At the end of last summer, an old (at least 75 years old) climbing rose bush was dug up and transplanted into a sunnier, more rose-loving spot. It is doing splendidly well.
That is, the part that was alive is doing well. There was a dead part of the plant, stretching down to the root ball. It was carefully cut away, and being deadwood, it was cast off for the detritus pile. After all, as Matthew 3:10 states, “the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: therefore every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire.”
A friend of mine urged me to save it, and try planting it at my place.
So I did. It was like shoving an ancient shriveled up walking stick into the dirt. I braced it with an old bamboo stake, and gave it a good hearty drink (as Monty Don would say).
I had little hope, of course. And I gave it nary a thought over the winter.
A few months later in mid February I passed by one morning as I walked Wendell (my West Highland terrier and all-around hypervigilant expert on everything, notwithstanding a serious case of ADD) out into the yard for his daily ablutions. I looked at the old deadwood colonial rose. And gasped. A leaf bud was pushing out, about an inch or so from the top.
Yesterday, a rosebud arose. What seemed dead is alive. What was lost is found.
Wendell, of course, was not surprised. He had that “of course” look, like an insouciant child who witnesses a flourish of magic, laughs with joy, but not at all disturbed by the abrupt oddness of the thing.
For the innocent, the ones who have not become so inured to the old and gray and weary world-hardened gaze, beauty is never odd, never an interruption. The chortling babe, and Wendell (and all his furry brethren) remember things better than I. They know this is just the way things should be.
How did we let the ways of the world so brainwash us away from childlike wonder? How did we become so grown up that we would rather expect disappointment than take the risk of hope? To expect dread more than life? To count more enemies than friends?
One of the oddest things about the Easter story is that no one could recognize the Risen One. At least, not at first, and never without the help of divine surprise.
On the very first Easter afternoon, two friends were on a long hike heading home. A fellow traveler joined them on the walk. He wasn’t hooded or masked in disguise. Along the way, he patiently explained to them the meaning of the recent upsetting events. They finally recognized who it was only at supper, when he blessed the bread and broke it. Then he promptly vanished.
Earlier, in the morning of that first day, a battered woman who had been rescued by a friend was wandering in the garden, overwhelmed by the missing body of that same dead and disfigured friend. She saw someone and assumed that he was the gardener. She recognized who he was only when he spoke her name.
There is nothing in the text that suggests any disguise or hidden identity on the part of the Risen One. If there was any veil, it wasn’t a physical one.
But there certainly was a veil, no? A veil that lay upon a mind habituated to disappointment, a mind locked in the cold vise of fate, a mind too cautious for hope, too timid for joy, too grown used to decline. A point of view that had shrunk to a, well, single crabbed point of view and not a horizon, brainwashed by death.
A mind that could not see a rose, when all that was expected was mere dead wood.
Let’s have some sympathy for the cast of characters in the post-resurrection stories, shall we? Can you blame them for having been so convinced of death that they could not see life, even when he was staring at them in the face? I mean, when we’ve all seen death, cruelly repeated, face to face too many times, it’s so inconceivable that life would not only return, but triumphantly return, that if it stood right in front of us our minds couldn’t accept it. Like, there was no room in our reality for such oddness, such surprise.
Like the brightness of a morning sunrise that is hard to wake up to, out of a long nightmarish stupor, the Risen One gently persuaded his friends to see, to rub open their eyes and rise. They were used to saying things like “It’s too good to be true.” But in this case, the better thought is “It’s true, and so it’s good.” He is risen indeed.
The Risen One told his surprised friends in Matthew 25:40 that they needed to turn their new and improved view of an Easter wide horizon on everyone else, and every thing. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren (and sistren), ye have done it unto me,” he said.
Recognize me, he said, recognize me risen — risen and deathless. Recognize me in the face of your brother, your sister, who is everyone, everywhere. Recognize my risen love, my truth, my beauty in every blessed thing.
There is an inescapable corollary: if I won’t let my mind be awakened out of the dark death gutter and let the Risen One raise it to love in the morning, then I won’t recognize my brother from the other, nor an impossible rose. And I won’t recognize the face of the risen friend.
Easter is the way of love, the way of waking recognition, like the morning after a night that went on far too long. On last week’s rainy Saturday morning, on the eve of Palm Sunday in the Cupola House gardens, the anemones, the tulips and snowbells shone and trumpeted out their hues of crimson, amethyst and azure, magenta and coral, opal and pearl, and yes, the surprising rose.
I looked across the fence and saw, walking down Broad Street, friends that I know and friends that I don’t know yet, and it came to me that love calls for attention and care. Memory and prayer. Joy, thanks and faith. All on a rainy garden day. All because a friend, beyond all expectation, apart from all my (and your) habituation and loss-infatuation, simply and greatly arose.
Meanwhile, I’ll be tending my expected dead but now unexpectedly alive and lesser flower — by which I recognize the greater rose.
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