Notes for the Week Sixth Sunday of Easter Rogation Sunday May 17 2020

She’s called a Rose of Sharon.  Hibiscus syriacus, when we’re being formal. Although she came into being in Asia, she’s named for the gardens of Syria, where she grew thousands of years ago.  It was then her name was lifted up in scripture* and, in time, her name came to be given to the Divine One who would walk among us on earth one day, the One who was and is called, the Rose of Sharon, the Lily of the Valley, Jesus, the Son of God.  It seems fitting that Jesus would be named so, since like her, his humble beauty has never ceased to grace gardens, deserts, mountains and valleys and, in time, he became known everywhere and anywhere anyone took time to notice, even though he never asked anyone to.

Like a disciple of Jesus, one of a million birds, flying across tens of thousands of miles, like so many winged apostles flying across the flyways of time, carried the seed of the Rose of Sharon across oceans and spread her beauty across new lands, and she took root where she was dropped and bloomed where she was planted.

Now, she grows softly and silently in every other garden you could come across, and sometimes she’s carefully tended, given fertilizer in spring, and water in summer. Or she grows here on her own, untended, amid wild weeds and trees in a plot of government-owned land, softening the edges of rusty chain link and barbed wire, simply being who she was made to be, available to anyone with eyes to see and ears to listen to her quiet story.

Just like Jesus.

Like Jesus, she stopped me in my tracts.  During these days of rising human confusion, isolation, fears, rising protests, and noise, awareness of her was breathtakingly calming.  Receiving her message of serenity and her invitation to simply observe her quiet blooming, provided much-needed balm for the soul and a welcome quickening of hope.

Just as it is when you discover Jesus.     

Showing up, the way Jesus does; amid the tangled weeds of people’s lives, from the mountains to the valleys, amid the deafening noise of human scrambling need for attention, to the quietly humble of heart.  It doesn’t matter to Jesus how he is discovered, by whom, or where.  His beauty and grace blooms wherever and whenever he has been sought after and found. 

Hibiscus syriacus, like countless flora and fauna we celebrate on this Rogation Sunday, seems to gently offer the meaning of creation itself.   One begins to understand why God created and what God so profoundly wants us to learn from God’s creation.   To simply be who one is meant to be and to bring beauty into the place where one finds oneself.  To discern the truth of one’s God-given gifts in order to identify to the world who one really is and how one is really to serve.  To know when to produce and when to rest. When to grow and when to wait. To lower the sound of one’s voice, to lessen the need for attention in order to realize the truth of one’s existence. With grace and beauty, love and peaceful existence, one might already have found it.  Like the Rose of Sharon, one can come to know how to serve in place.  

Maybe this lone Rose of Sharon is unaware of the impact of her beauty or the depth of her history.  Maybe she is unaware that people will stop to admire her as they do.  She is invisible, yet visible. Present, but not proud.  Magnificent, with few requirements.  Teaching us that she is who she is, and that she asks only to be loved because she exists everywhere for all who care to notice along the way.

Like God.

We journey together,

Mother  Esme+

* “I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys….” (Song of Solomon 2:1)

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