Blossoms, blessings

Dried rose petals reposed in a small wooden box on his work desk. The color of blood, sunshine and pearls, they had fallen on the night of Feb. 28, 2013 off stalks that brushed a glass-enclosed reliquary in Cebu’s cathedral. Within rested part of a humerus of Saint Therese of Lisieux.

He gathered the petals, knowing that objects touched to a relic turn into new ones. After pressing them dry between pages of parchment, he found the best place for them in the wooden box, a gift from his dad. Someone in Palestine, where the tiny treasure chest came from, had etched an icon of the Christ Child, Mama Mary and Saint Joseph on its lid. Saint Therese in life, he read, kept a strong devotion to the Infant of Bethlehem, appending “of the Holy Child Jesus and of the Holy Face” to her Carmelite name.

He pictured the bits of corolla in recalling that dawn, hours after they became sacramentals by the hundreds, courtesy of Saint Therese. Then, Holy Father Benedict XVI left the Chair of Saint Peter. The boy Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, he learned years ago, nursed a soft spot for beauty, manifested in a love of flowers.

“I understand you, Joseph,” he said in a whisper. His late maternal grandmother used to make floral figures out of plastic bags to humor him. Several summers ago, his dad had made leis for him and his younger sister, stringing violet periwinkles through a pair of midribs ripped from palm leaves.

One of four female Church doctors (the others being Saints Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila and Hildegard of Bingen), Saint Therese called herself the “little flower of Jesus.” The 265th Bishop of Rome, Benedict envisioned a world “changed from a valley of tears to a garden of God.” In 2008 this Pope had beatified Saint Therese’s parents, Blesseds Louis and Zelie. Doctor and Pope rendezvoused again in spirit that night of Feb 28: The saint to heighten through a fragment of her bone the faithful’s sense of God’s closeness to them, the Pope to grant them the grace of an indulgence. The doctor fulfilled her vow: “I will spend my heaven doing good on earth. I will let fall a shower of roses.” The Pope, he felt, imparted a pledge of his charity: “I am not abandoning the cross, but am remaining beside the Crucified Lord in a new way.”

He doubted he would stop thinking of flowers after Jorge Mario Bergoglio ascended to the Chair of Saint Peter as Pope Francis. The new papal coat of arms bears the figure of a nard flower symbolizing Saint Joseph, the man behind the baptismal names of the last Pope, his archbishop, and his dad. Brother Ugolino sings the holiness of the deacon from whom the new Pope took his name in a book titled “Fioretti di San Francesco (Little Flowers of Saint Francis).”

The rose petals that he picked up after the last Mass where people prayed for Benedict as Pope and the third visit of the relics of Saint Therese to his home city gave him much to meditate on. He discovered that the red ones stood for courage, the yellow ones for friendship and the white ones for purity. Mankind needed all three to heed the new Pope’s first tweet: “Let us keep a place for Christ in our lives, let us care for one another and let us be loving custodians of creation.”