone by all the sweet flower-love. These real and aromatic things helped to keep me aware of God’s presence as much as did the kind messages in cards, and the care packages of fruit and candy.

They also gave me a job to do. While my children took over the more difficult practical matters of phone calls, shopping, cooking and organizing a funeral, I was able to wander about tending my flowers, trimming the stems, changing the water, removing spent ones and recombining the longer-lasting blooms (Carnations win the prize for aging well.). It was and is an easy sort of gardening, and very soothing.

People have given our family flowers and other kindnesses because they love us; that makes them feel our sorrow with us. We don’t really need any more explanation than that, but there is another aspect to our sorrowing. I find what Fr. Alexander Schmemannsymp azalea says about Jesus’s tears to be helpful:

He weeps because He contemplates the miserable state of the world, created by God, and the miserable state of man, the king of creation… “It stinketh,” say the Jews trying to prevent Jesus from approaching the corpse, and this “it stinketh” can be applied to the whole of creation. God is Life and He called the man into this Divine reality of life and “he stinketh.” At the grave of Lazarus Jesus encounters Death — the power of sin and destruction, of hatred and despair. He meets the enemy of God. And we who follow Him are now introduced into the very heart of this hour of Jesus, the hour, which He so often mentioned. The forthcoming darkness of the Cross, its necessity, its universal meaning, all this is given in the shortest verse of the Gospel — “and Jesus wept.”
….
symp tulips The power of Resurrection is not a Divine “power in itself,” but the power of love, or rather, love as power. God is Love, and it is love that creates life; it is love that weeps at the grave and it is, therefore, love that restores life… This is the meaning of these Divine tears. They are tears of love and, therefore, in them is the power of life.

Perhaps Mary and Martha didn’t have as many flowers as I do when Lazarus died. They likely did have flower essences in the ointment they would have used to prepare their brother’s body for burial.

And they had the Lord, not just weeping with them for the wrongness of death, but in His love giving the ultimate gift, His own Self. Without the knowledge of that Love and the assurance of a coming Resurrection, what flowers can give wouldn’t be very satisfying. But while my husband walked this earth he and I shared Christ’s life-creating Love, and we still do. Flowers are one more reminder of that reality to my still-weeping heart.

symp w carnation

Do you ask what the birds say?

love, poetry, ,

April is National Poetry Month. I like celebrating that.
Here’s a happy-making poem from my files:

ANSWER TO A CHILD’S QUESTION

Do you ask what the birds say? The Sparrow, the Dove,
The Linnet, and Thrush say, “I love and I love!”
In the winter they’re silent — the wind is so strong;
What it says I don’t know, but it sings a loud song.
But green leaves, and blossoms, and sunny warm weather,
And singing, and loving — all come back together.
Then the Lark is so brimful of gladness and love,
The green fields below him, the blue sky above,
That he sings, and he sings, and for ever sings he —
“I love my Love, and my Love loves me.”

~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A poem like ammunition.

love, poetry, , , ,

millerw

 

The poet Miller Williams died on the first day of 2015. I had not been familiar with his poetry, though I knew of the book he co-authored, How Does a Poem Mean? As I browsed some of his works I came upon this one that I liked right away.

 

Love and How It Becomes Important in Our Day to Day Lives

The man who tells you which is the whiter wash,
the woman who talks about her paper towels,
the woman whose coffee holds her home together,
the man who smells the air in his neighbor’s house,

the man who sings a song about his socks,
the woman who tells how well her napkin fits,
the man who sells the four-way slicer-dicer,
the woman who crosses tape between her tits,

and scores besides trample my yard, a mob
demanding to be let in, like Sodomites
yelling to get at my guests but I have no guests.
I crawl across the floor and cut the lights.

“We know you’re in there,” they say. “Open the door.”
“Who are you?” I say. “What do you want with me?”
“What does it matter?” they say. “You’ll let us in.
Everyone lets us in. You’ll see. You’ll see.”

The chest against the door begins to give.
I settle against a wall. A window breaks.
I cradle a gun in the crook of my elbow.
I hear the porch collapse. The whole house shakes.

Then comes my wife as if to wake me up,
a case of ammunition in her arms.
She settles herself against the wall beside me.
“The towns are gone,” she says. “They’re taking the farms.”

–Miller Williams

My necessary Bird has flown.

friends, love, poetry, quotes, ,

This season of Thanksgiving is a good time to remember my friend who was known on this blog as “Bird.” She fell asleep in the Lord last year, but at the time I couldn’t find the words to write about her passing. She had been very dear to me, affectionately motherly and sisterly at the same time. Even past her 100th birthday she was thoroughly engaged in the present and was a good counselor and truth-teller. Not in platitudes or the kind of universally applicable advice that fails to touch the individual in a warm way, but in the manner of a Christian, a “little Christ” who comes alongside and shares the joy or pain. Bird took me Bird +K 97into her heart and gave me of her self: her motherhood of thirteen children, her married womanliness shaped by devotion to a passionate and visionary man, her thankfulness to a loving Father.

I didn’t meet Bird until she was already in her 80’s and had been a widow for some time, so I am not qualified to speak about her life as a whole. But certainly if someone can be supremely happy and content from the ages of 85 to 102, that is a huge accomplishment, not to speak of the many good people having descended from her. Even if she hadn’t been so good a friend to me, just the example of her life would have been encouraging. There was nothing flashy about Bird, no career or teaching ministry or fame; her habit of self-giving was gentle and quiet.

Recently her son kindly sent me a copy of the special journal thP1110738at she liked to write in, her Gnome Gnotebook, repository of decades of treasures she had collected in the form of poems, quotes and proverbs. I had enjoyed exploring the original book whose pages had long ago been filled up; when she ran out of room Bird simply wrote any new notes and poems on scraps of paper and kept them tucked between the pages, the whole bundle getting fatter and fatter, held together with a rubber band and always kept within arm’s reach.

As I began to browse the contents this month, a couple of entries jumped right out at me as completely expressive of truths that she had learned deeply and lived out every day. They happen to be written conveniently  right next to each other on one of the bound pages of the Gnotebook, and if any maxims might have been formative for the woman I knew, these would be likely ones.

P1110740 Bird's book

When I tried a year ago to write this tribute, the words “Bird has flown” were in my mind, and when recently the following autumn poem by John Updike came to my attention it seemed to complement my feelings. The world is a bleaker place without her – there is no replacement. And yet, there is that “certain loveliness” still present, spread abroad and noticed by those giving thanks in the spirit of my Bird.

NOVEMBER

The stripped and shapely
Maple grieves
The loss of her
departed leaves.

The ground is hard,
As hard as stone.
The year is old,
The birds are flown.

And yet the world,
Nevertheless,
Displays a certain
Loveliness —

The beauty of
the bone. Tall God
must see our souls
this way, and nod.

Give thanks, we do,
each in his place
Around the table
during Grace.

–John Updike

 

If you didn’t get a chance to read what I’ve written about my friend before, this post on Bird’s Open Heart features a photo of her as a young woman, and A New Apron for Bird tells a story about our friendship.