Flowers will Come of It (Mid-week)

 

Grizzly Peak at Lilac Time (taken this morning) 

Flowers will Come of It 

This Sunday at 10 a.m. Holy Eucharist, we will have the flowering of the cross during the offertory.  We take a barren wooden cross and turn it into a living, vibrant burst of flowers.  (Everyone is invited to bring some flowers, both at 8 and 10, to provide enough blossoms for this, which will be done by Trinity's children, clergy, and altar and flower guilds.)  Here at Trinity, we do this on the second Sunday of Easter rather than on Easter Sunday so this wonderful symbolic act won't get lost in all the other wonderful symbolic acts and anthems of that very busy day.  Thinking about the new life that Easter brings, I was reminded of a poem by Richard Wilbur:   

April 5, 1974

The air was soft, the ground still cold.
In the dull pasture where I strolled
Was something I could not believe.
Dead grass appeared to slide and heave,
Though still too frozen-flat to stir,
And rocks to twitch and all to blur.
What was this rippling of the land?
Was matter getting out of hand
And making free with natural law,
I stopped and blinked, and then I saw
A fact as eerie as a dream.
There was a subtle flood of steam
Moving upon the face of things.
It came from standing pools and springs
And what of snow was still around;
It came of winter’s giving ground
So that the freeze was coming out,
As when a set mind, blessed by doubt,
Relaxes into mother-wit.
Flowers, I said, will come of  it.  
     (Richard Wilbur, Collected Poems. © Harcourt, 2004)  

Grace and Peace,  
Fr. Tony+