Flowers

I gave my daughter her first flower a few weeks ago. A woman in the check out line at Trader Joes said to me, “You must be in love, you are always buying flowers.” I wonder how many of us are here because girls like flowers?

I for one feel uneasy about this state of affairs. Giving flowers seems a little like offering a girl someone else’s poem. Their potent meaning transcends one’s creativity.

My daughter, though, did not seem overly impressed. She pulled apart the petals and stuck them in her mouth. There seems to be an infantile urge to rip things apart and chew on them. Is analysis a sophisticated expression of this primitive instinct?

Once while courting the woman who later consented to be my wife, I rowed her out on a river with a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets. We analyzed poems line by line and chewed upon each image. “Can’t we just enjoy the poem?” she asked. My Baconian dissection was ruining something beautiful.

The Scottish dissenter George MacDonald diagnosed the mishandling of created things in his Unspoken Sermons. While God does allow His child to, “pull his toys to pieces. . . , he were a child not to be envied for whom his inglorious father would make toys to such an end.” For, “it is through their show, not through their analysis, that we enter into [the] deepest truths [of the things God cares for]. Thus, “to know a primrose is a higher thing than to know all the botany of it--just as to know Christ is an infinitely higher thing than to know all theology, all that is said about His person, or babbled about His work”; This is so because, “the truth of the flower is, not the facts about it. . . . but the shining, glowing, gladdening, patient thing throned on its stalk.” One knows a flower by its blossom.

What is uncovered by the flower that unites all three of Botticelli’s Annunciation paintings? It is a white lily brought by the Angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary. In two of the paintings, light pours over the petals and illumines Mary’s face. While Mary's rose-red dress in the third painting is that worn by the Madonnas in Botticelli's Madonna of the Rosegarden(s), the bend of her body, which appears blown back by the force of Grabriel’s rapid arrival, mirrors the form of the lily held by Gabriel, to which it forms a parallel curve. In addition to the words voiced by Hosea to the Almighty’s beloved, a scripture lover who ponders this sign of God’s favor might recall a peculiar dramatic song:

Beloved: I am the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valleys.

Lover: Like a lily among the thorns, is my darling among the maidens.

This is of course an excerpt from the Song of Songs, dramatic poetry that initiates listeners into the mysteries of love. Among other things, it reminds hearers that there is a difference between a flower and thorns. Above all guard your heart, says the teacher of the Proverbs. For like the blossom that unlocks the door, the heart itself may be belong to a love story that is higher and deeper and wider than prying hands grasp.

One day, Lord willing, I may walk my daughter down the aisle to give her away. If she is anything like her mother, she will be carrying a bouquet through a church filled with flowers. Hopefully she will not mindlessly rip apart the petals and chew on them. I do hope that she will be grateful for their beauty and perfume, costly gifts indeed. The man up front had better!