And he said to the rose, "Stop shouting"

"The Multiflora Roses (Rosa multiflora) were alive with the sound of buzzing this morning," we wrote two summers back in our post "It's too damned hot," adding "Catch as catch can to get a focussed shot of one of their 'gentleman callers.'  Like the fickle male humans they often stand metaphorically in for, the bumble bees and lesser bees of all stripes out there stopped but a moment at each new blossom before moving on to the next."

A revelation from The Anchoress, who's  dipping into Raymond Arroyo's Mother Angelica's Little Lessons, the "perfect Lenten reading for a busy age -- portable, accessible, in turns amusing and serious, and yet able to sound some surprising depths":

St. Francis de Sales one day was looking at a rose, and he put his hands to his ear and he said to the rose, “Stop shouting.” There is a power in the love of God. Most people today look at a rose and they don’t see anything; only a name, a color, a fragrance. But these great saints saw God in everything.

Forget about stopping to smell the roses. How about stopping to scold them for shouting out the glory of creation? We've stumbled into Mother Angelica's show on EWTN from time to time when surfing for broadcasts of Papa Ratzi but never knew anything whatever about this most remarkable woman, whose voice, reports The Anchoress, is "now silenced due to a stroke." Born in Canton, Ohio as Rita Rizzo, Mother Angelica came up from poverty -- the old story where the father deserts the family early on and the child learns to look after her mother and fend for herself -- found God through a miracle and went on to actually found EWTN, if the Wikipedia entry is to be believed. But back to "that which we call a rose." As an amateur naturalist in love with all things bright and beautiful, we totally adore St. Francis de Sales's loving request of the rose to stop shouting. From Isaiah 35:

The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.

As with atheist Oriana Fallaci's spiritual kinship with Papa Ratzi, we know "there must be something true."

Comments

[goomp]

As Ayan Hirsi Ali has pointed out, all cultures are not equal and the western Judeo-Christian standards that followed the Enlightenment have led to the freest and most economically beneficial societies the world has ever known. As Sisu points out. if Oriana Fallaci and Papa Ratzi can agree, something must be true.