Greetings!
One of my favorite Christmas Carols is Lo, How a Rose e’er Blooming. Almost any setting of it, whether it is called by this name, or by its other name A Spotless Rose, is a beautiful weaving of metaphor leading us to the Incarnation. It’s a play on the word root, meaning at the same time, the lineage of a family and the grounding of a flower. As only poetry and music can allow, this metaphor winds its way through the text until it blooms into a fragrant rose.
My grandmother used to remind me that all flowers are weeds, and that what distinguished one from another was how people appreciated it. Those blessed weeds which bore fruit or beautifully colored or fragrant flowers were nurtured by humans, cultivated, prized. Those that were perhaps simpler, but just as glorious and complex in their form and their role, were passed by, admired perhaps from afar. Yet, prized or forgotten, cherished or shunned, all flowers attract pollinators, attach their fragrance and pollen to the wind, stand tall in the sun, and fall back in the darkness of the winter.
Each flower is a sign of abundance, whether we recognize it, or not. Each is numbered and counted in God’s Eden, given to us in the gift of Creation and the science of evolution to be just what it was designed to be. The famous Carol might compare Jesus to a tender, yellow buttercup, or a purple, fuzzy thistle, or a proud dandelion rebelliously standing tall in an otherwise green lawn, each of them a sign of God’s extravagant abundance. Whether rose, buttercup, or dandelion, the roots absorb the same nutrients and water, the leaves soak in the same sunlight, the pollen catches on each gentle breeze, knowing, as each of us know, that we are rooted in abundance, given our role in this great garden of life.
With Christmas Hope,
Cn. J. Davey Gerhard III
Executive Director
