new church life: september / october 2013
flowers on an iron fence
I’ve heard that we should take time to smell the flowers, so I did. They were
growing on a fence at the top of the high stone wall next to the old Cathedral
workshops.
It is a nice black iron fence, but its real beauty comes from the green
tendrils, leaves and flowers growing so gracefully on it in the warm bright
sunshine. And since, as the Writings tell us, there’s nothing in this world that
doesn’t represent something spiritual, I tried to think what an iron fence
covered with flowers might be trying to tell us.
Without the flowers, the fence might appear rather stark and forbidding:
rigid, angular, of a somber hue. An emblem, perhaps, of a certain quality of
thought; a mind bound by cold hard facts, fixed and inflexible. You’re either on
one side of the fence or the other; and the other side is the wrong side.
Fences are useful things. This particular one protects people from a bad
fall. They mark boundaries, and boundaries are important. Facts are facts
and must be respected. But human intelligence, although supported by facts,
involves something more.
Just as a fence is softened and made beautiful when adorned by living
plants, green and flowering, so factual knowledge is vivified and beautified
by the addition of tender green leaves of faith and fragrant flowers of charity.
The spiritual intelligence and wisdom that grows out of love (the flowering
plants) needs the mental constructs formed of natural knowledge (the fence)
for support, but without spiritual wisdom the highest use and beauty of the
fence would be unrealized.
(WEO)
a taste of heaven
Every so often we get a glimpse of heaven. It happens when we are part of
a group working toward a common goal, with everyone playing a role that
blends into a harmony of uses. There is no discord, no ego, no frustration. We
lose ourselves in the joy of the experience.
The Rev. Jeremy Simons recen H