My Church is a garden. My little parish is a living, breathing, blooming community. People come from all over the City to enter this garden, in the heart of which the creator and sustainer of all life reposes in a golden tabernacle. He comes to us in every Mass, into our very hearts through the delicately parted lips of those who receive Him with inexpressible joy. Receiving this eternal food, we grow tall and strong, we blossom and bloom, we breathe and we swim in seas of glory.
I counted the living plants in our church this morning. Thelma and her elves had adorned its three altars and 25 shrines with 22 vases of roses, 30 orchid plants, 12 pots of succulents, and 18 urns of green leaf plants. Another eight vases of roses and potted plants bedecked the adoration chapel. That’s ninety flowerpots with hundreds of living plants. About seven hundred people come to Mass at Star of the Sea every week—at least one flower for each.
Mary Magdalen, on Easter Sunday, thought Jesus was a gardener. She was looking for her Lord in the garden in which He had been buried, but the living, breathing, blooming man in front of her could not be the tortured, bleeding, dead man she had seen crucified three days before. Jesus is indeed a gardener, and the Church is His garden. We are his blossoms. How lovely to enter a church that portrays not only the crucified sacrifice of the Gardener, but also the blooming life that follows the Passion, the precious faces of each who come to receive new life from God at His altar.