The columbines I never planted in our backyard are blooming again. It seems like every year a new one pops up, born from the seeds of last summer and carried on the wind from another part of the garden. Signs of possibility, even under the shadow of their name.
I wrote about columbines in a Facebook post in the late spring of 2019, before I had a blog, and it seems appropriate now to revisit that message. At breakfast time one morning this week, I stood in the kitchen struggling to contain my emotions so my children wouldn't notice me crying and come over from the table to see what I had just read. It was an article about the school shooting in Uvalde. I knew of it, but had been avoiding reading any descriptions—and for good reason. Now there I stood, gripping the counter and staring at the wall, unable to shake myself loose from the horrifying mental pictures that mingled with the sounds of my children’s carefree laughter from the other side of the room.
Once again, the reminder that there is, as there always has been and always will be, a snake in the garden. Evil is real, and some people go so far down its darkening path as to do what should be inconceivable.
Nevertheless, as I wrote in my earlier post, goodness persists. And by its persistence it overcomes. Beauty blooms where we might not expect it. That’s what these little plants tell me, not just in spite of but because of their name.
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(from my 2019 Facebook post)
What do you think of when you hear the word columbine? If you remember the 1999 shooting, maybe that word makes a chill pass through you like it always did to me. A few years ago when my husband came home from the garden store with a tray of shade-tolerant flowers to plant in our front yard, I was especially delighted by the one with little bell-shaped blossoms and tall, slender stems that drooped at the ends like old-fashioned light posts. A shadow passed over my heart when he told me it was a columbine. That was the first time I had seen the actual flower for which that school in Colorado was named.
The 1999 massacre at Columbine High School was not the first American mass shooting, but the first to be widely publicized with live TV coverage and Internet. I was twenty years old and had not yet learned the ugly truth that Scary People who do Unthinkably Bad Things existed right now, in my own world, not just in the pages of history textbooks.
Columbine shocked me to the core. Those security-cam images of the two shooters walking through the school with their black trench coats and bizarrely large weapons are forever seared into my memory; I can still see them. Kids just a few years younger than I was at the time. I couldn’t wrap my mind around such darkness existing within a human soul that was created by God and designed for goodness, beauty, and love.
The many tragic shootings that have followed have all affected me, but only as echoes of that first one. It left a deep mark.
And yet—the opening chapter of St. John’s gospel tells me that “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” If you think about it, this is the basic message that all flowers proclaim, wordlessly, simply by being little bursts of joy and beauty no matter how dreary the day or how heavy the heart.
In our parish newsletter that arrived in the mail earlier this week, there was a reflection by Fr. Rudy on being witnesses of peace and love in a culture where mass shootings have become all too common.
“We can not accept this as the ‘new normal,’” he writes. “We must by our very way of living reject the violence, evil and hatred and offer the world peace, virtue, and love as a better way to live.”
Our family now has brightly colored columbines adorning both our front and backyard flowerbeds. Some of them we have planted ourselves, but others just grew on their own and surprised us, often in “inconvenient” places right in the middle of other plants.
Recently we discovered an adventurous pink one shooting up from within a thick patch of asters. I know by the end of the summer the asters will have grown to be four feet high, sprawling and spilling over with a galaxy of tiny white star-flowers, and this delicate little beauty will be completely hidden. From a gardening standpoint, leaving the columbine there doesn’t make sense.
Still, I can’t bring myself to pull it up. It is a witness. Goodness persists; beauty can bloom anywhere; and so must we.
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Photo of Columbine High School taken from this article: https://www.westword.com/news/columbine-twenty-years-later-time-of-preparation-transition-for-safe2tell-11306806
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