"Yucca Moth in a Bloom”
We Christians believe that when Jesus chose to die on the cross he freed us forever from our sins.
We are already right with God, and we rejoice in that fact.
And because we rejoice, we hope that our most ardent and only desire is to be in right relationship with God, who loves us beyond any measure. Our hope, as Paul puts it to the Corinthians, is that we have this deep longing to become the righteousness of God.
In the following poem entitled “The Yucca Moth,” the poet A. R. Ammons, provides a beautiful image of this life giving and right relationship with God.
Ammons describes a blooming yucca plant whose flowers provide shelter for the yucca moth from the heat of the day.
The poem goes like this.
The yucca clump
is blooming,
tall sturdy spears
spangling into bells of light,
green
in the white blooms
faint as
a memory of mint:
I raid
a bloom,
spread the hung petals out,
and surprised he is not
a bloom-part, find
a moth inside, the exact color,
the bloom his daylight port or cove:
though time comes
and goes and troubles
are unlessened,
the yucca is lifting temples
of bloom: from the night
of our dark flight, can
we go in to heal, live
out in white-green shade
the radiant, white, hanging day?
The poet is surprised to find the moth inside the bloom because the moth blends so well that Ammons almost doesn’t see it.
The poet then implies that the yucca plant is faithful and dependable, when he writes that
even though time comes and goes and troubles are unlessened, the yucca lifts its “temples of bloom.”
The poem closes with a question.
“From the night of our dark flight, can we go in to heal, live out in white-green shade the radiant, white, hanging day?”
This question is the poet’s Lenten dare to each one of us–
to dare to enter and rest in God’s shelter and protection for healing so fully that over time we take on God’s characteristics and become content to live our days fully in God’s presence, right with God and with one another.
The season of Lent gives us the time to take stock of our lives, to be more disciplined in giving, to enter more deeply into prayer, to fast from the things that distract us from God, to forgive one another, and to be intentional about entering into and resting in God’s merciful love, so that we can live as the transfigured and resurrected human beings that God has already made us and hopes that we will want to become.
Amen
Resource: Ammons, A. R., “The Yucca Moth,” page 142, Collected Poems 1951-1971, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc, 1972.