Not Yet

If you know what this is, it's likely because you already have one in your house waiting for the weekend.  Or you just know flowers way better than I do, since I'm not sure I could identify a bloom before it opens, no matter how well-known the plant.

It is of course an Easter Lily.  We got this one last Friday from the grocery store.  They all looked quite healthy and full of potential sitting there on the rack, and it seemed worthy of the ten dollar investment. So we brought this one home.

I really like having them in the house at Easter, mostly because it reminds me of Spring, and any flowering thing is more than welcome.  But an Easter Lily has special association for me because of how I've understood it to be a visual representation of the Resurrection.

If you look it up, you'll discover there is a lot to the symbolic meanings of the lily.  The flower is mentioned a few times in Scripture (Song of Solomon 2:1; Hosea 14:5; Matthew 6:28-29 if you are so inclined to do a quick study).  But nothing necessarily in connection with Resurrection morning.  The spiritual symbolism comes to us more courtesy of 14th century artists and other influences, which is all fine and meaningful in its own right.

I think for me, the particular way the blooms stay closed shut, then open wide and trumpet-like has a resemblance to the Tomb of Christ, both before and after.  I find myself checking in each morning to see which blooms are almost ready.  There's a patient expectation.  I know it will be worth the wait.

When the blooms do open, it's almost like they're saying, "Ta da!"  Maybe it's the trumpet shape.  Maybe it's the purity of the white petals.  I can't seem to help myself in feeling 'yay.'  It happened!  He is risen!

But not yet.

We're not done Lent yet.

It's in these waiting spaces that much can be revealed in those deeper places where we are human.  It's in the 'before' that we are refined for the 'after.'  And this year, as I look toward the opening lily blooms, I am again reminded that I know the end of the story, whereas the original Disciples did not.  They did not know.  

Not yet.  

I find I am drawn to waiting with them this year as I look at the closed-up-ness of my lily.  With them and with sisters and brothers around the world not knowing yet how their own story will end.  For some it looks grim.  War does that.

I want to wait with others, closer to home, who know a fresh grief, and can identify so much more painfully with those original Disciples than I do right now.  With others whose stories seem all tight and unlovely in this chapter that unfolds for them these days.  

And I wait with my own wonderings at the strangeness of the ways some things appear to be so very not okay.   And I am okay to sit with that in these days before the Opening.

Because I do know the rest of the story.

But not yet.