Flourish is a rich and reassuring word. From the Latin stem florere it relates to flowers. To flourish is to "develop in a healthy or vigorous way, especially as the result of a particularly congenial environment." Who wouldn't want to flourish?
The word has recently become a buzz word in self-help and pop psychology circles. Book titles love it: Flourishing. How to Achieve Happiness and a Deeper Sense of Well-being and Purpose in a Crisis. Yes, I'll have some of that.
Flourish. A New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being – and How to Achieve Them. Yes. Always up for new ways of understanding, especially my self.
The Sermon on the Mount and Human Flourishing. Yes indeed. My kind of book, exploring my kind of textual territory, and in fairness, the only one of the three I have read. But it's clear flourishing is a good thing, and there's a market for it, though I doubt you can buy it
Describing my sense of self during these lock down weeks, flourishing is not the word that comes to mind on first thought. On second thoughts, it still seems a bit of a stretch. No. I have to be honest. I haven't felt that lock down and all its constraints helped me "develop in a healthy or vigorous way, especially as the result of a particularly congenial environment."
However. If I look at the photographs I have taken, it becomes obvious I paid close attention to flowers, you know, these botanical specimens from which we get the semantic seeds of "flourish", florere. No surprise that I took so many. Flowers are fascinating, beautiful and have always been mood shifters for me.
What becomes clear as I review a lot of them is the necessary transience of beauty, and the more poignant thought that the flower has to fade before the seeds form, drop, and keep the cycle of flourishing going for another year.
There is a profound hopefulness hidden in our expectation of next year's beauty from this year's seeds. Isaiah thought so too. "The desert and the parched land will be glad, the wilderness will rejoice and blossom. Like the crocus it will burst into bloom…" (35.1) Deserts will flourish, wilderness will bloom, parched land will blossom. That's a promise, says Isaiah. And he said it to people who had been in exile, a 70 year lock down.
The Hebrew word for 'blossom' is itself like a seed; "it suggests an image of breaking forth, budding, sprouting, even bursting." Latent energy conserved and coiled in readiness; stored up vitality waiting its chance to make its play in a dazzling performance of grace, beauty and life celebration. I'm not sure I know a better image of hopefulness in the dry land of these past weeks. "The desert shall blossom…" Or literally, and with an intensive emphasis, "blossoming it will blossom!"
There are different kinds of desert; or, at least, I have found that there are different parts of our humanity where we experience the desert. Wilderness can be multi-layered in our experience. The drying up of emotional nourishment when we are separated from those we love, who love us, with whom much of our identity is entangled; the wilting of relationships that have had to get by on limited contact, mediated presence through online platforms, and the cancellation of all those informal meetings for coffee, a blether, at the shops.
And church, or rather the absence of church as embodied presence through physical proximity and shared space, that too feels like a receding reservoir. At its best, the church to which we belong is a place of friendship, fellowship, community, communion and shared presence, and all of that providing the compost of our faith and needed nourishment for our roots. But without the water of life shared person to person, each other's presence encountered, and praise and prayer and worship made corporate by the Body of Christ gathering together, I have sensed the slow encroachment on my soul of what Isaiah calls the dry places, the wilderness, the desert.
Such a spiritual, emotional and relational recession is inevitable when sources of nurture are shut off. That is what these past weeks of lock down can mean for human beings made in the image of the Triune God for community, reciprocity, love, conversation, relationship, communion and all the other social interchanges that confer and sustain our identity. And we are not through it yet.
That's why Isaiah's fascination with flora and flourishing is such a powerful stimulus to new growth. The desert shall blossom and life will flourish again. The dry places will have streams in the desert. The parched land will burst into bloom. Wilderness will again become fertile. Seeds are sown and the energy of life awaits the spring rains and the coming of God.
Let Isaiah have the last word, or the last three words. Lebanon. Carmel. Sharon. "The glory of Lebanon will be given to it, the splendour of Carmel and Sharon." (Isaiah 35.2)
The three arid lifeless places of desert, parched land, and wilderness will become like the three most familiar fertile areas known to the exiles. Lebanon. Carmel. Sharon.These were places of hope and promise that the people would flourish again, the land would be fruitful again, God was on the move again.
To repeat myself; There is a profound hopefulness hidden in our expectation of next year's beauty from this year's seeds.
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