Delighting
Christ delighted in flowers.
--Bernard of Clairvaux, "On Loving God"
And God, eternal love from age to age, said, “I will love what cannot last, what is not of my being but longs for it. Their longing I assuage, as to myself I bring the ones who fall to storm wind’s blast and time,” and made the lily and the sage. They could not help but blossom in his love and fade as quickly as they bloomed to vanish from the earth, yet when their maker left his seat above he chose the lily’s birth: to bud, unfold, and then be doomed with all the flowers he’d had the making of. For by their nature they could not remain— these somethings made from nothing fall, returning to the dust and leaving nothing, not even a stain, an ash, a fleck of rust— yet when they live, he lives in all, and when they die he knows their dying pain. But he who made the seasons made the spring; who made the stars made all the hours and each new-mercied day, and though we drop like petals withering he knows our swift decay. Christ so delighted in the flowers he fades with us, although he is our king. And so with him we fall and we return. We languish with a passing breath, as wind in autumn sighs, yet he is curled within, a sleeping fern and spring that never dies, that we may blossom after death delighting in him, too, for whom we yearn.
Rosa centifolia (cabbage rose) By Pierre-Joseph Redouté - www.herbarium.com, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=859013



I asked St Therese for a rose today. Here 'tis!