The Rose

Rev. Meg Barnhouse
June 9, 2013

We hear in songs that love is a rose. We read the poets, who say life is a rose. From Rumi to Emerson to the Grateful Dead, the rose is used to evoke beauty, pain, the ephemeral nature of life. It’s summer, and the roses are blooming.

Reading: The Greening Breath

The new house we moved into has roses blooming all along its sunny southern side. Mama told me roses were hard to grow, so I never tried before, but here they are, and I like watching them. A medieval Christian mystic named Hildegarde of Bingen wrote: ” ……the breath of the air makes the earth fruitful. Thus the air is the soul of the earth, moistening it, greening it.” Watching my roses, I see that greening breath moving up slowly through the stem, sending energy through the tips of the leaves as they uncurl, gathering in what they need from the summer sun. Hildegarde said: “The soul is a breath of living spirit, that ……permeates the entire body to give it life.”

I find myself wishing for that greening spirit in my soul this summer. The heat drains the life out of me. Some days I just drag around, crabby and overwhelmed. I see people on TV having cookouts, rafting down refreshing rivers, enjoying places I can’t afford this year. I know that comparing my life to life on TV is a no-win practice. When I’m hot, it feels like everyone else is graceful, loving, patient, financially savvy, organized, with animals who do what they are supposed to do. They do things a little at a time rather than letting them pile up. When it’s hot, everything is too hard. Or maybe I’m too soft. I can’t tell. The greening is hard to feel in summer, for me, but I see my roses feeling it.

Sometimes I wonder if it hurts to bloom. I know scientifically, that doesn’t make sense, but suspend disbelief for a moment and picture this: if you were a rose, and this were your first time out, would you be having fun being a bud, all curled around yourself, feeling hugged and tight, knowing what’s what? You are soaking up the sun, being gently tossed in warm wind, and suddenly everything starts to loosen up. Your petals are letting go! They are moving apart from one another! Do you try to hold on, try to grab for the edges and keep the changes from happening? Maybe you think to yourself, “I don’t understand this, but maybe it’s what’s supposed to happen.” You allow the once tight petals to move apart. Does it hurt? Does it cause anxiety? Do the buds think they are falling apart or do they know they are blossoming ? The roses seem to accept each stage with grace, but how do we really know that? Maybe we just can’t hear them screaming.

Are you evergreen, stable, cruising through the seasons, level and confident? Are you dry as a stick, all thorns, wondering whether any life is left in you at all? Are you uncurling in high anxiety, wondering if you are falling apart? Are you letting go, surrendering, hoping that this falling apart will lead to blossoming? I’m going to try to trust, imagining that whatever is happening is what is supposed to happen. Maybe that is true or maybe it’s not, but it is a stance I’m going to try out for a while. The shoot, the stem, the flower, then the seed, all in their own time.

I love that image of a rose bud, tightly curled, beginning to loosen and just going into a panic. “Help! What’s happening? My petals – they’re coming apart!” What the rose blossoms into is so lovely that it has delighted humans and ants and aphids and many other creatures for millions of years. The oldest fossils of roses, 32,000,000 years old, found in Colorado and Oregon, resemble more the East Asian roses than the American ones of the present day. The first record of the kind of roses we know best is a highly stylized one in a fresco at Knossos in Greece; it dates from the sixteenth century B.C. E. Maybe they come from East Asia. The Goddess Lakshmi was said to have been born from a rose that had 108 large petals and 1008 small ones.

From ancient days, the rose has been a symbol. A symbol is a thing that stands for something else, often something abstract and multi-layered, hard to understand. With its thorns and its beauty it makes an excellent stand in for many abstractions.

What is both beautiful and painful? What lifts the heart and pleases the senses but also can hurt you? What, in life, is welcoming and forbidding at the same time? Some would say “Life.” Khalil Gibran says: The optimist sees the rose and not its thorns; the pessimist stares at the thorns, oblivious to the rose – Kahlil Gibran.

You could say “creativity.” It certainly has its joys, but there is self-doubt, the mystery of when the muses are with you and when they’re not, and there is often lack of appreciation or criticism of what you produce. Progress would be some people’s guess. You try to change things and make them better, and there is always resistance, there is always conflict and failure that you have to get through. Progress has its beauty and its thorns. When most people think about what is beautiful that can also make you bleed, they say “love, of course!” The rose has been a symbol of love from ancient days. Sacred to the goddess Venus, whose Greek name is Aphrodite, the rose naturally became a symbol of the female face of God that the Christians brought to history: Mary, the mother of God. They say the rosary was called that because the beads were first made of the pressed-together petals of roses, in her honor. Lots of baby girls are named Rose Mary, Rosemarie…. After Mary, the rose of heaven.

The rose is love, all right. Pure love: white roses. First love: pink roses. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,/Old Time is still a-flying – Robert Herrick, urges young women in To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time True love: red roses. O, my love’s like a red, red rose/That’s newly sprung in June – Robert Burns , A Red, Red Rose

Cheating? Yellow roses. When I learned that it made me sad; the split rail fence at my grandfather’s farm was covered in yellow roses, and I have thought since then that they were the most beautiful.

One friend saw my sermon topic and told me about a poem by Walter de la Mare that ends: “Oh, no man knows, through what wild centuries, roves back the rose.”

Many wild centuries ago the rose was a sign of silence and secrecy. The word sub rosa “under the rose” referring to the demand for discretion whenever a rose was hung from the ceiling at a meeting or fastened to the door of the room where the meeting took place.

The number 5 is associated with the rose, as it has five petals in each layer. In mystery traditions, five represents the four elements plus Spirit. Also, a human being when standing with arms outstretched has five “points.” Geometrically, the rose corresponds with the pentagram and pentagon

The rose has linked them with the 5 senses. In an absolute sense the rose has represented the expanding awareness of being through the development of the senses. Many people touch smell and even taste roses. I don’t know what they sound like, but there could be people who hear them….

Politics and the struggle for justice is a prickly business. A red rose held in a hand is a symbol of socialism or social democracy: it is used as a symbol by the socialist or social democratic parties of many countries. This began when the red rose was used as a badge by the marchers in the May 1968 street protests in Paris. In the early 1900’s James Oppenheim had written a poem that was used in a textile strike in MA. “Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses.”

You Grateful Dead fans know that one of their best-known albums is titled “American Beauty.”

In an essay for the book Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics. David Dodd Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs talks about how often the rose shows up in their songs. “The rose is a metaphor waiting to happen, and peoples have always ascribed to it some aspect of the mystery of life.” In the words of Robert Hunter: ” ‘ I’ve got this one spirit that’s laying roses on me. Roses, roses, can’t get enough of those bloody roses. The rose is the most prominent image in the human brain, as to delicacy, beauty, short-livedness, thorniness. It’s a whole. There is no better allegory for, dare I say it, life, than roses.” Jackson, Grateful Dead: The Music Never Stopped, (p. 152-153)

Dante uses the rose as a symbol of the whole universe, with its swirl of many petals a representation of the expanding cosmos.

The rose is such a rich symbol that it can hold many meanings. One woman I know imagines, when she is going into a difficult situation, that she is covered in roses. You are welcome to try it if you like. I do when I remember, and it’s quite pleasant. The rose has been working on the human brain for untold ages. It helps us. “I know this rose will open,” we sing. Rumi says:

“In the driest whitest stretch of pain’s infinite desert, I lost my sanity and found this rose.”

“Slowly blooms the rose within……….”

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

http://itunes.apple.com/podcast/first-unitarian-universalist/id372427776