This amazing tulip with layered petals is named Orca. It blooms early to mid-spring, orange-tangerine with gold highlights. There were a dozen of these show stoppers in the front of the house here along the blue stone walk to the chapel.
The display lasted about two weeks before the petals fell. The leaves then lost their green and started to decay. A friend returned a week or so later and asked, "What's happened to your tulips; they look like they're dying?"
What's happened is a normal and necessary process called Healing. The bulbs, having worked so hard in producing these wonders, have now gone into a rest period, building up reserves and even "birth-ing" bulb-lets, all of which will survive through the winter and re-appear in April of 2019. What a great name for this process - Healing.
The word healing might well capture the Christian imagination: Jesus the Healer. But the miracles of Jesus are about much more than simply physical healing: the blind man, the deaf man, the mute, the crippled man, the bent over woman, the fevered mother in law, the little girl dead in bed, Lazaraus in his stone-tomb. They are indeed images of our present need for healing and new life in our human condition, the healing, binding up, raising up of our families, our emotional lives, our spiritual, relational, psychological, cultural, national and ecclesial lives.
He came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day as he usually did. He stood up and read, and they handed him the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah. Unrolling the scroll he found the place where it is written:
The Spirit of the Lord is with me, for he has anointed me to bring good news to the afflicted. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives, sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim a year of favor from the Lord. (Luke 4:16-19)
O Jesus, please, your healing of our family tree,
the ancestors, the long lineage of
divorce and domestic violence,
suicide, abortion and infidelity,
sex abuse, emotional brokenness,
addiction, alcoholism, poverty,
failure, desperation and depression.
O Jesus, good news for us too in the affliction of our
loneliness,
the wounds of younger years,
sex abuse,
willful ignorance,
naivete,
our bubble world,
O Jesus, your freeing us from our enervating
greed,
selfishness,
arrogance,
superficiality,
vanity and fear,
our collecting,
our storage bins from
sea to shining sea.
O Jesus, liberty from the slavery of our
false worship - our idolatry,
love of money,
trusting of power,
the adulation of might,
the glorification of weapons,
the sins of nationalism and
that politics...
that radio voice which keeps us from thinking freely for ourselves.
O Jesus, healing the blindness of our
hatred,
distractions,
lack of imagination,
sight-stealing fears,
inattention to our interior lives,
our winking at,
our confident admiration for what is repugnant to you.
O Jesus, a year of favor for us too,
anointing us with
that essential truth,
the only truth which matters really,
the truth about ourselves
as we stand before you
with the soul-seeing Father and
the Spirit of renewing life and love.
Father Stephen P. Morris
