It is of course St Valentine’s day today, with the obligatory displays of chocolates and roses whose connection to an early Christian martyr is at best rather tenuous.  But the use of red roses to express affection and love goes back further than I had realised, even to Roman times; and in Victorian times flowers were exchanged as a way of passing messages and secrets, especially when the rules of society could seem very constraining.  Sending a rose was a way of saying what could not or should not be put into words, breaking the conventions of language at least for that one moment.  There was always the risk of failure or misunderstanding, but also the possibility of new adventure.
Though today’s rose industry feels very commercialised, perhaps we still seek ways of moving beyond language and words to express how we feel or who we are.   And the roses remind us of the power of gifts and symbols to take on meaning, and how sometimes it is through images or things that we find the ways to connect more deeply with one another.  Perhaps this is true too in the language of prayer, as we try to open our hearts and make known to God what it is that we desire or hope, or that we fear and regret.  Sometimes there are words, sometimes our stretched human language begins to crack and split and we reach out to God beyond those words.  Yet we can do so filled with hope, knowing that our hearts are always already held in God’s loving embrace.