THE TURNIP AND THE CELESTIAL ROSE

Three seemingly random images for this first week in November.

First, Stingy Jack’s turnip lantern

Stingy Jack, Irish folk lore tells us, was a bounder and a cheat. He caged drinks from everyone and played tricks. He even got the best of the devil on several occasions. When Satan was bested in a drinking match with Jack, the penniless cad convinced the Evil One to turn himself into a coin to pay for the drinks. Jack promptly put the coin in his pocket next to the silver cross on his rosary, trapping the Prince of Darkness. A series of misadventures followed, until finally Jack agreed to free the devil on his promise never to take him to Hell. When Jack finally died, St. Peter wanted no part of him, and Satan was good to his word: no hell, just one coal to light Jack’s way through the dark cold world. Jack carved out a turnip into a lantern–pumpkins were still centuries and a continent away, in the New World–and Jack still roams the dark nights of November still, or so the legend says. Lantern in hand.

Quite a different vision

Dante gives us an entirely different image for this All Saints’s Week. Having passed through hell and up the mountain of Purgatory, the poet tells us he ascended higher and higher towards the throne of God. As he neared, he encounters a river of light. As he drinks from it, his sight is transformed, and he see a cosmic, celestial rose, whose petals are souls of the just, enveloped in beauty and fragrant splendor. At far off, presiding over the furthest ring, the Mother of Jesus shines like daylight, and lit by her reflection, the poet plunges into the wordless glory of God, experiencing what eye has never seen, nor ear ever heard. The last cantos of his Paradiso are blinding, almost hallucinogenic, as words fail before the glory that enfolds the poet. His vision constantly shifts: from bright flowers blooming by a river of light into a great celestial rose made up of saints, and at the center, the summit, the endless depth. he barely glimpses the unseeable, the mystical, risen body of Christ, the fullness of all that fills all things, the “love that moves the sun and other stars.”

Out there

Looking for images of the Celestial Rose for this reflection, I stumbled across this image of the Rosette Nebula. I imagine that old Dante would have nodded approvingly at this image, It is just down the road, about fifty light years away in the constellation called Monoceros, “Unicorn” and is 100 light years across. It suggests the beauty that awaits us–not Stingy Jack’s lonely, turnip-lit wanderings, but glory that awaits us, when, as T. S. Eliot describes it:

“All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flames are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one.”