Day 9: The Dead Stick That Flowered in the Dark

Shoonoyo/Dormition Fast | The Second Eve series: August 2026

In the name of God the Father, Christ Jesus His Son and the Holy Spirit, One True God. Amen.

And it came to pass, that on the morrow Moses went into the tabernacle of witness; and, behold, the rod of Aaron for the house of Levi was budded, and brought forth buds, and bloomed blossoms, and yielded almonds. – Numbers 17:8

The setting is an argument, and it is an ugly one.

Israel is quarrelling about who has the right to stand at the altar and serve before God. A rebellion has already taken place, the consequences have been severe, and still the murmuring continues. Everyone has an opinion about who God has chosen, and everyone is prepared to say so loudly.

So God settles it, and the way He settles it is worth attending to. He settles it is strikingly quiet.

He does not send fire from heaven. He asks for sticks.

Twelve staffs, one for each tribe, each with a man’s name written on it. They are laid before the Lord in the tent of meeting, before the ark, and left there overnight.

And now think about what a staff actually was.

It was a length of wood cut from a tree and carried by a man for years. Worn smooth by his hand. Cut off from its roots long ago, thoroughly dry, no further scope of growth left in it. Twelve of these were laid on the floor of a tent, and by any account of how the world works, twelve of them should have been lying there in the morning exactly as they were left.

By morning, eleven of them are exactly what they were before. One is not.

The Staff That Became Alive

Our Fathers went straight to this, and their eye is on a particular detail.

Aaron’s staff which sprouted
resembled you, O daughter of the Hebrews.
Amid all the dry staffs it alone grew moist and fair,
like you who are filled with all beauties.
Among young maidens you are outshining,
among virgins your case is unique:
the single staff within the whole world,
without any other resembling it,
the single virgin who gave birth in wondrous fashion,
uniquely, without having any comparison.
This symbol, the staff which sprouted forth in the Ark,
has now received explanation.
Blessed is He whose telling lies hidden in Scripture!
– Bride of Light, no. 30 (Hymns on Mary no. 17), verse 5.

Amid all the dry staffs it alone grew moist.

Something had begun to live where no life should have been possible. The poet’s emphasis is not that the staff was stronger than the others, nor that it had some hidden quality which made it suitable for the miracle. It was dry like the rest. The life in it was not the result of cultivation or natural strength. It was the work of God.

Another hymn develops the same image:

They depict you too in the staff, placed in the Ark;
it sprouted forth without being planted, to proclaim your tale,
this staff which, though unwatered, was crowned with leaves,
to be a parable of the Virgin
who sprouted forth, to provide us with the wondrous Fruit.
It is her symbol that is hidden in the Levite’s staff.
– Bride of Light, no. 10 (Hymns on Mary, no. 5), verse 6.

Without being planted. Though unwatered.

Nobody did anything to that staff. It was not tended. It was not put in soil, or given water, or placed in the light. It was left on the floor of a tent in the dark, and something happened to it that has no natural explanation, and by morning it was carrying almonds.

In The Dark, Where Nobody Was Watching

Hold on to where this happened, because I think it is the pastoral heart of today.

It happens at night, inside the tent, away from the eyes of the people. There is no crowd watching the first bud appear, no one sees the blossom open, and no one can say exactly when the change began.

There was only a quarrelling nation asleep outside, and dry wood in the dark, and God working.

By morning, the work is already done.

There are several moments in Scripture where God’s greatest work begins in this hidden way, and the Annunciation is one of them. A young woman is in Nazareth, a village of little importance. There is no public ceremony, no crowd and no witness standing nearby. Gabriel speaks, Mary answers, and outwardly the world appears unchanged.

Rome is still ruling. Herod is still on his throne. People are still buying bread, drawing water and going about their ordinary lives.

And yet everything has changed.

The Word has become flesh.

God has entered His creation in a new way.

The greatest event in human history begins in silence, away from the world’s attention, much like the staff flowering in the darkness of the tent.

The Wondrous Fruit

The Syriac poet tells us why the staff matters. It “sprouted forth, to provide us with the wondrous Fruit.”

