The kingdom of heaven is like a Petunia
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My parish is nestled in the heart of a concrete jungle, a small David against the encroaching mechanization of man. She was built by immigrants. Her classrooms now empty. Her abundant flower gardens tended by just two feminine hands.
I’ve never met the gardener but I see how she adorns the church. And tucked a potted flower in that one hidden nook. Beyond the gardens, the flowers seem to go where they will and we search every week for new signs of petunias in hard places.
These little flowers are joy opportunists. Easily plucked and crushed, yet finding a way.
I had an image in my mind of the small church property and the shining tabernacle within. And it seemed to me that the delight of Jesus Christ was seeping through the doors, through the ground, and out of every opening of that building...
And it was rising up through the cracks in the sidewalk as petunias.
Back at home, I noticed a plant growing straight up through the asphalt at the end of our street. No sidewalk crack required. It simply grew and poked a perfect hole through that hard surface. My fingers can crush this plant and yet it rises up through what my hands could never penetrate. Mystery.
How does it rise?
How do we?
Sometimes I have trouble understanding Church. I see the broken people. I see my own sins. I see institutional failures that challenge me with doubt and anger and grief. And I think of the flowers, the leaven, the mustard seed (Mt 13)…
The kingdom of heaven is like smallest seed that transforms into a tree so large that the birds make a home there.
The kingdom is like leaven which loses itself in the meal until it rises and nourishes.
Where is the seed? Where is leaven? Where is Church? And when will we see that the Eucharistic feast is not contained… but alive like the mighty petunia in a heart disposed to grace?
Some day…
“The Son of man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and throw them into the furnace of fire…Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father...”
And the flowers will be gathered and grow forever.