LOOK: Lily Among the Thistles by Laura Lasworth
This still-life painting by Seattle-based artist Laura Lasworth shows a beautiful cut lily sharing a vase with a bouquet of twelve thorny, withered stems. The water in which they sit is red. The work’s title is taken from the Song of Songs 2:1–2: in Latin, “Ego flos campi, et lilium convallium. Sicut lilium inter spinas, sic amica mea inter filias,” or from the New Revised Standard Version:
I am a rose of Sharon,
a lily of the valleys.As a lily among brambles,
so is my love among maidens.
While the Song of Songs, written in the wisdom tradition of Solomon, is first and foremost a collection of poems exploring the human experience of love and sexual desire, most Christians also interpret it as an allegory of the love between Christ and his church, or God and the individual soul. In that reading, Christ is the “lily of the valley” who speaks here.
Early Christian writers such as Origen, Hippolytus, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine associated the lily of Song of Songs 2:1 with Christ; in the Middle Ages, Venantius Fortunatus (ca. 530–610), Peter Damian (1007–1072), and Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), among others, followed suit. I’m familiar with this floral metaphor for Jesus from a gospel song I grew up singing!
From the fourteenth century onward, in images of the Annunciation, Western artists commonly portrayed either a lily vase on a table, or the angel Gabriel presenting a lily to Mary. The lily became a symbol both Christological and Mariological, signifying the flowering of the Incarnation: God’s pure Son emerging from the virginal stem of Mary.
On December 10, Jonathan A. Anderson, a professor of theology and the arts at Regent College in Vancouver, gave the homily in chapel, using Luke 1:26–38 as his scripture text and exploring Lasworth’s Lily Among the Thistles in relation to it.
Thorns and thistles are an image of cursedness throughout scripture, starting in Genesis 3:17–18, Anderson points out. But in Lasworth’s painting, a lily rises up from the center of that cursedness. “If the thistles visually articulate the groaning of creation and the sorrows of humanity, the lily symbolically inaugurates a newness of life, somehow flowering right in the midst of this,” Anderson says. “The audacious proclamation of Advent is that the Son of God—the Creator and Healer of all things, our tree of life—was born into the brambles of human history and into the bloody heritages that still cry out daily from the ground.”
Anderson considers the polyvalence of Lily Among the Thistles:
In one sense, this is an icon of Christ’s appearance in human history. In another sense, this vase is also an individual heart—my heart, your heart—that has heard the Annunciation for itself amidst its own sorrows and deathliness. . . . Or we might also see this as an icon of creation, simultaneously groaning for the reconciliation of all things and blooming with new creation. And surely, it is an icon of the church, in which we harbor various fertility altars overgrown with thorns and thistles, and yet in which we are a people of the incarnation, people in whom new creation has begun, people through whom the light of the Spirit is already casting the shadows of the redemption of all things.
LISTEN: “There sprang a Flower from out a thorn” | Traditional English carol compiled in Richard Hill’s Commonplace Book (Balliol College MS 354, fol. 222v), early 16th century; translated from Middle English by Jessie L. Weston, 1911 | Music by Dominic Veall, 2017
1. There sprang a Flower from out a thorn,
To save mankind that was forlorn,
As prophets spake before that morn:
Deo Patri sit Gloria!2. There sprang a well at Maid Mary’s foot,
That turned all this world to good,
Of her took Jesu flesh and blood:
Deo Patri sit Gloria!. . .
4. From diverse lands three kings were brought,
For each one thought a wondrous thought,
A King to find and thank they sought:
Deo Patri sit Gloria!5. Richly laden with gifts they fare,
Myrrh, frankincense, and gold they bear,
As clerks in sequence still declare:
Deo Patri sit Gloria!. . .
9. There shone a star in heaven bright,
That the men of earth might read aright
That this Child was Jesu, King of Might:
Deo Patri sit Gloria!
This song is a choral setting by London-based composer Dominic Veall of a late medieval lyric that begins, “Ther ys a blossum sprong of a thorn”—or, as Jessie L. Weston modernizes it, “There sprang a Flower from out a thorn.” The recording omits stanzas 3, 6, 7, and 8, but you can read the full lyrics here. The Latin refrain translates to “Glory be to God the Father!”
Art & Theology 