Saturday, October 28, 2023
Feast of Saints Simon and Jude, Apostles
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Consider the flowers in the field
Brothers and sisters, you are fellow citizens with the holy ones and members of the household of God.
Give me a mansion just over the hilltop, filled with God and his kids. It doesn’t get any better than this.
Jesus holds us together and grows us into a temple sacred in the Lord. In him you too are being built together into a dwelling place for God in the Spirit.
When I keep my eyes open, and that is by no means easy, the world explodes in color and intricacy. Consider the goldenrod, which blooms in the fall:
Goldenrods bloom with geometrical extravagance. Up close, the panicle, or flowering top, of the plant is composed of racemes, long stems with upturned yellow flowers. I waded into a field and plucked a modest goldenrod panicle, which comprised twenty-three racemes. I counted twenty-eight flower heads on one raceme and forty-nine on another. So any given panicle might contain between five hundred and a thousand flower heads. But then each flower head is composite, too, containing somewhere between two and sixty disc florets, surrounded by a handful of ray florets. My little goldenrod panicle had flower heads composed of six to eight florets, bringing our total to somewhere between three and eight thousand diminutive flowers on a single panicle. Even if there are only two goldenrod plants per square foot, an acre of the stuff could contain a half-billion flowers. – William Thomas Okie in Plough Magazine.
Oh, my goodness!
Mr. Okie wants me to “lean in and count the flowers, count the bees visiting the flowers, and catch an ovipositing insect in the act.” Then it might be more likely that we can turn toward each other and notice what’s noticing. Like those late-blooming flowers, we in our middle or aging age “feed vagrant organisms and protect the vulnerable young through the long, cold darkness.”
Seasons matter to the flowers, and of course to us. Our lush springs and summers also fade into “autumns of theatrical display and winters of hollow hospitality.” Can I live with that? Even die in the midst of that? God does not do seasons like I do. His constancy recognizes my fragile, fearful desire for God’s kind of immortality without judgment or condemnation. But he does not honor my request.
Nothing changes. And that’s the best thing that could happen for me.
Jesus went up the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God. Then day came.
I see how different we are, God and his goldenrod. I’ll lose my petals, but God will not judge me for it. I think his eyes always see me as the person he made, not the person I make myself out to be, good or bad.
God does not bow to my psychology, nor to my flourishes or faintings, and I am so grateful.
For Mr. Okies, a teacher of agriculture, “taking in a field of goldenrods is its own kind of tonic.”
I look down at the field of gold, and then I look up at the blue skied dome.
The heaven declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day pours out the word to day, and night to night imparts knowledge. Through all the earth their voice resounds.
And I am happy.
 (Ephesians 2, Psalm 19, Luke 6)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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