from Alan Crowley, "A Liminal Trillium"

 A Liminal Trillium

Alan John Crowley

Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Jericho, Vermont May 4, 2025

“There’s Trillium!,” my walking companion Lisa exclaimed as we walked along a wooded trail on a softly raining spring day.

“What’s that?,” I asked .  With the tip of her umbrella, Lisa gently lifted the top leaves of a three leafed plant to reveal a stunningly intense scarlet flower sheltered beneath. We had just been resting on a wooden bench nestled next to a stone wall on the edge of the hilly woods and a bright meadow quilted with grass that blanketed the valley all the way down to the roadway below,  Enraptured by all the sensation of this springiest of days in this most idyllic of places, we continued our conversation about spiritually in nature, about seeking the presence of God in our encounter with the living things around us. 

We had just come from a Sunday worship service in which our  friend and spiritual mentor Michael Hechmer had encouraged us to understand the Gospel of John as fundamentally a story about learning to see,  finding in Christ the help and light needed to transform our vision to see beyond darkness and illusion so as to experience the abundance of God’s presence.  

Sitting on the bench, shielded from the very damp wood by my windbreaker spread upon it, I said to Lisa that our participation in the moment, our witness through our senses, is an integral part of the created world we were experiencing.   I said something about how just noticing things, feeling emotions, and searching for meanings are together a form of praise, a prayer of oneness.  We had just resumed our walk after our contemplative and necessary (at least for me) rest on the bench, when Lisa pointed out the trillium.   As a longtime botanically challenged thinker, I intuited that I should be familiar with the significance of this discovery, but despite my cluelessness, the enthusiasm in Lisa’s voice fired up my curiosity.  She explained that the flowers were usually protected by the leaves (technically “bracts” , I learned later,  leaf like multitaskers which emerge from the  flower’s core (“fluorescence”) rather then off the flower's stem).  I asked Lisa to take my assistive walking stick to lift up the bracts again so that I could take a picture of the three petaled flower glowing under its three leafed tent.

    It was then I realized that Lisa was physically enacting the spiritual dynamics  that  we had just been talking about. She was, I decided, “Christing.” She was helping me to see the flower by helping me interact with it.   I have  been writing and praying recently with  familiar  scriptural themes from  John and Paul about “abiding in Christ” (Jn 15:4), “becoming one with Christ,”(Jn 15:12) and “putting on the mind of Christ” (Phillipians 2), but I had never considered using the word “Christ” (Greek for “anointed one”) as a verb.  The action words we use to talk about imitating God are familiar, and explicitly taught by Jesus and Paul, “Bless” like God, “Sanctify” like God, and of course, “Love” like God, but to “Christ” like God?? 

“Yes!!,” the Holy Spirit blazed into my brain, “Exactly, dumdum: to be a disciple of Christ is to verb like he verbs.  Help others see, lift up the veils, be a witness and give voice to all the divinity surrounding and within you!”  

When I got home I needed to do my exegesis of “trillium” and as Jesus is quoted in Luke’s Gospel, I received  “A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, “(6:38)

Not only did I learn about “bracts and pedicles”, but also that trillium is a long beloved and widely known sign of spring across North America, a medicinal herb, a symbol of bisexual love, and a representation of the Holy Trinity. I think all the possible symbolism is connected to how the plant is associated with liminal things like bridges and borders, and even new birth (one of its folk names is “birthwort”).  One source, a new agey business trafficking in essential oils as part of an earnest alchemy of spiritual transformation,  pulls many of these cultural associations of the flower together into a rather eloquent sales pitch:

The trillium flower helps us to overcome fears of being in our physical body so that we strengthen our physical connection to the Earth whilst increasing our spiritual understanding.  It acts as a bridge between our inner and outer world, between the physical and spiritual realms, allowing us to be effective and whole spiritual beings in a physical body.  It can give a sense of rebirth into the physical so we start again with the innocence of a newborn.  The flower symbolises the three aspects that it helps us to integrate: the mind, body and soul.  ….Trillium helps us to integrate our feminine and masculine aspects so that we are able to soften where we have become hard and to strengthen where we yield too easily.  It encourages transformation, particularly if we're quiet and reserved, helping us reach out and connect with others.  It helps release survival fear and feelings of panic.

But God (who Anne Lamott claims is an inveterate showoff) in no way was finished with her provident shower of abundant grace.. The measure that fell into my lap this time was a profound poetic meditation by Louise Glück,  a writer I have long admired. In this poem, it seems that an infinite number of trillium meanings are subsumed by the central metaphor of the poem, that the speaker herself (and the poem itself?) is a trillium lying on the forest floor seeking shelter, rest, and meaning:

Trillium

by Louise Glück

 

When I woke up I was in a forest. The dark

seemed natural, the sky through the pine trees
thick with many lights.

I knew nothing; I could do nothing but see.
And as I watched, all the lights of heaven
faded to make a single thing, a fire
burning through the cool firs.
Then it wasn’t possible any longer
to stare at heaven and not be destroyed.

Are there souls that need
death’s presence, as I require protection?
I think if I speak long enough
I will answer that question, I will see
whatever they see, a ladder
reaching through the firs, whatever
calls them to exchange their lives –

Think what I understand already.
I woke up ignorant in a forest;
only a moment ago, I didn’t know my voice
if one were given to me
would be so full of grief, my sentences
like cries strung together.
I didn’t even know I felt grief
until that word came, until I felt
rain streaming from me.