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| Every
Easter, at least since I've been married, I buy my wife a lily. When I
select a lily I look for one that has not yet opened because of the imagery
that I connect with the blooming. I'm sure it is not my own unique idea
that the blooms recall the opening of a whole new world when God's resurrection
power opened a sealed tomb and Jesus was resurrected from among the dead. The Easter lily is truly a gaudy flower and there was a time that I refused to buy it because in my judgment it lacked the delicacy that I associated with flowers, like unto a woman who applied too much make-up. But now I see it differently. If a lily has blooms that are too impossibly big and a perfume that is too strong and a pistil that literally drips, it is because it announces a message of great, great joy which, as in the angels Christmas proclamation, "shall be unto all people". I looked up the word "gaudy" in my Brewer and I found "gaudy-day", a holiday or feast day. The Latin root is gaudéo, the verb "to rejoice". So, it is quite appropriate that Easter's symbolic flower is a gaudy one, a flower that you might think was actually in the midst of its own joyful celebration of the resurrection. I hope your lily blooms big this Easter and that you have a very gaudy-day! Ted Dettweiler. |