A Bramble in the Garden of the Lord

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, a young Carmelite nun of the late 19th Century, describes souls as flowers in the garden of the Lord and it is because of this description that she is known as the Little Flower. In her Autobiography, The Story of a Soul, Thérèse speaks of the beauty of great saints as lilies and roses, and of lesser saints as little flowers. Of these little flowers she writes:

“He [Jesus] opened the book of nature before me, and I saw that every flower He has created has a beauty of its own, that the splendor of the rose and the lily’s whiteness do not deprive the violet of its scent nor make less ravishing the daisy’s charm. I saw that if every little flower wished to be a rose, Nature would lose her spring adornments, and the fields would be no longer enameled with their varied flowers.”

And so it is in the garden of the Lord. There is found a variety of trees and shrubs, flowers and grasses. Each created by God and for God to honor, adore, glorify, and delight, each in its own way, according to the beauty given it by the Lord. It is thus that I have come to see, to understand this mystery of God’s garden, that within it there are no weeds; that is, there is nothing there that does not belong, for all was created by God and all was created for Him.

It is from this thought, reflecting on my own life, that I too; like Thérèse, am neither a lilly or a rose. Neither am I a little flower. No, when I survey the beauty of God’s garden, the loveliness of all that he has planted there, I find, hiding in the shade, curled and bent, harsh and uninviting, a most unpleasant and dreadful shrub. It is an unruly and wild bush, prickly and unapproachable, seemingly unwelcome in so well kept a garden. Lurking beneath the tree, and watered only by that which falls to it from the branches above, planted firmly by the Lord, lives… the bramble.

And so this journey begins. I am The Bramble of the Lord, an unruly shrub, full of thorns, bent and broken… but like the little flowers of the field, the beauty of the rose or the whiteness of the lilly do not rob me of my own spring time glory, for the even the thornbush blooms and bears fruit at the appointed time.

Until next time,

The Bramble of the Lord