They Toil Not: What the Lilies Know That We’ve Forgotten
JOSEPH CLAIR
4 min read ⭑
Each April, my house overflows with seed trays, heat mats and grow lights, as our property becomes a labyrinth of tilled rows, raised beds and rotating crops of colorful and evocative flowers. Before my wife took on her cut-flower garden project, I didn’t know 99% of these flowers even existed. Some of my favorites are the roses — the ones called “Jude the Obscure” that smell like cedar and grapefruit — but the list goes on and on: Sweet William, Canterbury Bells, Bells-of-Ireland, Ranunculus, Anemone, Cock’s Comb, Strawflower, Larkspur, Foxglove, Love-in-a-Mist and Zinnias. They come in such a wide variety of colors and sizes. The beauty of it all can make you punch-drunk like the over-pollinated bumblebees I find dozing in the folds of the dinner plate-sized Dahlias on sunny afternoons.
There is a gratuitous excess to it all. I am not a botanist, but I can’t imagine the ornate symmetry and colorful explosions are necessary for species survival. Why does all this beauty exist? What are flowers for?
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The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins suggests (and exemplifies in his poems) that each part of creation, by manifesting its own glory, makes visible a unique aspect of God’s invisible nature — in a way that only it can. This is as good an argument for the intrinsic value of biodiversity as I can imagine. C.S. Lewis, in his essay, “The Weight of Glory,” goes further to suggest that beautiful things and our experience of them awaken in us a spiritual longing for the capital-B “Beauty” of our Homeland, something we can only find in God’s presence. Experiencing little-b beauty is not to be confused with the thing itself, as he says, “they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.” I am all for this apologetic of beauty and the longing that it awakens in us, but recently I have been thinking about the value of experiencing beauty from a different angle, in the ordinariness of our day-to-day lives.
As I have gotten deeper into the busyness and hustle of midlife — deeper into career, parenthood, homeownership, taxes — I have found myself increasingly hollowed out by the speed and blur of productivity and consumption. The downside of my American outcomes-driven approach to maximizing every ounce of life is that I have become addicted to efficient usefulness. I think part of Jesus’ call to come to him and rest is an invitation to resist this instrumentalized view of reality. One key practice in this resistance is, for me, paying attention to my wife’s flowers.
Part of what feels liberating about paying attention to the beauty of flowers is that their worth is not entirely bound up with what you can do with them. What can you do with the arrangement on the kitchen table other than take notice of them, appreciate their intricacies and give thanks? Their fleeting fragility only seems to heighten the stakes of this opportune glimpse. My soul often feels in perpetual motion — ever onward, up and to the right, moving forward, never ceasing, always striving in the workshop of my own self-crafted good life. The beauty of these flowers stops me in my tracks. Their beauty provides little moments of rest in a restless world, a little guest house for my soul on the long day’s tired pilgrimage.
“That such things are so obviously outside of our control continually reminds us of our status as guests in some much greater cosmic house, and that we too are subject to these same forces.”
I recently heard the singer-songwriter Jon Guerra say, “beauty puts us in touch with invisible things.” Yes! Invisible things that are also real things, perhaps even more real than we are. Things that last. Things that we can’t quite strategize, chase and acquire. Things that don't operate according to the same rules of productivity that characterize our lives and yet are, in the end, more valuable and real than most of what consumes us and keeps us awake at night. Anything that clues us into this invisible reality and economy is a gift. In this way, a little bouquet might be the most precious possession in your house for the short time that it is there. It depends on your hierarchy of value.
My pursuit of the good life often feels overly cumulative — I am trying to grow in character and advance my vocation and acquire more stuff. The experience of a beautiful flower reminds me that part of (perhaps the most important part of) pursuing a good life is not cumulative but more a matter of tuning in, paying attention and being apprehended by the inestimable goodness, glory and beauty of the things God has made and is making, and responding accordingly. This frees me from my addiction to productivity as core to my identity and opens me to other intrinsically worthy activities that make life so enjoyable and worth living, which often feel like a waste of time — reading, writing poetry, painting, learning, playing and fly-fishing.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus suggests that in some mysterious way the beauty of flowers can release us from worry and free us for the singularity of seeking his kingdom — a kingdom that can only be sought in the present moment, in a single day. “Tomorrow will be anxious for itself”(Matt. 6:34, ESV). In the beauty of flowers, Jesus says, we are invited to see that the providential hand orchestrating all of that gratuitous beauty is actively caring for us — weaving the fabric of our life and tending to our needs in ways that we cannot comprehend.
I think ultimately there is some deep analogy between flower beauty and the experience of God’s grace. The swelling beauty of the spring garden cannot be created by mere human hands. Its beauty can only be cultivated in cooperation with sunlight, soil, raindrops, seasons and microbes. That such things are so obviously outside of our control continually reminds us of our status as guests in some much greater cosmic house, and that we too are subject to these same forces. Whatever our role in cultivating flower beauty, we are at best recipients and stewards of a gift that precedes and exceeds us. Once things are in bloom, the only requirement, the only action to be taken, the only work to be done, is to stop and “consider the lilies.”
Joseph Clair serves as the Associate Provost for the Division of Humanities, Honors and Education and Professor of Theology and Ethics at George Fox University. He is a Martin Institute Cultura Fellow. Joseph and his wife, Nora, live in Dundee, Oregon, with their four children.
Adapted from “Consider the Lilies” by Joseph Clair in Conversatio. Copyright © 2006. Used with permission of Conversatio.org and The Martin Institute for Christianity & Culture.