First of all, she’s actually three rhododendrons. They have been growing together like three old spinsters since the early 50s, septuagenarians who moved in shortly after the house was built, which makes them among the oldest residents, next to the pines and pin oaks.
You ought to respect your elders.
I know they look a little haggard this spring after a glamorous bloom last year, but you would too, if you spent 51 weeks gathering sunlight and rain for one week’s display of hundreds of trusses, thousands of blooms. Who among us works with such singular purpose to create art so fleeting and free?
I know you envision more productive uses for the strip of property between the garage and garden shed. Instead of a mound of bright green evergreen leaves towering over the roof of our house, you propose a paved walkway or yet another spot to park a car. The lawn is too narrow, you argue, for the mower to access the backyard.
Right now, the rhododendrons brush the top of your head as you pass, they lay a hand on your shoulder. They’re prayer warriors.
In this age of storage units, house plants, and job transfers, isn’t it enough to be a living witness, rooted in this one place so many decades, among so few things that promise to stay?
You know, we could take a cue from Mildred, Agnes, and Betty. We could be three-in-one, braided and bound, inseparable, stalwart, and brave. We could let the dead leaves fall, try on new growth, and find it in us to keep gathering so many bell-shaped blooms to catch the dew, every morning for one week in May, so bright and loud, perfect and faithful to bring our particular color and flare to this one corner, this home.
I’m Reading A Testament of Devotion by Thomas R. Kelly Right Now
And it’s, again, exactly what I need these days. Isn’t it wonderful when books and authors find you right where you are?
Early on in Kelly’s book, he addresses a tension I often sense in myself—this feeling that I am both in the world but not of the world, completely attached and yet soundly detached, that there is one layer of reality and then a deeper, really Real. Kelly describes this sensation as two levels: the daily, external affairs we all must navigate, and then another, “deep within, behind the scenes, at a profounder level, we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship and a gentle receptiveness to divine breathings.”
He continues,
Between the two levels is fruitful interplay, but ever the accent must be upon the deeper level, where the soul ever dwells in the presence of the Holy One. For the religious man is forever bringing all affairs of the first level down into the Light, holding them there in the Presence, reseeing them and the whole of the world of men and things in a new and overturning way, and responding to them in spontaneous, incisive, and simple ways of love and faith.
Facts remain facts, when brought into the Presence in the deeper level, but their value, their significance, is wholly realigned.
What a way to live and move and have our being in this world, to know that we can take our interaction with a colleague, our teenager’s cantankerous spirit, our anxiety and weariness, our rhododendron bush, the lack and the abundance into the throne room, into the palace in time, and offer it up to be seen anew, through the lens of Christ’s love!
Here’s what the Spirit does for us, daily, when we pause to let it do the good work in our souls:
He plucks the world out of our hearts, loosening the chains of attachment. And he hurls the world into our hearts, where we and He together carry it in infinitely tender love.”
May we go forward into the weekend detached from the world’s attempts to assign us significance, security, and acceptance. May we simultaneously walk through the minutes and hours ahead, holding the world in infinitely tender love.
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