Whatever is Foreseen in Joy

Whatever is foreseen in joy
Must be lived out from day to day,

Vision held open in the dark
By our ten thousand days of work.
Harvest will fill the barn; for that
The hand must ache, the face must sweat.

And yet no leaf or grain is filled
By work of ours; the field is tilled
And left to grace. That we may reap,
Great work is done while we're asleep.

When we work well, a Sabbath mood
Rests on our day, and finds it good.


--Wendell Berry (1935- ), American poet, essayist, agrarian, philosopher, novelist, and farmer, from This Day: New and Collected Sabbath Poems


Scriptural association: Mark 4: 26-34 (Proper 6B)

The Wish to Be Generous

All that I serve will die, all my delights,
the flesh kindled from my flesh, garden and field,
the silent lilies standing in the woods,
the woods, the hill, the whole earth, all
will burn in man's evil, or dwindle
in its own age. Let the world bring on me
the sleep of darkness without stars, so I may know
my little light taken from me into the seed
of the beginning and the end, so I may bow
to mystery, and take my stand on the earth
like a tree in a field, passing without haste
or regret toward what will be, my life
a patient willing descent into the grass.

--Wendell Berry (1934- ), America poet, farmer, agrarian, essayist, and philosopher

Lectionary scripture: 2 Corinthians 8:7-15, Proper 8B

Christmas Trees

(A Christmas Circular Letter)

The city had withdrawn into itself
And left at last the country to the country;
When between whirls of snow not come to lie
And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove
A stranger to our yard, who looked the city,
Yet did in country fashion in that there
He sat and waited till he drew us out
A-buttoning coats to ask him who he was.
He proved to be the city come again
To look for something it had left behind
And could not do without and keep its Christmas.
He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;
My woods—the young fir balsams like a place
Where houses all are churches and have spires.
I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees.
I doubt if I was tempted for a moment
To sell them off their feet to go in cars
And leave the slope behind the house all bare,
Where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon.
I’d hate to have them know it if I was.
Yet more I’d hate to hold my trees except
As others hold theirs or refuse for them,
Beyond the time of profitable growth,
The trial by market everything must come to.
I dallied so much with the thought of selling.
Then whether from mistaken courtesy
And fear of seeming short of speech, or whether
From hope of hearing good of what was mine, I said,
“There aren’t enough to be worth while.”
“I could soon tell how many they would cut,
You let me look them over.”

                                                “You could look.
But don’t expect I’m going to let you have them.”
Pasture they spring in, some in clumps too close
That lop each other of boughs, but not a few
Quite solitary and having equal boughs
All round and round. The latter he nodded “Yes” to,
Or paused to say beneath some lovelier one,
With a buyer’s moderation, “That would do.”
I thought so too, but wasn’t there to say so.
We climbed the pasture on the south, crossed over,
And came down on the north. He said, “A thousand.”

“A thousand Christmas trees!—at what apiece?”

He felt some need of softening that to me:
“A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars.”

Then I was certain I had never meant
To let him have them. Never show surprise!
But thirty dollars seemed so small beside
The extent of pasture I should strip, three cents
(For that was all they figured out apiece),
Three cents so small beside the dollar friends
I should be writing to within the hour
Would pay in cities for good trees like those,
Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools
Could hang enough on to pick off enough.
A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!
Worth three cents more to give away than sell,
As may be shown by a simple calculation.
Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.
I can’t help wishing I could send you one,
In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.

--Robert Frost (1874-1963), American poet

Image- Balsams on a tree farm in Oklahoma, not mine

II (Another Sunday morning comes)

Another Sunday morning comes
And I resume the standing Sabbath
Of the woods, or the finest blooms
Of time return, and where no path

Is worn but wears its makers out
At last, and disappears in leaves
Of fallen seasons. The tracked rut
Fills and levels; here nothing grieves

In the risen season. Past life
Lives in the living. Resurrection
Is in the way each maple leaf
Commemorates its kind, by connection

Outreaching understanding. What rises
Rises into comprehension
And beyond. Even falling raises
In praise of light. What is begun 

Is unfinished. And so the mind
That comes to rest among the bluebells
Comes to rest in motion, refined
By alteration. The bud swells,

Opens, makes seed, falls, is well,
Being becoming what it is:
Miracle and parable
Exceeding thought, because it is

Immeasurable; the understander
Encloses understanding, thus
Darkens the light. We can stand under
No ray that is not dimmed by us.

