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| Geranium Trio ~ Oil on Gesso Board by Linda Jacobus |
A few people commented early this week that they smelled or felt a bit of spring in the air. The changing of seasons isn't bound by a calendar date and usually seasons change gradually. We might learn that lesson, exhausted as we are by production timetables, due dates and finish lines.
Nothing in the spiritual life happens suddenly and all at once, but rather slowly, little by little. This invites us to notice subtleties: the reappearance of bird species, the filling in of the trees and forest floor, the different kinds of seasonal clouds. Many of us were good at detecting and discerning these things when we were children; Spring invites us to enter that wonder-world again.
D.H. Lawrence wrote: "The sense of wonder, that is our sixth sense. And it is a natural religious sense."
I'm remembering when I was a young boy in the 1950's and Long Island was still a rather natural place that felt untouched. There were peach orchards, horse farms, potato fields, nurseries with greenhouses, farm supply stores. Behind our new home there was an undeveloped woods, and in an adjoining field there were wild apple trees. A neighbor friend had a field of Sweet William growing behind her house.
On Mother's Day (maybe 1957) my father took me to a green house near the railroad station to buy a gift for my mother. Along the outside wall of the glass house we found a large geranium in full red-bloom in a clay pot. Time slowed down as the details jumped out at me: the spicy fragrance of the geranium leaves, the smell and cool dampness of the clay pot, the bright moss growing between the bricks in the path, the heft of the potted plant in moist soil, the way my father and I crouched down to examine the plant, how the light played off all the plants. That was about 60 years ago - a seemingly innocuous event that has turned out to be a resilient wonder-moment.
"The sense of wonder, that is our sixth sense. And it is a natural religious sense," D.H. Lawrence. "A natural religious sense." Wonder is a God-gift. God's kind way of letting us know how close God is to us. Maybe every moment holds wonder. It's up to us then to detect it and to hold it lovingly.
In his rule for monks and nuns, Saint Benedict requires that the monastics treat the garden tools and the kitchen utensils as reverently as the chalice is treated at Mass. That's a contemplative stance. But I'd go further, suggesting that we might notice and reverently savor every moment as we do the moment of the Consecration of the Bread and the Wine at Mass. Wonder is all around us.
