The Orchid Show
On a trip to Chicago in March, Jennie and I received complimentary tickets to The Orchid Show at the Chicago Botanic Garden. The promotional postcard promised exhibits featuring “more than 10,000 stunning orchids and other tropical plants.”
I’m a dummy when it comes to flora and fauna. I had to look up the words horticulture and floriculture as I was writing this to know what they mean. The definitions confirmed I am ignorant of both. Jennie and I have a running joke that unfolds on our walks. She’ll point to colorful bloom along the path and ask, “What’s that?” Perennially clueless (Hey wait, isn’t a perennial a flower?), I make up an answer: Hibiscus. Dogwood. Magnolia. Kudzu. She then rolls her eyes, educates me, and I promptly forget.
So it was that yours truly received a ticket to see 10,000 varieties of orchids. That is a laugh line. This is not: I was awestruck at the beauty-in-diversity evidenced in those orchids of every shape and size. In the lyrics of a favorite hymns, I was “lost in wonder, love, and praise.”
The experience of being filled with awe and reverence before something or Someone bigger than us, gloriously, unspeakably wondrous, is a good thing. Getting goosebumps and being reduced to mute adoration is a good thing. A God thing.
When Jennie and I took our three kids and Will’s friend Brandon to the Grand Canyon for the first time, we parked at Mather’s Point and walked to the rim. I found myself amid a veritable United Nations Praise Choir, people from every race and nation making the same involuntary deep-throated guttural sounds – Ooh, Ah!, and Mmm! I thought to myself, millions of people come here every year for what? A fix of transcendence. To stand before something big. Holy. The test came when 18-year-old Will and his friend Brandon, two calloused, not-exactly-emotionally-expressive teenage males, walked toward the rim for their first look. The first thing that came out of their mouths? A-w-e-s-o-m-e!
The prophet Isaiah stood in the Temple and said, “Holy!” Moses took off his sandals before the burning bush. Two 18-year-olds blubbered “Awesome!” I joined their chorus at the orchid show.
I whispered a quiet kudos to the Creator of Heaven and Earth. It struck me that one type of orchid would have been enough, but in God’s infinite imagination and apparent delight in diversity, in a show of extravagant generosity, God made 10,000 orchids (echoes of another hymn: Blessings all mine, with ten thousand beside!)
The Orchid Show reminded me God is the extravagant giver par excellence. When God created the heavens and the earth, did God do it with a medicine dropper mentality?
One thoroughbred foal per bluegrass hillside is plenty for Kentucky. Drop, drop, drop.
I’m not going to waste too much time carving out that cave north of Bowling Green. Visit MicroCave looks fine on a billboard. A mammoth cave would be a waste.
How many stars should I spring for in the night sky? How about three? Drop, drop, drop.
Spices? Two: salt and pepper. Flowers? Unnecessary frills. Colors? How many can I afford? People: I’ll make one kind. They won’t appreciate the differences anyway!
Speaking of God’s extravagance in creating orchids and human beings in glorious diversity, I write these words from the General Assembly of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Louisville. As Jennie and I walked back to our hotel after the second day of worship, study, table fellowship, and homecoming with 3,000 Disciples from across this country and around the world (a good many I know, love, and have been loved by across my nearly 64 years in this Church), I had a thought.
I asked Jennie, “You know one thing I rejoice in tonight?”
“What?”
“The diversity of our Church.”
In leadership, in worship, in the hallways, workshops, business sessions, and meals, I’m aware of the beautiful breadth of humanity now affirmed, valued, and embraced by the parentheses of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). I grew up in a field of orchids that all looked and thought pretty much like me. One of the gifts of living as long as I have is having my eyes, heart, arms and mind opened to the extravagant breadth of imago dei – the image of God – revealed in so many different orchids.
Here in Louisville, just blocks from the Convention Center, Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton had a vision. The spot is marked by a historical marker that excerpts his words:
“In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people… that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers… There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”
Merton had his vision 18 months before I was born. Count me grateful that the path my 64 years of life have taken led me at last to Merton’s Corner and his vision of the wondrous, diverse humanity God has planted among the orchids.
