Lilies of the Field: Relationship as Prayer

An exclusive article for the Rowe Center by Elizabeth Cunningham

As I write, it is August. It has been a strange spring and summer in the U.S. Northeast, with many things blooming a month early, some a month late. I’ve done plenty of fretting about climate change and what it portends, noting the scarcity of honeybees and monarch butterflies. Yet much of the time, when I wander outside, despite heat and humidity, I am in a delirium of joy. In my garden everything is blooming, flowers I planted and flowers that planted themselves. Sunflowers, beebalm, zinnia, echinacea, marigold, miniature roses, phlox, German onion, coreopsis, to name a few. The meadow is full of butterfly weed, bergamot, goldenrod, black-eyed susan, and queen anne’s lace.

Last week I went on a brief retreat by a mountain creek. The protected flood plain along the banks had grown into a wild thicket, flowering plants springing up between river stone, some I knew, like loosestrife and josie pie weed, and many I had never seen. As I walked along, gazing, I heard one of those whispers that comes from both inside and beyond:

“This is what you’re here to do.”

In this moment? In this life? And what exactly was I doing?
Adoring.
Which is to say, praying.

“Flowers are my religion,” I heard myself saying to someone I didn’t know. “I worship them.” She looked at me askance. Or maybe she just thought I was nuts.

According to Christian orthodoxy, you are supposed to worship the creator, not the creation. To worship the latter is to risk idolatry. Perhaps my passion for flowers is idolatrous. Here is another way to consider loving creation—whether a flower, a person, a fellow creature, a mountain, a forest, a river, an ocean, a cause, the planet. Every love can be a revelation of what Dante calls “the Love which moves the sun and the other stars.” If relationship itself as a way to connect with divine mystery, then any relationship may bring you into a deeper intimacy with all that is.

Take the flowers. Where I live, from the first signs of spring to the first frost, a sacred drama is enacted over and over. (Tropical regions have their own seasons and cycles.) Each plant rises from the earth, flowers, goes to seed, and dies back into the earth. Life, death, resurrection. This relationship with the flowering earth is a revelation, showing me how to love life, accept death, trust in the darkness where seeds wait until, unseen, they break open and grow.

Take loving a child. There are many cycles of love, loss, letting go, and trusting in the unseen in raising a child. I remember helplessly loving my adolescent child who could not, at the time, receive that love. I heard one of those whispers, “Now you know what it’s like for me.” And I saw so clearly that love is flowing over all of us, everything, all the time. Like ground that is hard or dry or frozen, we often can’t receive it. This heartbreaking moment of human love revealed to me the heartbreak of divine love.

Take lifelong love of partners or friends. I have lost more than one friend to death. My cohort is in the season of life where, if we were plants, our leaves and seeds would be flying and falling earthward. One friend I met in his prime, whose trajectory into dementia I have witnessed from the first subtle signs to inability to care for himself, is now in a nursing home. I visit him every couple of weeks. It is not easy, but neither is it a grim duty. It is a commitment, even a desire, to be present, to go as far as I can with someone I love. As changed as he is, as much as he’s lost, there is some essence of him, in him, that is a continuing revelation to me.

Back to the lilies of the field, whose raiment is more beautiful than Solomon’s and perhaps more useful. Did any royal robe ever succor a pollinator? The Gospel according to Mark may be my favorite, because it leaves room for mystery.

“This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man throws seed on the land. Night and day, while he sleeps, when he is awake, the seed is sprouting and growing; how, he does not know.” -Mark 4:26-27.

To enter into the kingdom of God, which is here—within us, around us, between us—is to enter into intimate relationship with the unknown. Yet we partake of that divine mystery in all our relationships, with flowers, children, friends, lovers, the work we do for peace and justice.

We adore, we rejoice, we suffer losses, we grieve, we rage, we fail each other, we forgive, we release, we wonder, we ponder, we live, we love, we die.

Which is to say, we pray.
We are prayers.

In late October and early November, I will be facilitating an online series of four workshops called Prayer for All Seasons. The season of Samhain (summer’s end in the Celtic tradition), All Saints and All Souls in the church, the Day of the Dead in Mexico, is a good time to reflect on the mysteries. Between the worlds of life and death, the Samhain season is the Celtic New Year, which begins in the dark where the seeds sleep. I hope you will consider joining me.

Novelist, poet, and interfaith minister, Elizabeth Cunningham recently published her debut work of nonfiction, My Life as a Prayer: a multifaith memoir. She is best known for The Maeve Chronicles, a series of award-winning novels, featuring a feisty Celtic Magdalen. In addition to writing, Cunningham has been a counselor in private practice for more than twenty-five years. She is also a prayer, as in “a prayer is one who prays.” She lives in the Valley of the Mahicantuck (the river that flows both ways aka the Hudson) on unceded land that was home to the Lenape.