I've always been fascinated by the geometry of botany. The precise arrangements of petals and stamens combined with colour and light, provide an entire world of beauty in one flower head. One of the best ways of looking closely at a flower is to stop, and look, closely.
Yesterday morning, leaving the house for our exercise walk, I stopped to look at a small anemone growing in our front border. It was breezy so it was moving around. I only had my phone and I stood there bending down waiting for the breeze to calm down so I could take a close up photo.
The picture here is the result.
Only when it was downloaded did I notice the sunlit leaf above the flower head. I could look for the rest of my life and not find such a coincidence of colour, light and shadow. But unmistakably, there is the shape of a cross.
So of course the photo has to come into this series on seeing the cross everywhere. But I have already chosen the photos, and thought about what to write about some of them. This one is an interruption, an entirely accidental by product of my focusing on a flower. And once you see the Cross you can't unsee it. Which makes it both an unlooked for bonus or an inconvenient gatecrasher. Not often a flower is photo-bombed by a leaf.
More seriously, because I do take seriously those momentary epiphanies of God's grace, and I do try to attend to those intimations of Presence, when we notice God's fingerprints on his creation. More seriously, then, purple is the liturgical colour leading towards Easter. Purple is also the colour of the robe that draped the humiliated body of Christ. The juxtaposition of a purple flower and a leaf engraved by sunlight with the shape of a cross, I found a deeply moving discovery. Call it a moment of revelation, when the deep truth of who God is clarifies in the fusion of two images, and in the midst of all that is happening, the imprint of the Father's love.
The cross is the hallmark of God's love, the authenticating signature written across Creation. The link of that thought with Julian of Norwich is irresistible:
And in this vision he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut, lying in the palm of my hand, and to my mind's eye it was as round as any ball. I looked at it and thought, "What can this be?" And the answer came to me, "It is all that is made". I wondered how it could last, for it was so small I thought it might suddenly disappear. And the answer in my mind was, "It lasts and will last for ever because God loves it; and in the same way everything exists through the love of God".
And as if by intended accident, the coincidence of light and shadow in my photo, the telltale fingerprint of God discreetly impressed on his Creation:
"In this little thing I saw three attributes: the first is that God made it, the second is that he loves it, the third is that God cares for it."
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