Summer 2021 Florilegium
A tongue rested on each of them for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.
He left his servant there.
For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father.
Other boats were with him. They were glad because they had quiet.
There will I be buried.
"Pursue love so that he might fill all things." What they said pleased the whole community. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.
What are human beings that you are mindful of them?
And all ate and were filled.
I was introduced to the spiritual practice of florilegium by the podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text in 2016. I loved this spiritual practice immediately because it remind me of a writing exercise that I had done in the past called found poetry. Florilegium is a Latin word that means "a gathering of flowers." I like to interpret it a little more loosely as "bouquet." The idea is that while you are doing your sacred reading you keep your eyes and heart open for a phrase or a sentence that catches your attention or sparkles up at you, like picking a beautiful flower. Once you have identified your florilegium, you copy it down into a journal or on a scrap of paper. After you have collected a number of florilegia, you can then put them all together to create a new text, a bouquet of selected flowers. Reading through your new text you can spend time contemplating what your florilegia has to teach you about the season you are experiencing in your faith life and what God may be providing you while you are there.
Over the past summer, I served as a substitute pastor while a colleague was away on sabbatical. While I was serving, I guided this congregation through their own sabbath season. Before I got there they had committed to learning new spiritual practices so I decided that I wanted to introduce them to florilegium because it is an approachable practice that is suitable for many ages. Above you will see the thirteen florilegium I gathered over the summer.
Here is how I like to approach my florilegium
- Play with punctuation: Once you have all your florilegium typed up, start to place or remove periods and commas where you think they belong to help smooth out your collected phrases.
- Paragraph breaks: Add paragraph breaks where you think the voice changes.
- Consider voice: Who do you think is speaking? God? You? Your community? Some other community? And who is that voice speaking to?
- Repetition: Do you see any themes, images, or words repeated among your florilegium?
- Singular instances: On the flip side, what words or images are unique within your florilegium?
- Significance: What is being communicated to you? Are you pointing yourself to something? Or is the Holy Spirit teaching or comforting you?
- Mix it up: Once you go through the previous six steps you can completely rearrange your florilegium and start the process over again to see what additional wisdom or insight is waiting for you.
- The first three statements strike me as a Trinitarian declaration that before anything else I am a cherished child of God. God has claimed me. I am taught by Jesus. I am comforted by the Holy Spirit, who was "left there."
- The "him" with the other boats then becomes the Holy Spirit, who provides the flow of current. The Holy Spirit also provides a place of rest and quiet.
- "Buried" brings to my mind images of baptism and death and rest and being planted. It is bringing to my mind images of Viking ship burials or being buried at sea. What does it mean to desire to be buried in the quiet of the Holy Spirit?
- "Pursue" is the only imperative within my florilegium. How do you pursue love while being buried? How can one be both on the move and restrained? How does pursuing love aid the Holy Spirit to fill all things?
- "Fill" and "all" are both repeated. These words seem to be both an affirmation that all people will be filled and communicates a desire to have it be so. Hope and longing. But fill what exactly? - boats? people? baptismal fonts? soil?
- "What are humans?" sounds like a respectful response to the first three lines, a prayer of humble gratitude, that we have been claimed and marked and tended by God.
