Goodness: The Rosebush of Reality 

By Andrew DeCort

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The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

(George Eliot)

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Last July, I made a personal pilgrimage. It unfolded across eight miles of intentional walking amidst the eight million humans of New York. 

I started in Harlem from the places where Dietrich Bonhoeffer studied, lived, and evolved in 1930: Union Theological Seminary, the International House, Abyssinian Baptist Church, and the streets that connect them. Years prior, I wept with grief and gratitude when I finished reading every surviving word that we have from Bonhoeffer. The last piece was his final message that he gave to a friend before being hanged, followed by his mother’s anxious, unanswered letter expressing her hope that he was safe. 

Walking in his footsteps was sacred to me. It was a way of connecting more deeply with the precious gift of his life—79 years after he was executed by the Nazis in a death camp soon after his mother wrote that letter. “This is for me the end,” Bonhoeffer confessed that day, “but also the beginning of life. I believe in the principle of our Universal Christian brotherhood which rises above all national hatreds and that our victory is certain.” It turns out he wasn’t—and was—safe. 

I then made my way from Abyssinian past bustling hair-braiding salons and through the blossoming beauty of Central Park. I finally arrived at James Baldwin’s old house on West 71st Street in Manhattan. Once a shoeshine boy in the streets abused by police, Baldwin had purchased the narrow, four-storey apartment building as a home for his sister Gloria, her five kids, a cousin, a niece, and his beloved mom, Emma Berdis Jones. 

If you visit the Baldwin residence, there is no plaque on the building or any historical marker on the street announcing that this is where a prophetic writer and inspired artist sometimes lived with his family. Unless you’re looking for it, you won’t see what’s in front of you or know where you are. 

Not long before, I had worked through Baldwin’s Collected Essays. On each of its 842 pages, I was in awe of his blazing, lyrical passion for truth, love, and justice, which I then tried to summarize in an essay of my own. There in Manhattan, I sat across the street on the curb, looking up at his old home and contemplating his life and words. The lack of any homage to his legacy seemed baffling but oddly appropriate. “Every human being,” Baldwin wrote, “is an unprecedented miracle.”

Eventually, a woman with a small dog approached. She stood behind me on the sidewalk and looked over my shoulder toward the house. I wondered if she was also on her own pilgrimage to pay her respects to Baldwin. Curious, I asked back over my shoulder, “Do you know who owned that house?” 

She replied matter-of-factly: “Yes, it’s my house. I bought it from James Baldwin’s sister decades ago.” Phyllis went on to tell me the story. 

Along the way, she mentioned how James’ mother Emma had tried to plant roses in the backyard away from the street. But the flowers never flourished, lacking sunshine in the building’s shade. I was touched as Phyllis pointed to the massive bush of red and yellow roses now flourishing outside the home’s front door in the middle of the cement sidewalk. I had hardly noticed they were there. But Phyllis explained that she planted the rosebush as an unmarked memorial to the Baldwin family and James’ love for his mother Emma. 

Then and now, I behold that rosebush as an archetype of all goodness. 

Goodness is almost always unmarked. From one perspective, the rosebush is “merely” a plant. Perhaps, at times, it is beautiful to the eyes and fragrant to the nose. But it appears little different from any other of its kind and is easily passed by without notice, perhaps even with annoyance at the thorny obstacle it presents to pedestrians. It holds little, if any, economic “value” or material utility in this ultra-wealthy neighborhood. And, eventually, it will blossom for the last time, die, and disappear—unmourned and unremembered by most, if not all, who momentarily glimpsed its glory. 

And yet, from another perspective, that little piece of creation, like all pieces of creation, is itself an incarnation of the miracle of love. The love of our Creator for an independent world where roses can grow. The love of an abuse survivor for his mother and their extended family. The love of a degraded woman in a racist society for the defiant beauty of flowering things. The love of a stranger for another family’s love across time and their apparent absence now. 

We have to look for goodness to see it, to know where we are, especially in the world we’ve fabricated with genocidal death camps, abused children in vulnerable streets, and everyday indifference to the unmarke(te)d magnificence of what is given. But when we do learn to see, goodness is everywhere. It’s all around us and within us, whispering a primal story of love, of gift-giving, of home-making and the wonder of being the unprecedented miracles that we are, together. When we can see this, as Bonhoeffer wrote, our “gaze opens to the fullness of the divine life in the world.”  

Such is the primal worldview that the biblical imagination invites us to see through. In the beginning, God created everything that exists, and God saw it all as “good” and “very good” (Genesis 1). Not merely as “real” or “functional” or even “optimal” but as good and very good—laden with love, worthy of attention and appreciation, of precious value calling for special care. When we can see even the dust, a blade of grass, a random rosebush, a stranger’s face, indeed, the whole aching mystery of reality as an unmarked memorial of divine love, then perhaps we are coming home to goodness, wherever we happen to be. And, then and there, we can rediscover that original, incorruptible goodness that is deep within each one of us and share it freely with others. As Paul wrote even to the heart of the empire, “I am convinced that you are full of goodness” (Romans 15:14). 

This goodness can take all sorts of forms. Creating beautiful spaces for others to exercise their freedom, like God. Planting a rosebush in unrecognized hallowed ground amidst concrete like Phyllis. Writing prophetic essays to a power-addicted culture like Baldwin. Crossing an ocean, studying with strangers, and returning to oppose a genocide like Bonhoeffer. Or simply looking into another face – perhaps a face of great beauty and great anguish or even a face of great malice and great terror—and seeing within it a burning bush of divine love.  

This, Paul writes, is the organic evidence of God’s presence within and between us.

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