The Spiritual life is Like a Flower

 

A friend Rob came on Monday to plant Sunflowers and other assorted flowers in the gardens at the chapel. He came for the first-time last year. This year he came a little later, due to one or two planting errors. The flowers are a legacy of love from his dad. His dad had died from Covid, right at the beginning of the pandemic. I had helped him create the service he conducted himself at the side of his father’s grave. It was filmed and broadcast around the world, his father had come to Britain from Zambia over 50 years ago. His dad loved gardening and since he died Rob has carried on this legacy. If you ever go to Southern Cemetery, on the edge of Chorlton, and notice an incredibly well kept grave, it is very likely to Rob’s dad’s. He devotes much of spare time taking care of it. He tells me even in his death his dad is taking care of him, keeping him on the straight and narrow. It is truly a labour of love, as was his planting here on Monday.

Last year Rob came on the second anniversary of his dad’s death. As he was planting he talked and I listened. The planting of the flowers was his gift to me and me witnessing him remembering his dad as my gift back to him. We both gave and we both received and the whole community benefitted from the beauty of the gardens, which blended beautifully with the loving beauty already here.

The planting of those flowers seemed to me to be the spiritual life in all its beauty and glory; it seems to me that the spiritual life is like a flower.

Now you may well ask, how is the spiritual life like a flower? It is a reasonable question to ask. I will attempt to explain.

The first thing that comes to my heart and mind is that the spiritual life is about opening up, as a flower opens up. That to live spiritually is to open up and to continue opening up day after day, season after season and year after year. Just as the flower opens and up to the light, so do we. How many times do we open up and reach for the morning light? Well infinite times it would seem.

That said we not only open many times we close down and shrivel up many times too. We seemingly close in, shrivel up and fade away many times in our lives only to rise and open once again in a new spring time. The spiritual life is about opening up and closing back in before opening once again, over and over again.

We are all of us like flowers in the garden of life. Each unique and yet similar. Each with something to offer if we grow and flower and be all that were born to be. Yes a flower looks beautiful when it stands alone. It has its own beauty and own unique qualities but it only truly becomes all that it is when it grows together with other flowers in the garden. It only truly becomes all that it is when it shares all that it is with all the other flowers in the garden of life.

It is the same with us and our lives. Yes, we are all uniquely beautiful and we all have our own qualities but we only truly express them and experience them when we come together in love and share them with others, encouraging them to do likewise. The spiritual life is never truly experienced or expressed alone. These things only really come alive in company and communion with others. Each of us have something uniquely beautiful to offer one another, things that only truly flower when we share them with each other.

The spiritual life is not only like a flower, but like a flower garden…The spiritual life comes alive in the garden of life…The garden of delights…

The spiritual life is not experienced alone, it does not exist alone. It only comes alive when we share it with others. No one life is an island. We cannot thrive or survive alone. We are interconnected, much like life in a garden is interconnected.

Margaret Silf captured this thought near perfectly in “The Way of Wisdom”. She wrote:

"We belong, not merely to the created order of things, but in a great web of relationship, and interconnectedness, in which every particle is intimately interwoven with every other, and in which, in some mysterious way, each particle holds and reflects something of the totality. This makes a huge difference to the way we live. Every choice we make, every response we offer, every reaction we reveal has an effect on that web of being. We are made for relationship. The Wisdom of creation insists on it. No single creature can disengage from the dance of creation without jeopardizing the eternal beauty of that dance. We are indeed created to be 'we'. To opt for merely being 'I' is to opt out of the creative process itself. It is only in interrelationship that we have our being and our meaning."

In my eyes this beauty of this interconnectedness is portrayed near perfectly in the observation of flowers growing together with all that makes up the nature of a garden. Our lives and all life is like those flowers in the garden.

You see nothing in life is separate, everything is interconnected. If we damage one aspect of life we damage all life, just as if we begin to heal one aspect of life we begin to heal all life. Or to paraphrase Jesus “What you do to the least of them, you do to me.” Everything is interconnected, nothing lives separately from all life and I believe that is all connected by a Great Universal thread from which all life exists. I call this thread God.

True reverential spiritual living, an awareness of the sacred in everything helps us to recognise the importance of everything. It helps us see that everything matters. Every thought, every feeling, every word and every deed. It helps us recognise the intrinsic value of our own lives too. It reveals how we see life and how we live in life impacts on everything, including our own souls, our own beings. I am recognising this more and more as I live and breathe and enjoy my own being and that in which I live and breathe and share my being.

In recent months as I have simply enjoyed walking round where I live with Molly I have felt more connected to the people and the nature that I pass and interact with. As my reverence and love for life has grown, so has my love for my own being too. This has helped to continue the healing of my being in so many ways. It allows me to thrive and live and dance in the garden of life and thus be of better use in this life.

By observing flowers in a garden we can see clearly the interdependence of all life…The life in which we live and breathe and share our being…

The spiritual life is like a flower. I experienced this once more this week. May we all grow together in the garden of life, the garden of delights.

Please find below a video devotion based on the material in this "blogspot"