Break into Blossom
By Patrick Kennedy
“And the tree broke at once into blossom…”
This is a phrase that Oscar Wilde used in his wonderful little story, The Selfish Giant. He used it to describe what happened when a little child, that was to small to climb, was placed by the giant in a little tree that was stuck in Winter.
There are so many ways to break.
Things can break apart. Someone can break in and steal. After too much use, things can break down. But its also possible that when something breaks, it breaks open.
Right now, in this for-health-reasons-imposed stoppage of all regular school, community and work life, our whole world has come to a halt. Beyond all the bodies that are breaking down under the effects of this new viral pandemic, it is hard to even begin to see all the ways human souls are breaking down under the stresses of fear, loss of work and loss of real social contact.
How can these ‘breaks’ become a breaking open? How can we, like the tree, break into bloom?
I received a beautiful message from John, my friend and colleague in Christ, this Easter morning. It points beautifully towards an answer to this mystery:
“We tend to think of God as not present in sin, suffering, death, and hell. But today [Holy Saturday], Christ descends with redemptive power into the outermost reaches of the darkness of this present age. There is nowhere where he is not. In the Odes of Solomon (17:10-17), Christ speaks:
“I have shattered the bars of iron, and my own shackles have grown hot and melted before me, and nothing appeared closed to me, for I was the opening of everything!“
“I was the opening of everything”…
Every bud and blossom holds tight throughout the Winter. This tight, hardness must be broken, the seal cracked, the outer sheath shed, for any blossoming to begin. Only the sun can do this for the buds, the sun, returning to its full power at springtime. What’s hard for us to feel or notice, sometimes, is that when we are breaking apart or breaking down, it just might be that our sun – the Son – is nearing us. Oscar Wilde knew this secret. Of his own relationship to this experience he once said, “How else but through a broken heart may Lord Christ enter in?”
If we stay bound up with that part of us that is breaking, that part of us that is falling off, we feel only the tragedy, the pain, the loss. But if, in sensing the moment, we recognize the signature of the One who is “the opening of everything”, and we turn towards him, the sun of our true humanity, then our breaking becomes a ‘breaking into bloom’. Then Easter is happening within us. Again.
