Listen to the Sunflower

What the Sunflower Face Says...

Perfectly gorgeous!  I spotted this sunflower in a garden in the North Carolina Mountains.  It fills the frame and sets apart in a garden flanked by Black-Eyed Susans.  The face says that "I will be food for countless birds when I am done with my life with the remaining seed bringing me back to life next year."  But do we hear something else?

Mathematicians have long been attracted to this flower. The florets arrangement is an intricate mosaic of perfect proportion and relationships. Go ahead and work the 1979 formula by Prof. H. Vogel:

Johannes Keppler looked at the design in the universe and reasoned to a chief designer.  Or, go find one and see what your heart tells you.  "Whoever made this knew what He (or She!) was doing!"  

Of the many memorable lines from Les Miserables, I often repeat the phrase--"to love another person is to see the face of God."  Do you suppose that in the same way we can look at the Sunflower and hear God talking through the magnificence of its face, we can also look into the eyes of even a stranger and with a kindly act, see the the face of God?  Now turn it around. Who do people see in us?  And what does that say about the ultimate worth of every person, starting with us?

In The Diary of a Country Priest, we hear that we are to love ourselves with the same love that God does.  That's a tall order.;  We are not God.  Perhaps we can begin with the sunflower, and in the same way we catch its divinity, we can begin to tell our stories by starting with the same love of God.

Bottom line?
The bottom line is out of sight.
The sunflower face is a mirror held up for ourselves that ends in the ultimate Creator who gave us our lives.