On what a single flower can teach us: order, purpose and beauty as three fingerprints of God.
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. - Matthew 6:28-29
Christ does not say: Look at the lilies quickly. He says: Consider.
That single word is an invitation, and it is harder than it sounds. To look is to glance; to consider is to dwell, to return to something until it begins to speak, until you have given it the kind of attention that allows you to be changed by it.
In the first chapter of Genesis, God looks at everything He has made and declares it very good. But we do not always see it as very good. We walk through a world that the tradition calls saturated with the presence of God, and yet we manage, most days, to walk through it seeing very little of Him.
All things, at every level, from the least speck of dust to the greatest of the seraphim, are theophanies, the immediate manifestation and presence of God.Kallistos Ware
The question is not whether creation carries His fingerprints. The question is whether we have the stillness, or the courage, to look.
I want us to consider a flower: three things it can teach us about the God who made it.
I. Order
Order is one of the fingerprints of God. Everything He does carries harmony, rhythm, and peace.
There are many aspects of a flower that reveal rhythm and harmony, but that which sings to me the most is seasonality.
Ecclesiastes speaks of this directly
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal. - Ecclesiastes 3:1-3
God has ordered creation so that flowers bloom in spring and wither in autumn and in winter are altogether hidden. They do not resist this. They do not mourn their own withering. They live, and fade, and wait - and in doing so reveal something about the grain of reality itself.
We also live seasonal lives. There are warm seasons: of consolation, of clarity, of felt nearness to God. And there are winters, long, cold, apparently fruitless. Seasons of aridity, in which prayer feels like speaking into silence and the presence of God feels very far away.
Daniel James Brown, writing about competitive rowing at the highest levels, describes what everyserious oarsman must eventually come to terms with:
It is not a question of whether you will hurt. It is a question of who you will be, and what you will do, while pain has her way with you.Daniel James Brown
Matthew 14 offers a version of the same truth. Peter walks on the water and begins to sink…
But when he saw that the wind was boisterous, he was afraid; and beginning to sink he cried out, saying, “Lord, save me!” And immediately Jesus stretched out His hand and caught him, and said to him, “O you of little faith, why did you doubt?” And when they got into the boat, the wind ceased.
Notice the order. Before calming the storm, before any reassurance or rebuke, Christ reaches out and takes Peter by the hand. The touch comes before the calm. This, I think, is the order of grace. It is not that God relieves our suffering from a distance. It is that He enters it with us. The encounter comes first; the storm becomes secondary.
St Thérèse of Lisieux, dying of tuberculosis in 1897 and writing only months before her death, describes the interior life of winter with a precision that comes only from having lived it:
And if you abandon me,
O my Divine Treasure,
deprived of your caresses
I still want to smile.
Above the clouds
the sky is always blue.
One touches the shores
where God reigns.St Thérèse of Lisieux
This is not optimism. It is something far harder and far more costly. And it is what the flower, in its patient willingness to wither and wait, can teach us.
I pray that we may be given the graces to abandon ourselves and have this unwavering confidence that although we may be in the bitter cold of winter, we have no doubt the summer is to come.
II. Purpose
A flower is not beautiful by accident. Its colours, its shape, its fragrance — none of it is arbitrary. It draws life toward itself. It attracts the pollinator. Its purpose is ordered toward union.
A stone in merely existing as a stone - that is, in being heavy, hard, and brittle - a plant in living, an animal in living sensitively, a human in living rationally, an angel in living intellectually - in short, each thing simply in being what it is, is loving God.Kallistos Ware
In other words, each created thing loves God by being what it was created to be. The flower does not need to strive after its purpose. It loves God by flowering.
Our purpose is similarly beautiful: participation in the ecstatic love of the Trinity. We are made not merely to exist, but for union. Lev Gillet writes that all love is a movement of one being toward another, with the desire for some form of union.
But here we touch something painful. Because if our purpose is union, why do we so often feel lonely? If we are made for love, why is love so often mixed with pain? If creation is full of theophanies, why do we so often miss them?
Part of the language of love is also the language of pain and loneliness. We yearn for full, all-consuming love and ecstatic union with God or with others. Reality, however, does not always deal in dreams and yearnings. Consequently, we go through life experiencing not just love, but frustration, restlessness, tension, and loneliness as well. In life, all of us are somewhat frustrated in our deep desire to share our being and our richness with others. We live knowing that others do not fully know and understand us. St Paul calls this living as “through a glass, darkly,” a riddle, a veil, a mist of unreality that separates us from God and others, and from what is authentically real (1 Corinthians 13:12-13).Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart
This loneliness is not a sign that we are broken. It is a sign that we were made for something we have not yet fully received.