The leaves are beautiful, and the blossoms are astonishing, but the fruit is the purpose of the sign. The miracle is not given merely so that people can admire an impossible piece of botany. It is given to reveal something.

And this is where the image leads us.

Mary is the staff. Christ is the Fruit.

She sprouted forth, to provide us with the wondrous Fruit.

Nobody cared about Aaron’s rod. What ended the argument was not that a stick had blossomed but that there were almonds on it, and everyone could see them, and no explanation was possible.

Fruit is the point of a staff that flowers. Fruit is the point of a virgin who bears. If nothing had come of it, the wonder would have been a curiosity and nothing more, and we would not be reading about it three thousand years later.

And the almonds were not kept.

The staff was put back inside the ark, and the letter to the Hebrews lists it there, along with the tablets and the golden jar. It was kept as a witness, so that the murmuring would stop.

She is the staff. He is the Fruit.

The whole meaning of the sign lies in the One who comes forth. This is why the Church never stops with any Marian image as though the image were complete in itself. Every title given to the Blessed Virgin opens toward her Son.

The dry staff flowers because it bears fruit. The Virgin is blessed because she bears Christ.

And that Fruit is not kept hidden away. He is given to the world.

Dead Wood and Living Fruit

There is another part of the image that is difficult to ignore, because Christ Himself would one day be placed upon wood.

The Cross too was dead wood, cut from a tree, carried on a man’s shoulders and raised on a hill outside Jerusalem. On Friday afternoon, nothing about that wood looked like life. It looked like defeat. It looked like the end. It looked as though death had won.

And yet by the morning of the third day, the wood of the Cross had borne its Fruit.

Life came out of death.

The grave itself becomes another kind of hidden chamber, sealed, silent and apparently final. No one sees the moment of Resurrection. No crowd watches life return. Once again, the greatest work of God happens in the dark.

And by morning, everything has changed.

What Today Asks Of Us

We are nine days into the fast now, with six days remaining. By this point some of us may be feeling dry. Prayer may feel repetitive, the discipline of fasting may no longer feel particularly meaningful, and we may have expected to notice more change in ourselves by now than we actually do.

That can be discouraging, because we would like to feel the life of God moving within us. We would like to see the bud. We would like some reassurance that the effort is producing something.

Aaron’s staff offers us a gentler picture of spiritual growth.

The staff was not chosen because it had life in it. There was no life in it. It was chosen, and then life came, and the order of those two things is the whole of the gospel. Not: become alive, and God will choose us. But: God chooses, and life follows, and it follows in the dark where we cannot watch it happening.

There are times in the Christian life when growth is obvious to us, but there are also long stretches when all we experience is dryness. The temptation during those times is to leave too early. We abandon prayer because it feels empty. We loosen the fast because we cannot see what it is doing. We interpret silence as absence.

But the staff reminds us that there are things God does in us that we do not see while they are happening.

The first bud may be forming in the dark.

Eleven of those staffs stayed dry. I will not pretend otherwise, and neither does Scripture. But not one of the twelve could tell, at the time, which it was going to be.

So let us do the only thing dry wood can do.

Stay in the tent. Stay where He put us. Do not walk out of these last six days because nothing seems to be happening.

Stay with the prayer even when it feels dry. Stay with the fast after the enthusiasm of the first few days has gone. Stay with the silence even when nothing seems to be happening. Stay before God.

Not because staying earns the miracle. It does not.

But because Aaron’s staff remained before the Lord through the night.

There is no need to force ourselves to feel spiritual, and there is no need to pretend that dry wood is already green. We can simply offer God what is actually there: our tiredness, our distraction, our dryness and our unfinished selves.

And then trust that life belongs to Him.

Morning comes. The curtain opens. And sometimes only then do we discover that God had been at work while we thought nothing was happening.

Blessed is He who brings life from what is dry, who brings fruit from what seems barren, and who rose from the darkness of the grave.

I end with the Lkeebooso, sung during the intercession to the Blessed Theotokos:

Bless’d are you, Holy Virgin,
You are the second heaven
Where the Sun of Justice rose.

Your brother in Christ
Jobin

Tomorrow – Day 10: A ram caught in a thicket on a mountain in Moriah, an old man with a knife, and a tree that our Fathers said had not been standing there the day before.