Forsythia the Herald,
Amaryllis the Shepherdess

by Dee H Wade

There are a lot of things I don’t know. But now the vast vault of my ignorance has one fewer fact stored therein. The Amaryllis family of flowers, I have just discovered, was named for a shepherdess who appears in the poetry of Virgil. Does the “mary” in her name mean something? (See? The more I learn, the less I know). Milton knew about Amaryllis, and wistfully referenced her as a rustic lover with whom one might “sport.” Talk about your spring fever.

After a winter that kept us honest, spring dares to venture forth. This day in the first week of March reached seventy degrees, even with rain. In the upper South, Forsythia the Herald waits, but impatience thickens. The fattened buds of a red maple in my backyard are about ready to pop. Various jonquils, daffodils, and crocuses are breaking through the earth, with a blossom here and there, but what I notice most are the naked ladies.

Not that kind; the kind also known as Amaryllis belladonna. (The flower pictured below is A. Hippeastrum equestre, “Equestrian Star Flower,” or one of its cultivars). A. belladonna is the only Amaryllis that has been naturalized into the North American landscape, and they are generously distributed around the neighborhood in which I live. Locals with long memories call them “Korean Lilies” due to the fact that Anna Moore Bedinger, who had been a missionary in Korea, brought bulbs of the plant back with her when she returned to America. About ninety years ago she gave bulbs to the members of the Ladies Bible Class of the church I serve, and they have thrived here ever since.

The early spring marks the time of their eruption. Rounded baskets full of foliage appear, lush and green and promising great blossoms. If you don’t know the plant you think, “Wow, something great is gonna come out of that!” But you watch it as Spring lengthens, and nothing happens. The strap-like leaves begin to brown out and die all the way back to the ground. One day they are just gone.

Then summer comes to drag on and you’ve forgotten all about that disappointing plant. At summer’s blaze point, its peak, elegant stalks suddenly burst from the ground, tall and leggy, and at the top of them there is this most remarkable head of precious star shaped flowers, pointing every which way -- so pretty in pink -- and you think to yourself, O, Glory! And you want to laugh and cry at the same time. You could die now, on this steamy morning in July, and be happy. Life is so much more beautiful than you have ever imagined, because you never would have imagined something like this.

Standing starkly upon the ground without leaves, as A. belladonna does, one can see why her kind received the name “naked ladies.” Her flowers coming after the plant seemed to be long dead, she is also called the “resurrection lily.” She flourishes, therefore, as a metaphor for Easter. Since she is risen in the sultry days of July, the metaphor is imperfect. But then again, what image could ever contain or unlock or support the event that changes everything, from world history to personal relationships? The Amaryllis only looks dead; Easter’s truth turns all we knew about life and death, physics and chemistry upside down. If Easter is possible, what else is in store?

Perhaps it works this way. God could have created his world to be merely functional -- efficiently keeping plants and animals alive and growing, and nothing else. But God didn’t stop there -- divine attention was also paid to the shape and the form of this world, and all its creatures and all the ways they make their living. God proves to be not only a magnificent engineer, but also a great artist.

In nature, there is wonder and mystery, and an excessive, unimaginable beauty. At the depth of the Spirit there exists the mysterious wonder of an excessive, unimaginable grace. If God so cares for the lilies of the field like Amaryllis belladonna -- along with the birds of the air, the beasts of the field, and the fish of the sea -- how much more does God care for you and me? The God who creates extravagantly also redeems extravagantly, which is to say: with wild abandon.

One of God’s wild agents is Amaryllis the shepherdess, who even now roams the greening countryside in one of her guises, rehearsing her part in the conspiracy of resurrection.