Essay #11: Lily and the White Rose

In the ruin of Lily Phillips’s bedroom, in the aftermath, somebody had left a single white rose—a symbol of the Virgin Mary, mother of mercies and refuge of broken women. Was she in that room, the White Rose reaching out to the bruised Lily? Was her son? Everyone involved in the awful affair sinned grievously; everyone was implicated and no one was innocent. That’s the demon-haunted world we’re living in, no different here and now than it was two millennia ago in Jerusalem. And that is the world in which, at every moment and every coordinate point, God incarnate offers mercy. Can we see him?