Anne and the roses

The heavens are telling the glory of God …. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth. (Psalm 19:1-4)

It happens every fall. I talk to my plants. I talk to the trees on my walks in the woods. I talk to the fields, dusty with harvest on the rolling hills of my childhood.

Sometimes, I talk to them in the summer, too, the petunias and begonias and mums that light up the patio and the balcony, the day lilies in the flower beds and certainly the roses by the southwest corner of the house. I tell them how they bless me.

But our exchanges become more poignant as October goes. An urgent impulse builds within to say ‘thank you,’ not once, but again and again. Thank you.

The words come of their own accord, tears, too, as another summer slips away, its colors fading, one less, now, in the store of summers I have been given to savor the sun’s embracing rays—feeling myself so graciously, so gratuitously loved by the Blessed Author, who wrote me into the script of a great story whose ending we do not see.

But the wonder of light and color and beauty fires hope to carry the soul through winter’s sleep. Too soon, it will come upon us to silence the earth and bid us to rest in peace—knowing earth’s Beloved Author will write another summer into the story, because that’s what love does. Love always has another chapter to write. Always.

But this chapter is not quite done. Words must be spoken.

Rounding the southwest corner of the house, I stop and take a long, loving look at the last roses of summer. Five blossoms remain, one falling apart, three faded by a recent frost and one small, elegantly-formed, velvety red blossom sings out its name, undimmed and undaunted.

This is what remains from the hundreds of blossoms the bush produced this year, planted three years ago in a patch of soil that had killed everything else I dared plant there. Little wonder I consider every rose a defiant shake of the fist in the face of all that is loss and death, a triumphant yes of life praising the verdant heart of life’s loving Source.

At the corner of the house, under a crystal blue sky and in the sight of confused neighbors who might have wondered to whom I was talking, I did what my heart required, obedient to love’s insistence.

Touching my heart, an involuntary gesture, the words came simple and true:

Thank you for your beauty. Thank you for the miracle of color. Thank you for singing the glory of the One whose beauty you share. Thank you for revealing my deepest desire and prayer that … maybe … someday … if only for a moment … I might shine with heaven’s light as beautifully as you.

I might add one more bit of thanks: Thanks for reminding me of life and beauty amid the vicious social divisions and the ugliness of hate that have poisoned the air we breathe. You gentled my heart, whispering a word of love you received from the One who is Love.

The roses were healing balm for my soul amid the bitterness of our times. Nothing surprising about this. Mystics and contemplatives and Jesus, too, heard Love speak in deserts and mountains, forests and flowers, in rivers that flow and winds that blow.

‘Every common bush is afire with God,’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, which is to say, alight with love.

A teenage Anne Frank knew this even as she hid from the Nazis in the darkest of times. ‘The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside,’ she wrote, ‘somewhere where they can be quiet, along with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature.’ 

I think Anne must have seen the roses.