Vinca

This flower is called vinca and a kindly colleague provided it in a vase for our work’s staff room. Traditionally, it is known as a ground-covering plant in graveyards and cemeteries. It is easy to keep, requiring little maintenance while adding welcome colour in that bleak, grey place of pain and death (the cemetery, not my staffroom).

The grave of a Christian is often just as great a place of sorrow and suffering as the resting place of any other. The Christian wife, mother, father, son or friend is as missed and mourned as the next plot's inhabitant. Yet there are rays of sunshine and tokens of colour which the grave of the unbeliever is unable to claim with any certainty. Our Christ has defeated death; the grave can only hold us for a season. Easter reminds us that death has been vanquished; it has lost the war, even though it continues to win many a battle. Vinca comes from the Latin vincire which means to bind, or chain-up; if death is a prison, Christ is the jail-breaker who sets free its captives.