Eternal Beauty

The promise of the flower is the promise of sustained beauty. The promise of the sunset is the promise that there is more to existence than I can put in a jar and call my own. The promise of all that captivates my senses is that I was made for more and that there is more to come. Yet, all these pass and don’t fully satisfy. The promise of friendship is that there is true acceptance. The promise of heroism is that there is true virtue. Yet, all friends fail, all heroism is mixed with cowardice, and virtue is mingled with vice. The flower’s beauty came from somewhere. So the sunset’s dazzling array. The virtue of the hero was dipped from a deep well of character. That these things are passing, measured, crippled, and limited to my experience in this world does not negate the certainty of their reality or their transcendence. There is a God. He makes the flowers come back. He spins new sunsets and clouds. He raises the dead. I remain. As Job said,

“I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes—I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!” Job 19:25-27, The New International Version, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House) 1984.

I Saw a Flower in the Path
by Steve Coan

I saw a flower in the path,
And gazed upon it ere I passed,
And for a moment felt its bath—
Its loveliness was unsurpassed.

I plucked a flower from the path
For gazing left me wanting more,
And pleased was I apart from wrath
To mete what did my soul adore.

I held a flower from the path
And blissful—ah, my senses pleased
To have it close and taste its breath.
This simple charm my spirit eased.

I kept a flower from the path,
With several more that I arranged—
Displayed for me in simple swathe
A captive beauty not estranged.

I gave a flower from the path
To many friends both young and old,
Accumulating bloom and grass,
The blossoms fair we all extolled.

I cursed a flower from the path
For kept or shared in any case
It breathed a last and suffered death;
Betrayed I was by passing grace.

I met a flower in the path,
And almost turned my heart away
That it might not have chance to scath
And cheat me when it would not stay.

I found a flower in the path,
And wrest my lust for vernal spree,
But savored that that flower hath
But loveliness to offer me

I saw a flower in the path,
But lo, the flower gathered me
And for an aeon give her bath—
A promise of eternity.

Inspired by George MacDonald.

“If the flowers were not perishable, we should cease to contemplate their beauty, either blinded by the passion for hoarding the bodies of them, or dulled by the hebetude of commonplaceness that the constant presence of them would occasion. To compare great things with small, the flowers wither, the bubbles break, the clouds and sunsets pass, for the very same holy reason (in the degree of its application to them) for which the Lord withdrew from His disciples and ascended again to His Father—that the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, the Soul of things, might come to them and abide with them, and so, the Son return, and the Father be revealed. The flower is not its loveliness, and its loveliness we must love, else we shall only treat them as flower-greedy children, who gather and gather, and fill hands and baskets from a mere desire of acquisition.” George MacDonald, 365 Readings by C. S. Lewis, p. 118