Just been to the most attractive Garden Centre right in the middle of St Andrews. It's up a close, roofed over, and filled with plants, shrubs, and assorted garden stuff - it also has what could be called a judicious selection of roses. There is beauty, delicacy, fragility and generosity in a rose - also vulnerability and poignancy, because such glorious extravagance of colour and scent is transient. Maybe such living beauty is only possible at the cost of permanence.
My father grew roses in every garden of each house we lived in - and that was quite a few. The one I remember with most affection was a huge white rambling rose that covered half a gable end of our cottage. Then there was the time I discovered the Peace rose, and for all kinds of reasons, emotional, theological, political and horticultural, I want one again. Emotional because of its story, political because peace-making is in my view the highest political goal, theological because every reminder, intimation, symbol of peace seems to me to touch the deep places in my understanding of God, horticultural because....well just because.
Mary Oliver has several poems about roses. Here are some lines from "The Poet Visits the Museum of Fine Arts".
For a long time
I was not even
in this world, yet
every summer
every rose
opened in perfect sweetness
and lived
in gracious repose,
in its own exotic fragrance,
in its huge willingness to give
something, from its small self,
to the entirety of the world.
I took time today to look at a rose flower, not thoughtfully as in analytically, more observantly as in contemplative waiting. I've no idea how to guage perfection, but the rose I gazed at seemed richly formed, pink white and pale yellow shaped around petals more precisely fitted than any geometry could achieve, and to my eyes achieving what can only be described with the grammatically clumsy term unimprovable. Is it claiming too much to say that looking at and smelling such a flower gives the heart an emotional holiday, and then suggest that this act of recreative attentiveness can for each of us, sometimes, be compared to prayer. Not prayer as petition and intercession; not prayer with words at all; just the willingness to see in fragile beauty and extravagant if casual attention to detail, a miracle that argues against all the functionalism of our technology worshipping world. And in that miracle and argument the rose always wins - but not by arguing. Simply by being and by the beauty of that being, the rose through the utter functionlessness of its beauty, points us beyond our habits of calculation to a way of recognising in this God soaked world, that some things are invaluable in the sense of unvaluable, they are not amenable to the criteria of utility. Like love, kindness, and goodness, beauty, as Mary Oliver says, exists in gracious repose, extravagant self-giving, and encounters us with transformative grace. Or so it seemed as I spent two or three minutes in contemplative waiting before, of all things, a rose.
The blue rose is called Rhapsody in Blue - a David Austin variety that will soon be in our own garden.
So sweet, so ethereal, so restful to a flower loving working woman @ the end of a work week. I'm always praising the "Creator" for His limitless attention to details in the plant realm. From cactus to roses and everything in between He delights me that I get loopy with joy and "enrapt", so glad I can enjoy His creation thru my sight, smell, touch, and spirit. Praise God who does all things well!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Posted by: Cynthia | August 05, 2016 at 10:27 PM