Flower Power
The other day, I was telling a priest friend of mine about a problem I was having with making time for prayer. He used a very beautiful image to explain how we need to encourage prayer through a sensible discipline. He likened the spirit to a rose bush. If you planted the rose bush in good soil, nourished it, kept it well watered, and let it receive direct sunlight, it would flourish and grow rapidly, giving off a beautiful fragrance.
However, if it was left to grow unsupported it would get too large, unwieldy, and collapse. So you need to support it with a trellis. The trellis is a structured time for prayer, or some specific way of praying. It can help support out spirit as it grows towards God.
The danger would be to forget why you put the trellis there in the first place. You shouldn’t prune the rose bush to fit the trellis. The rose bush will continue to grow and you shouldn’t restrict it. You simply have to add more support — through a disciplined prayer life, through praying with friends, through the nourishment of an active church community.
We must also have firm roots and not become too entangled in the trellis. In Ephesians 3:16–20, Paul prays that: “In the abundance of his glory may he, through his Spirit, enable you to grow firm in power with regard to your inner self, so that Christ may live in your hearts through faith, and then, planted in love and built on love, with all God’s holy people you will have the strength to grasp the breadth and the length, and the height and the depth, so that, knowing the love of Christ, which is beyond all knowledge, you may be filled with the utter fullness of God.”
In this way, the rose bush can flourish for the glory of its creator and produce flowers.
In chapter 13 of St Matthews Gospel, Jesus’ parables contain many images of nature; the parable of the sower (also Lk 8:4–9), the parable of the darnel and the parable of the mustard seed.
However, nature can also be a negative force if it is corrupted. Jesus tells us to be sure to produce good fruit (Mat 7:16–20). Gardens can be places of suffering too, as Jesus found in the garden on the Mount of Olives. It is not only in the desert that we can feel abandoned.
In the Genesis story, it’s all too easy to picture God as a distant magician who is hardly active in the world after its creation. At his resurrection in the Garden of Gethsemane, Mary Magdalene mistook Christ for a gardener. To me, it seems appropriate that the Creator should be found in his creation, which he has given us to look after. We should recognise the love he has for us in making us the greatest of his creations.