Roses, by Mary Oliver
Everyone now and again wonders about
those questions that have no ready
answers: first cause, God's existence,
what happens when the curtain goes
down and nothing stops it, not kissing,
not going to the mall, not the Super
Bowl.
"Wild roses," I said to them one morning.
"Do you have the answers? And if you do,
would you tell me?"
The roses laughed softly. "Forgive us,"
they said. "But as you can see, we are
just now entirely busy being roses."
Mary Oliver's poetry is light and quick. I am always amazed at the depths she can communicate in a scarcity of words. At almost every turn, her poetry conveys her love and wonder of the subject and is the outflowing of its careful study. In this poem titled, 'Roses,' Mary Oliver meets us in the anxiety of our lives, those moments when we get caught up in questions we can never answer with certainty—the existence of God, the death of those we love, the frustrations of the mundane. Yet these wild roses that are filled with beauty and freedom offer no solace to our questioning hearts. They are too busy being themselves.
Jesus said something similar in Luke 12 when he tells his disciples not to worry about what they will eat, or drink, or wear. He goes on to say in verses 27 and 28, "Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, you of little faith!"
There are other passages of scripture that speak of living with wisdom to plan for the future, but when our lives are consumed by worry for the future or those questions with no ready answers, perhaps we have stopped living at all. Jesus invites us into the wisdom of living present in the moment, of striving to be fully what and who we are right now. Perhaps that presence is something we can learn from the creation around us. Perhaps that is a practice of our faith, to breathe in and breathe out, choosing to live this moment with our fullest focus just like the lilies and the roses, the ravens and the sparrows. Perhaps that is what it means to trust God.