Wood Anemone…. A little story.

According to the poem at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, God completed the creative action on Planet earth after six days of total activity.
Genesis informs us that on the 7^th day, God rested.
But rest rarely means inaction, especially for God. There is no way that The Maker of everything can either unmake nor stop the inbuilt process of evolving, developing, deepening, the love which God had poured into all that was made.
You see, in order to ‘make’, God had to use the very essence of being to do this and that same essence, being God, is never absent.
That’s a quick way of saying that God is always God and always making things in his and her own image!
God broods over creation like a father and a mother, holding it in being, trying to save it from harm, and guiding with all encompassing ‘love’. That’s the work chosen by God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

But none of that needed to be explained on that first Sunday morning. Later, God would invent and make some very clever people called ‘theologians’ who could mull over everything that God has made and decide whether it is good or not so good. They will helpfully disagree on this which makes it very simple for us to ignore them, or become one of them. (tongue in cheek remark!)
On that first Sunday morning, God wasn’t prepared to get too involved in all that. He was resting. I suppose, being, God it wasn’t the forty-winks kind of rest that we know it to be now. It was a creative rather than restorative rest.

As God the Father rested, God the Son pointed up at the lovely stars and noticed that, appropriately, one of the stars had six points, one for each day of creation. In fact, many people would give it the name of The Creator’s Star.
These 6 ‘pinpricks’ touched the darkness and so it wasn’t as dark as it would be without them. In fact, the light had a bright and luminous beauty which simply shone amazingly.

As God the Father, watched this, God the Holy Spirit allowed inspiration to flow.
Earlier, a joint effort had created things like paper, pens and pencils, paint and ink and paint brushes. So God the Spirit set to work.
Gently, the pencil floated over the paper as God thought what to make of the stars with six points drawn on the  paper.
What  had emerged was a flower, robust but also vulnerable. It would live amongst the trees and in the Spring, it would shine with a brilliant  light.
Ah!, thought God. This little flower will become part of something very special.

God knew that one day it would be necessary for some extremely Good News to be announced and the Son of God would make it.
The plan, still to be unfolded, would involve the Son in a supreme act of love though as with all acts of self-giving, it would come at a price.
So, in using the little flower to be part of the message of hope and joy to lighten a dark world, God knew that it would perhaps not live very long because as we all know, when we light a candle, as it burns to give us light, it dies.
But in the case of the little white flower, there would be no permanent death because death merely continues a journey of life but in another place. Well, almost, because what the flower leaves behind is a root system which means it will come alive on earth again.

God loved the little flower and as the Son held it up, the Spirit breathed on it and it danced. It moved as if in the wind, so God said that it would be known as  ‘wind flower’.
The Spirit then pronounced the Name which would be ‘Anemone’  – Daughter of the wind.

Jesus loved the white colour because it would be the Easter colour of Resurrection and the anemone would live in forests and woodlands because that would remind people of the wood of the Cross. It would therefore suggest to the people who saw it that through the love of God poured out from the Crucifixion, the world would be a brighter, lighter, more joyful place. It would be a world able to celebrate hope and beauty and love again. The little white flower would remind people of this

… and the little Wood Anemone? Having done her job she would rest a little until next year.

[Mr G]

with thanks to Gill for the inspiring photograph.

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