A Rose E’er Blooming – Lynn Park
Posted in St. Gregory's Members Blog on Saturday, December 29, 2007
I’ve been thinking about roses--Christmas roses, roses in the snow, roses in December—all week. I’d already noticed, as I traveled up and down and round and about the highways and byways of the East Bay on Paratransit, how many roses bushes were in bloom. “Am I making this up,” I asked the driver, “or are there a lot more roses this time this year than last?” “I don’t know,” he says.
Sara’s sermon last week started out with the roses that the Virgin of Guadalupe showered on the peasant Juan Diego who had first seen her, when his account had been discounted by the Spanish bishop to whom he told it. Presented with these roses in all their profusion, these roses that seemingly came from nowhere and could only come from God, the bishop repented of his hard-heartedness and fell on his knees at the miracle.
There’s something about unexpected roses that makes them all the more special. I received my first dozen red roses, from my Daddy, when I was just a day old. Mama and I had red roses for him “from Clara and Lynn” when he died, in anger and alienation, from violence nearly thirty-four years later. Eleven years later, when Mama died, it was entirely natural for me that there be red roses for her “from Franklin and Lynn.” Of course he was part of the giving; he always had been, from the first.
When I got out of the hospital in August from my broken hip and the subsequent emergency surgery for infection, I was as far from being myself as I’ve ever been. I was weak, I was frail, I was frightened to move. And a physical therapist who came to the apartment said, “You’ll start feeling like yourself by Christmas.”
Now it’s Christmas, and there are roses.
