The dearth of flowers in liturgical settings throughout Lent makes the explosion of them through Holy Week particularly noticeable. From palm fronds to white trumpet-shaped Easter lilies, the sprays and bouquets of the season remind us of rebirth and new life in our worship of the triune God.
It is easy and familiar for our ecclesiological vision to turn to the architecture of the places where we gather – whether gothic or byzantine or modern – and influence the way we think of the church: stable, structured, weathering tempests and storms. Of course, this tells part of the story of our lives of faith.
But the plants we use to decorate the sanctuary offer a counterbalancing series of truths: seasonal transitions, lives with phases of growing, thriving, and withering, entities both uniquely beautiful and radically dependent on forces beyond their own control. Professor Micaela Soranzo, an expert in liturgy and religious architecture, has opined that the liturgical use of flowers powerfully complements “the immobility of architecture.” We are a people ever on the move, just as the living and dying plants that we see around us. That is why the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has argued that “the use of living flowers and plants, rather than artificial greens, serves as a reminder of the gift of life God has given to the human community.” (“Built of Living Stones,” No. 129)
We must continue to allow Psalm 103 to interrogate our comfortable presuppositions about our own centrality to the cosmic picture: “As for mortals, their days are like grass, they flourish like a flower of the field; the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more.” And Job famously laments that the human person “who is born of a woman, is few of days and full of trouble; the human being comes forth like a flower and fades away.”(14:1-2) In fact, the Lord Himself instructs us to be more like the lilies of the field, who neither toil nor spin, but are bedecked in glory by the Father, so that “not even Solomon in all his splendor was arrayed like one of these.” (Mt 6:29)
There are hundreds of species of plants named after Jesus, Mary, the Trinity, angels and the saints. As Catholic authors Michael Foley and Francis Xavier Weiser have pointed out, even the state of Florida was named after this time of year, since Palm Sunday was sometimes referred to in Spanish-speaking regions as Pascua Florida because the Church blessed various flowers and blossoms on it, in addition to the traditional “ramos.” So, when Juan Ponce de León first laid eyes on its coast during Holy Week in 1513, he connected its lush vegetation with the religious feasts then occurring in his native Spain.
As Isaiah foretold, the shoot that has come forth from the stem of Jesse has in this holiest of seasons borne great fruit: the salvation of the world. And thus we adorn our liturgies with reminders that “flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come, the cooing of doves is heard in our land.” (Song of Songs 2:12) That joyful exultation echoes down through the centuries to us, and as the British hymn puts is: “Now the green blade riseth, from the buried grain … Quick from the dead, the risen One is seen: Love is come again like wheat that springeth green.”
Originally from Collingswood, Michael M. Canaris, Ph.D., teaches at Loyola University, Chicago.
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