The title question here is important, "What remains ~ Indeed Flourishes?" It is a searching question: What remains after the McCarrick report? or What remains after the national contention of the past four, petulant White House years that overflows into today? or What remains after Coronavirus?
What remains after addiction? What remains after bankruptcy? What remains after cancer? What remains after betrayal? What remains after profound disappointment? What remains after perhaps losing my childhood faith?
Nearby, this small white rose remains (a little more than an inch across) on a now winter-hibernating bush. There have been freezing nights lately and cold, buffeting rain, but the rose remains, inexplicably intact. Better than simply intact, the flower is flawlessly white, soft, delicate, full-blooming. The flower flourishes above the spotted, mildewed, seasonally finished leaves. Look at your life and I, mine. There are so many factors which might have spelled a failed life: addiction, disappointment, failure, loss, abuse...
The little, last remaining rose, got my attention—I'm on my feet these many years, leaning in, looking for what is genuinely of God in an inner itinerancy, which means, being attentive to how each day, each hour, each minute, holds an exquisite surprise. The word exquisite comes from the Latin, exquirere—to seek or search out. Exquisite describes something that is particularly lovely, beautiful, excellent, flawless, deeply sensitive, perfected. Something is exquisite when it's understood in its subtlety, when it is uncommonly appealing, delicate, tasteful or fine. "On my toes" to detect the exquisite can be my way of life. I would suggest it is the spiritual life lived deeply. Jesus often calls us to awakeness, which is the realm of grace. Grace is not a commodity, a thing to be stockpiled, like the nation's silly stocking of toilet paper and paper towels.The priest-monk Gabriel Bunge, in his book on the Rublev Trinity icon, speaks of grace as God's sharing God's energies and illumination. We don't collect grace, but live in it!
For me, this encounter is shared sitting in front of my boyhood icon of the (Donskaya) Mother of God (below), or walking through the neighborhood learning the seemingly endless loveliness of trees (like the Japanese Red Cedar pictured above, which I came across recently).
Here we are, early in another Advent. I want to stand on inner-tiptoe where I realize I am not a victim to the insanity of the past or of this day—the decay, the disappointment, the ugliness, the fury, the lies. Rather, something remains, even flourishes within—this capacity to anticipate and live in the exquisite. You too!
