Several years ago, a spiritual phrase offered me deep insight. It comes from Dorothee Sölle, the author of Thinking of God. In a chapter of Silent Cry, she reflects on the phrase, “The rose does not know why.” This phrase shifts the heart of spirituality away from the urge to know why, the desire to explain why I, or you, experience certain situations, or why we exist at all. It opens a different space, a space of being and responding.
The phrase traces back to Meister Eckhart and was later expressed by the seventeenth-century mystic Angelus Silesius in Cherubinischer Wandersmann: “Die Rose ist ohne Warum; sie bluhet, weil sie bluhet.” “The rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms.”
At that time in my life, this phrase struck me deeply. Perhaps it was because, while living on the Prairies, I began to notice the spontaneous beauty of wild roses that bloom early in the short spring, and then, following that, I discovered British tea roses and fell in love with them as well. My heart still responds even now just to hearing the word “roses.” I simply love all roses. At the end of my thirties, still growing, still struggling, still not fully free from external standards and comparisons, I recognized a wisdom in the strength of the living rose, regardless of its kind, origin, or breed. While growing roses in Winnipeg, I learned this: before seeing the flower, you can tell how healthy a rose is by touching it, by seeing the colour of the leaves, and by noticing the strong veins that stand out like a pulse, those hesitation-less strokes in the leaf. And the rose in bloom, bright against that deep green, is not blooming for the gardener. The rose is not blooming for me to look at, not blooming for me. How simple, and how interesting that was. I was discovering on my own the freshness of that insight, that the rose does not bloom for me, and then one day, like a gift, I opened this theology book and found that line. Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, and even Rainer Maria Rilke were all echoing this strange and beautiful wisdom: the rose does not know why. The rose is without why.
What Sölle explored and wrestled with through the phrase “The Rose Doesn’t Know Why” was the long captivity of Western Christianity to seeing faith or spirituality as instrumental, as something used to explain why what is happening is happening, and to achieve a goal or produce results. That captivity shows up in questions such as: Why should we pray? What benefit do I gain from faith? What does faith give me? Sölle saw how these questions can turn God into an object of explanation, the Bible into evidence, and life into a chain of cause and effect, for example, the assumption that suffering must have a reason that justifies it, such as a lack of faith or insufficient faith, and how faith itself becomes a system of results and rewards.
Sölle argues that your spiritual expressions, your existential expressions, your suffering, your joy, your feelings, and your passage through whatever situation you are in, all of these are true not because they can be explained, but because they are lived, even without explanation. Like this: the rose does not know why it blooms, but its blooming is already true.
We can ask many questions about what happens to us, but most of the time we cannot fully answer the question “Why.” Faith is not something we join after we finally understand the reason why things happen. Faith is something we come to know by living, by participating in life itself.
So when we say, “The rose does not know why,” or “The rose is without why,” we are saying this: the meaning of existence does not begin only after it is explained. Life does not become true only when it is proven or justified. Your life, your existence, is already true before any reason is given.
For Sölle, “without why” is not a private mysticism. In the face of suffering, war, genocide, famine, inequality, and violence, before lives that cry out for justice but are so devastated or broken that they cannot fully speak for themselves, “without why,” without explanation, is not resignation, defeat, or erasure. Simply by existing in the midst of suffering, the suffering person, the suffering community, already reveals a deep truth about the world. Their very presence says, “This is not how things should be.” Even when words fail, their cry, spoken or unspoken, becomes both protest and prayer.
And here I want to say something to those who feel pressured by constant external demands and expectations, to those who are repeatedly asked to prove themselves, to show results, to justify their choices and their worth. I want to speak to those who are told what kind of voice they should have, whether they should speak louder or quieter for justice, how they should advocate - or not - and even how they should perform their care. To all of that, I want to say this: be committed to your rose-ness, to your being a rose without why, without explanation, and do the work that belongs to that rose.
The Gospel of John begins like this: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Life is made of living force and breath. It was present from the beginning. It was with God. And it calls for response before explanation. The Word that was with God, that was God, and that is God from the beginning and into eternity can be understood as the rose-ness of God, the inner spontaneity of God’s unexplainable love and righteousness.
When we ask whether people in poverty, on the streets, in addiction, in war, or living under any kind of violence, neglect, or abandonment are worthy of release, when we debate reasons instead of responding, we are no longer reflecting God’s self-giving love but engaging in exchange. Existence does not become meaningful because it has reasons. It calls us because it already carries the intrinsic fullness of God’s sacredness.
Let us, then, proclaim with the other roses in our midst, with your rose-self in your courageous embrace, that the new year, indeed every year, is the year of God’s love, hesed. Hesed, often translated as God’s steadfast love, is a word whose fullness cannot be contained by the word ‘mercy’ alone.
God’s love is not based on reasons anyone articulates for or against. It does not require sufficient explanation in order to be claimed or received. The original fullness of being already calls forth God’s hesed, God’s steadfast and eternal love, a love that stays to the end, to the very bottom, from the light and praise of life to the graves and the depths of death.
It is love that cannot be explained or calculated. No single life is excluded. No one must prove their worth in order to be found worthy. This covenant is not exchange. It is belonging between God and all beings born of God’s love, hesed, and the world God loves, a love given first, without reason.
The rose does not explain why it blooms, but it blooms within God’s sunlight, soil, and air. God’s hesed is the soil that still holds seeds beneath rubble and ashes.
As Meister Eckhart said, may we all become, like Mary, “mothers” of God, those who conceive God within, like a rose that blooms, irrepressibly, for its own sake. Let us declare together that even before we name it by the calendar, this coming year is the year of God’s hesed. Let your inner spontaneity of rose-ness bloom, and let the Rose, the Love and Justice Advocate, be the Christ child born within you.
Benediction:
Traditionally, Mary has been symbolized as a rose. Perhaps you have seen the rose window in a cathedral. Imagine that dignity and that spaciousness as belonging to you, and to all whom God loves without why and without conditions. Go into this turning of the year trusting that God’s eternal hesed already shines through your cathedral window, your heart window. May that light hold you, guide you, and be made visible through you, now and always.
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