In Introduction to the Devout Life, Francis de Sales suggests collecting a devotional bouquet that we can “smell” throughout the day:
When walking in a beautiful garden most people are wont to gather a few flowers as they go, which they keep, and enjoy their scent during the day. So when the mind explores some mystery in meditation, it is well to pick out one or more points that have specially arrested the attention, and are most likely to be helpful to you through the day, and this should be done at once before quitting the subject of your meditation.
The devotional bouquet that I’ve been collecting of late has been one about beauty. It’s come as a surprise to me, because it seems ridiculously fanciful to be dwelling on beauty amidst the pronounced suffering and tragedy in the world right now. But I have been drawn to thinking about beauty despite all of this unimaginable pain and brokenness.
At the tulip fields some weeks ago, I pondered the way the tulip stalks bend toward light and the way the wind ruffles their petals. Their colours, as bold and loud as they all were, seemed to whisper to me: “We exist. We are here. That is all that matters.”
And on a recent bus ride (in which I missed my stop because I was so wrapped up in enjoying said devotional bouquet), I was struck by how beauty may only fully and truly be so when it is not possessed or grasped. The minute that happens, it shrivels up and dies… for to see or appreciate beauty requires that we do not own it or lay claim to it; it can only be received and beheld.
To think on, meditate, delight in, and savour beauty in a hurting world is, perhaps, a way of speaking hope—first to myself, and then to others.
It’s resisting the pressures of this world to calculate and analyze and categorize and utilize.
It’s pushing back against narratives that unconsciously train us to be numbed by the overwhelming onslaught of terrible, awful stories.
And, like Steve Garber writes in Visions of Vocation: Common Grace for the Common Good: It’s knowing the world and loving it.
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Gathering a devotional bouquet doesn’t have to be hard, though it naturally requires some intentionality on your part, like collecting the thoughts that you fleetingly encounter throughout the day, choosing a particular image or experience or emotion to reflect upon, holding it up prayerfully to God to open up His wisdom, and finding joy in doing so even if nothing profoundly earth-shattering is revealed.
In the same book, de Sales moves from exploring practices of devotion to outlining the nature of prayer:
Prayer is a stream of holy water [that] flows forth and makes the plants of our good desires grow green and flourish and quenches the passions within our hearts.
What would our prayers be like if we thought of them as a bouquet of gorgeous tulips to be sniffed at throughout the day?
How would our prayer lives change if we saw it less as something transactional, and more as something as natural and effortless as a bubbly little stream making its way through a thick forest, watering our thirsty, hungry, God-yearning souls along the way?
I loved Francis de Sales’ invitation when I first read it last year, and I continue to hold it close as a spiritual practice to enter into. I love that it teaches us to value wonder, to still our thoughts and bodies, and to recognize God at work around us and within us.
I offer this invitation to you today, too. May you find flowers to gather and dwell upon for your very own devotional bouquet as you work, eat, rest, and play.
xx,
iz
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a singaporean-canadian couple on serving God faithfully