LEEKS, DAFFODILS, AND THE CROSS
This Friday, March 1, has particular significance if you are Welsh – March 1 is St. David’s Day; and St. David, who died sometime between 569 and 600 CE, is to Wales as St. Patrick is to Ireland. There will be parades in honor of Wale’s patron saint in cities like Ceredigion, Aberystwyth, and Caernarfon as well as a few others that non-Welsh speakers find equally unpronounceable. Leeks are everywhere on March 1 because the Welsh consider them their national symbol. In all fairness, an alternative symbol to leeks on St. David’s Day is the daffodil. It bears mentioning, however, that in Welsh the word for “daffodil” is Cenhinen Bedr or Peter’s leek. As early as Elizabethean times, Shakespeare refers to this Welsh custom of wearing a leek as an “ancient tradition.” He has Henry V tell Fluellen that he is wearing a leek “for I am Welsh, you know, good countryman.”
Why did the Welsh adopt a strong-smelling member of the onion family as their national symbol? Legend says that St. David ordered Welsh soldiers to wear a leek on their armor when they faced off in a 6th-century battle against Saxon invaders. The leek-wearing Welsh won the battle and so the leek became associated with the miraculous powers of St. David. Another of St. David’s legendary miracles is causing the flat ground beneath his feet miraculously to rise up into a hill so those listening to his preaching could better hear him. Of course, as anyone who has visited Wales can tell you, creating another hill in already mountainous Wales does not seem like a particularly astounding miracle.
Last summer I walked an ancient Welsh pilgrimage path associated with St. David. I ambled along the Pembrokeshire coastal cliffs until finally turning inland at Caerfai Bay where it’s a short walk to the cathedral and town of St. David’s. Along my week-long, approximately 100-mile walk, I visited holy wells, ancient churches, and other sites associated with St. David or other early Welsh saints.
The cathedral staff warmly received me, gifted me with a pilgrim’s shell, and offered me tea and cakes in one of the cathedral’s lounges while I waited to participate in the daily service of Evening Prayer. But my most memorable experience happened near the 6th-century church of St. Brynach in near Nevern. A row of ancient yews, which are called the “bleeding yews,” line the pathway up to the church. They are called “bleeding yews” because for hundreds of years they have oozed a blood-colored sap that drips down their trunks. Contrary to the legend of the site that attributes this phenomena to a miracle, my best guess is that there’s enough iron in the soil beneath their roots to turn their sap red. After all, what self-respecting Reformed Protestant would believe in anything other than a scientific explanation for why trees would drip blood-red sap.
Just above St. Brynach’s and its bleeding yews, the medieval pilgrim path I was following crosses a small stream and turns left, ascending alongside a steep outcropping of rock atop which are the remains of an iron-age hill fort. About half-way up this overgrown path is a faint cross chiseled by medieval stonemasons into the exposed rockface. Had my guidebook not told me to be looking for it, I could easily have walked past it, never noticing it. There were two indentations a few feet above the trail at the foot of the cross where someone could kneel and pray. Whoever created this spot intended it as a small shrine for pilgrims – perhaps moved by the sight of St. Brynach’s bleeding yews—to kneel at the foot of the cross and pray.
I lifted myself up onto those indentations to kneel in prayer where so many unknown pilgrims before me had knelt. Because rocky outcropping was gradually curving inward, kneeling in those indentations was more awkward than I anticipated. The position of these indentations and cross on the inward sloping rock forced me to lean inward onto the rocky outcropping itself. When I tried to assume any other posture, I immediately begin to lose my balance and risk falling backward onto the ground. So I kneeled there with my face pressed against the foot of the cross and my arms reached upward, touching the horizontal arm of the cross where I could feel slight grooves for my fingernails to grasp.
There I was: Kneeling in this precarious position. My face and lips pressed into the stone cross. My hands grasping the arms of the cross. Now I am a product of the traditionally cognitive-oriented Reformed and Presbyterian tradition, which is not exactly what anyone would call a highly emotive religious culture. And I am pretty much a perfect fit for that tradition. But, pressed into the cross and grasping onto its arms so I wouldn’t fall backward onto the ground, I had one of those sudden epiphanies where the divine spoke to me. I realized that nothing about what some medieval stonemason had done to create this spot was accidental. He or she had constructed it so that whoever knelt on those indentations would experience exactly what I was experiencing: That when our lives feel precarious and slightly off-balance, our only choice is to kneel and cling to the cross of the One who shed not red- colored tree sap but his own life blood as a sign of God’s boundless love for God’s world.
I share this experience not just because this Friday is St. David’s Day but because I hope it provides at least a small hint as to what Lent invites us to learn. There are moments in our lives when we find ourselves teetering precariously on some life-experience that has thrown us off-balance. We feel as if we are just hanging on, trying not to fall down or fall apart or fall away. In such moments we need to trust that there is something we can trust that will both hold us and onto which we can hold. Something that will restore us to equilibrium and balance physically or emotionally, psychological or spiritually. What we as Christians are reminded to lean at such moments is the Cross of Christ, which promises that there is nothing in life or death, in things present or things to come, that can separate us from the love of God. In our most unstable and precarious moments, when all feels off-kilter in our lives, the High God of Heaven is there as a strong rock, a high cross, for us to lean into, embrace, kneel before, and so discover a strength beyond our own that enables us to hang on until dawn breaks and a new day begins.
If all we take from Lent is the knowledge of God’s sustaining love when our lives feel out-of-balance, out-of-control, and off-kilter, then we will have had a good Lent.
On the journey to Easter with you,
Pastor Thomas