The mind that comes to rest is tended
In ways that it cannot intend:
Is borne, preserved, and comprehended
By what it cannot comprehend.

Your Sabbath, Lord, thus keeps us by
Your will, not ours. And it is fit
Our only choice should be to die
Into that rest, or out of it.

--Wendell Berry (1934- ), American farmer, poet, essayist, and agrarian, from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-1997

Anger Against Beasts

The hook of adrenaline shoves
into the blood. Man's will,
long schooled to kill or have
its way, would drive the beast
against nature, transcend
the impossible in simple fury.
The blow falls like a dead seed.
It is defeat, for beasts
do not pardon, but heal or die
in the absence of the past.
The blow survives in the man.
His triumph is a wound. Spent,
he must wait the slow
unalterable forgiveness of time.


--Wendell Berry (1934- ), American farmer, essayist, poet, agrarian, author, environmental activist

Prayer After Eating

I have taken in the light
that quickened eye and leaf.
May my brain be bright with praise
of what I eat, in the brief blaze
of motion and of thought.
May I be worthy of my meat.

--Wendell Berry (1934- ), American farmer, essayist, poet, agrarian, author, environmental activist

Image: detail of a window by Emil Frei and Sons at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, Ferguson, MO

Good Ground

I love your simple story of the sower,

With all its close attention to the soil,

Its movement from the knowledge to the knower,

Its take on the tenacity of toil.


I feel the fall of seed a sower scatters,

So equally available to all,

Your story takes me straight to all that matters,

Yet understands the reasons why I fall.


Oh deepen me where I am thin and shallow,

Uproot in me the thistle and the thorn,

Keep far from me that swiftly snatching shadow,

That seizes on your seed to mock and scorn.


O break me open, Jesus, set me free,

Then find and keep your own good ground in me.

-- Malcom Guite (1954-), English priest, poet, musician, and theologian

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The Meeting

He was looking at a flower,

Not with love, but looking at it;

His plough was stopped in the top corner

Of a field he had just roofed.

There was nothing to say that the wind,

Repeating in a tree the unrecorded

Facts of history, had reached further

Than the cold porches of his ear.

He was looking at a flower,

As an animal looks, wondering nothing

About the mystery of its growth.

And why should he? He had grown, too.

With less beauty? Who is to say?

There was a likeness in his eyes,

In both their tenancies of the air’s

Quietness. You could have passed

On the hill road, unsuspecting

That blank encounter in space-time

Of two creatures, each with its load

Of meaning not to be set down.

--R. S. Thomas (1913-2000), Welsh poet and Anglican priest

Psalm 65

To You, silence is praise, O God in Zion,
and to You vows are paid. O You who hear prayer,
before You all flesh comes. Misdeeds—
they are stronger than I am; our transgressions—
You are the one who makes atonement.

Privileged are those whom You choose and draw near
to dwell in Your courts.
May we be satisfied with the goodness of Your house,
Your holy temple.
With awesome works, in righteousness, You answer us,
O God of our salvation,
the Confidence of all the ends of the earth,
and the furthest reaches of the sea.

He sets firm the mountains in his strength;
He is girded with might.
He silences the roar of the seas, the roar of their waves,
and the din of the nations.

Those who inhabit the ends of the earth
feel reverent-fear at your signs;
the reaches of morning and evening,
You make them ring with joy.

You visit the earth and water it;
You abundantly enrich it—
God’s stream, full of water.
You set their grain—yes, You set it just so.
Drenching its furrows, settling its hillocks,
You soften it with showers; its growth You bless.
You have crowned the year with Your goodness,
and Your wagon-tracks drip richness.

The pastures of the wilderness are dripping,
and the hills are girdled with rejoicing.
The meadows are clothed with the flocks,
and the valleys robed with grain.
They shout out; they even sing.

-- translated by Ellen Davis, American Biblical scholar, professor, and agrarian

The Stones

I owned a slope full of stones.
Like buried pianos they lay in the ground,
shards of old sea-ledges, stumbling blocks
where the earth caught and kept them dark,
an old music mute in them
that my head keeps now I have dug them out.
I broke them where they slugged in the dark
cells, and lifted them up in pieces.

As I piled them in the light
I began their music. I heard their old lime
rouse in breath of song that had not left me.
I gave pain and weariness to their bearing out.
What bond have I made with the earth,
having worn myself against it? It is a fatal singing
I have carried with me out of that day.
The stones have given me music
that figures for me their holes in the earth
and their long lying in them dark.
They have taught me the weariness that loves the ground,
and I must prepare a fitting silence.