That distinction matters more than it might seem. The restless Christian, the one who is not satisfied by what the world can offer, is not failing. The perfect Christian, strange as it sounds, is not satisfied. Because the love they were made for has not yet been given in full. Not yet.
III. Beauty
Beauty is the hardest of the three to speak about, because it exceeds every category we bring to it. Makoto Fujimura, the painter, wrote:
We artists dare not “understand” or overanalyse our creative acts, just as the bird does not need to understand the aerodynamics of flight.Makoto Fujimura
Beauty is so hard to describe, and impossible to manufacture. We do not possess beauty by explaining it. We receive it by being moved.
Yet beauty is strange, because by nature it both consoles us and wounds us. You have probably felt this. A sunset. A piece of music. A liturgy. A moment with friends that you know, even as it is happening, is already passing. A flower. Something in the experience is beautiful beyond description and something in it aches. Not because the thing is bad, but because it is not enough. The moment ends. The music stops. The people leave. The flower dies. And you are left holding something that feels almost like grief.
Edgar Allan Poe said that poetry begins in a thirst for a wilder Beauty than earth supplies. This is precisely it. Beauty awakens a desire it cannot satisfy. And this is not a mistake. This is part of what beauty is for. Beauty is a signpost. It says: you were made for more than this.
Inside each of us, beyond what we can name, we have a dark memory of having once been touched and caressed by hands far gentler than our own. That caress has left a permanent mark, the imprint of a love so tender and good that its memory becomes a prism through which we see everything else.Ronald Rolheiser, The Restless Heart
The Greeks named this longing eros, not in the diminished sense we tend to give the word today, but in its full meaning: a passionate reaching toward what promises to fill a void. St Francis de Sales described eros as the desire that draws love out, that expands the heart’s capacity, that rushes us toward participation in divine life. St Augustine understood God’s apparent delay in satisfying this longing as itself a gift:
So by delaying [his gift] God strengthens our longing, through longing he expands our soul, and by expanding our soul he increases its capacity. So brethren, let us long, because we are to be filled… That is our life, to be trained by longing: and our training through the holy longing advances in the measure that our longings are detached from the love of the world… Let us stretch ourselves out towards him, that when he comes he may fill us full.St Augustine
Christopher West draws together this patristic tradition by arguing that Christianity is the religion that redeems longing itself, and that its saints are those who have had the courage to feel the full depth of that longing in their souls and in their bodies, and to open it, in prayer, to the One who alone can satisfy it. Benedict XVI makes the same point with characteristic terseness: prayer, properly understood, is nothing other than becoming a longing for God.
We are called, then, not to suppress our desires but to purify them. Not to extinguish eros but to direct it.
St Athanasius writes that progress in virtue ought not to be measured by time, but by desire and fixity of purpose. Not by how long we have been trying, but by how genuinely we want God. Which means the question beauty keeps pressing us toward is not What have you achieved? but How much do you want Him?
And here the flower becomes the image again. A flower’s beauty is not in its achievement. It is in its opening.
St Thérèse wrote this:
Like the daisy
with the rosy calyx,
Me, tiny little flower,
I open up to the sun.
She is not describing a strategy. She is describing a posture. The flower does not manufacture its own light. It does not perform its beauty. It simply turns toward the source and opens. And holiness, it turns out, is not so different. What makes us beautiful is not that we have no wounds, no darkness, no longing. What makes us beautiful is the extent to which we open all of it to Him.
In the Gospel of John, the first words out of Jesus’ mouth are a question: “What are you looking for?” Jesus poses the question at the beginning of the Gospel, but answers it only at the end. What is the answer? On the morning of the resurrection, Mary Magdalene appears, looking for Jesus. She meets him, but does not recognize him. She thinks him to be the gardener. Jesus greets her and repeats the question with which he opened the Gospel: “What are you looking for?” Then he gives her the answer: “Mary!” He pronounces her name in love. In the end, that’s what we are all searching for and most need. We need to hear God, affectionately, one to one, pronounce our names. Nothing heals us more of our restlessness than the voice of God, speaking deep in our souls, calling us individually by name and saying: “I love you!”Ronald Rolheiser