Considering the Lilies
Jenny Harris
Christ in the Wilderness - Consider the lilies | Stanley Spencer
For the flowers are great blessings.
For the Lord made a Nosegay in the meadow with his disciples and preached upon the lily.
For the angels of God took it out of his hand and carried it to the Height.
For a man cannot have publick spirit, who is void of private benevolence.
For there is no Height in which there are not flowers.
For flowers have great virtues for all the senses.
For the flower glorifies God and the root parries the adversary.
For the flowers have their angels even the words of God's Creation.
For the warp and woof of flowers are worked by perpetual moving spirits.
For flowers are good both for the living and the dead.
For there is a language of flowers.
For there is a sound reasoning upon all flowers.
For elegant phrases are nothing but flowers.
For flowers are peculiarly the poetry of Christ.
For flowers are medicinal.
For flowers are musical in ocular harmony.
For the right names of flowers are yet in heaven. God make gard'ners better nomenclators.
(An excerpt from Jubilate Agno, by Christopher Smart)
On Ash Wednesday we remember that we are dust. And this dust and clay of the wilderness is also soil, from which God makes the flowers grow.
Lent prepares us to walk the way of the cross, but it also prepares us for the flower-strewn walk into springtime at Easter. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing has come, and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land.
The fasting period of Lent coincides with what is traditionally called the ‘hungry gap’: the period in the agricultural year when the winter stores are depleted and not much from the new season is ready to eat. The crops, the fruits and vegetables, may not be ready yet, but the blossom on the fruit trees is a promise that they are growing, and they will ripen.
Stanley Spencer depicts Jesus in the wilderness enjoying flowers, specifically these daisies. Christ fills the entire frame, paying close meditative attention — adoration, even — to this simple wonder of creation, as I hope to also in March, when the daisies miraculously reappear.
We do not (usually) eat flowers, but they are nourishing nevertheless. I have certainly felt, looking today at the snowdrops and aconites that irrepressibly show their faces through the snow, that the flowers are great blessings. I might go so far as to say that they are medicinal.
When we take time to reconnect with our place in the natural world, when we call the flowers by their names and receive their blessing, we participate in the continual adoration of the angels, and we are reminded that, like the lilies and the daisies, we do not live by our own efforts, but are fed and clothed in due season by our loving God.
Poet and mystic Christopher Smart understood a thing or two about lockdown. Between May 1757 and January 1763, he was confined to a private asylum in London [1]. Prior to this he had written metrical, sometimes satirical poetry, but while confined he wrote a long, deeply strange poem modelled on the psalms, probably by writing a few lines every day.
Smart’s consolations in his confinement are his joy in language, particularly the language of the psalms, and the consolations of nature, including his famous lines about his cat Jeoffry, as well as this less well-known section about flowers that I have chosen to excerpt. Like many of us, he turned to gardening in his confinement. For Smart, language and nature are intimately and inseparably connected.
When Smart writes ‘For the right names of flowers are yet in heaven. God make gard'ners better nomenclators.’, he evokes Adam, who first yoked nature to language by naming all the animals and plants of the garden. But Smart asserts that language is not in fact human, but rather divine, and as such as unknowable to us in its essence as any part of God. The ‘right names of flowers’ can only be discovered via divine revelation. And any mystic knows that revelation has to be preceded by contemplation.
Like Spencer’s Christ, and like Christopher Smart, let us spend some of our time in the wilderness on a contemplation of God’s creation. By our adoring gaze on the spring flowers, let us learn the truth of God’s fathomless love for flowers, and God’s fathomless love for us, and so come to understand the Passion, and the cross, flowing out of that love as inevitably as the March daisies spring from the cold earth.
[1] Dr Johnson wrote about this: “Madness frequently discovers itself merely by unnecessary deviation from the usual modes of the world. My poor friend Smart showed the disturbance of his mind, by falling upon his knees, and saying his prayers in the street, or in any other unusual place.”