--Wendell Berry (1934- ), American poet, novelist, agrarian activist

Christ as a Gardener

The boxwoods planted in the park spell LIVE.
I never noticed it until they died.
Before, the entwined green had smudged the word
unreadable. And when they take their own advice
again – come spring, come Easter – no one will know
a word is buried in the leaves. I love the way
that Mary thought her resurrected Lord
a gardener. It wasn’t just the broad-brimmed hat
and muddy robe that fooled her: he was that changed.
He looks across the unturned field, the riot
Of unscythed grass, the smattering of wildflowers.
Before he can stop himself, he’s on his knees.
He roots up stubborn weeds, pinches the suckers,
deciding order here – what lives, what dies,
and how. But it goes deeper even than that.
His hands burn and his bare feet smolder. He longs
To lie down inside the long, dew-moist furrows
and press his pierced side and his broken forehead
into the dirt. But he’s already done it –
passed through one death and out the other side.
He laughs. He kicks his bright spade in the earth
and turns it over. Spring flashes by, then harvest.
Beneath his feet, seeds dance into the air.
They rise, and he, not noticing, ascends
on midair steppingstones of dandelion,
of milkweed, thistle, cattail, and goldenrod.


-- Andrew Hudgins (1951- ), American poet and professor of English at the Ohio State University, from The Never-Ending, 1991.



Image: The Risen Christ as a gardener (see John 20:11-18) with Mary of Magdala, from a Limoges enamel.

The Dreaming Fields

Oh, the sun rolls down, big as a miracle
And fades from the Midwest Sky
And the corn and the trees wave in the breeze
As if to say goodbye

Oh, my grandfather stood right here as a younger man
In nineteen and forty three
And with the sweat and his tears, the rain and the years
He grew life from the soil and seed

Oh I'm goin' down to the dreaming fields
But what will be my harvest now?
Where every tear that falls on a memory
Feels like rain on the rusted plow
Rain on the rusted plow

And these fields they dream of wheat in the summertime
Grandchildren running free
And the bales of hay at the end of the day
And the scarecrow that just scared me

Now the houses they grow like weeds in a flower bed
This morning the silo fell
Seems the only way a man can live off the land
These days is to buy and sell

So I'm goin' down to the dreaming fields
But what will be my harvest now?
Where every tear that falls on a memory
Feels like rain on the rusted plow
Rain on the rusted plow

Oh, the sun rolls down, big as a miracle
And fades from the Midwest Sky
And the corn and the trees wave in the breeze
As if to say goodbye
As if to say goodbye

Goodbye....

--Matraca Berg (1964- ), from the album The Dreaming Fields  (2011)

Sabbath Poem X, 1979

Whatever is foreseen in joy
Must be lived out from day to day.
Vision held open in the dark
By our ten thousand days of work.
Harvest will fill the barn; for that
The hand must ache, the face must sweat.

And yet no leaf or grain is filled
By work of ours; the field is tilled
And left to grace. That we may reap,
Great work is done while we’re asleep.

When we work well, a Sabbath mood
Rests on our day, and finds it good.

--Wendell Berry (1934- ), American poet, novelist, agrarian activist, from This Day: Sabbath Poems New and Collected, 1979-2013, 2013

Christ-hymn from "The Everlasting Mercy"

...I kneeled there in the muddy fallow,

I knew that Christ was there with Callow,

That Christ was standing there with me,

That Christ had taught me what to be,

That I should plough, and as I ploughed

My Saviour Christ would sing aloud,

And as I drove the clods apart

Christ would be ploughing in my heart,

Through rest-harrow and bitter roots,

Through all my bad life's rotten fruits.

 

O Christ who holds the open gate,

O Christ who drives the furrow straight,

O Christ, the plough, O Christ, the laughter

Of holy white birds flying after,

Lo, all my heart's field red and torn,

And Thou wilt bring the young green corn,

The young green corn divinely springing,

The young green corn forever singing;

And when the field is fresh and fair

Thy blessèd feet shall glitter there,

And we will walk the weeded field,

And tell the holden harvests's yield,

The corn that makes the holy bread

By which the soul of man is fed,

The holy bread, the food unpriced,

Thy everlasting mercy, Christ.

 

The share will jar on many a stone,

Thou wilt not let me stand alone;

And I shall feel (thou wilt not fail),

Thy hand on mine upon the hale.

 

-- John Masefield (1878-1967), 1911

 

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