Come Sunday

Lord, dear Lord of love, God Almighty, God up above,
Please look down and see my people through.
Lord, dear Lord of love, God Almighty, God above,
Please look down and see my people through.

I believe the sun and moon will shine up in the sky.
When the day is gray, I know it’s just clouds passing by.
He’ll give peace and comfort to every troubled mind,
Come Sunday, oh come Sunday, that’s the day.

Often we feel weary, but he knows our every care.
Go to Him in secret, He will hear your every prayer.

Lillies on the valley, they neither toil nor spin;
And flowers bloom in Spring and birds sing.
Up from dawn till sunset, man work hard all the day--
Come Sunday, oh come Sunday, that´s the day.


--Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899-1974), African American Jazz composer and musician

The video above features the incomparable Mahalia Jackson.

Six Days of Work Are Spent

Six days of work are spent
To make a Sunday quiet
That Sabbath may return.
It comes in unconcern;
We cannot earn or buy it.
Suppose rest is not sent
Or comes and goes unknown,
The light, unseen, unshown.
Suppose the day begins
In wrath at circumstance,
Or anger at one's friends
In vain self-innocence
False to the very light,
Breaking the sun in half,
Or anger at oneself
Whose controverting will
Would have the sun stand still.
The world is lost in loss
Of patience; the old curse
Returns, and is made worse
As newly justified.
In hopeless fret and fuss.
In rage at worldly plight
Creation is defied,
All order is unproved,
All light and singing stopped.


--Wendell Berry (1935- ), American poet, essayist, farmer, philosopher, novelist, and agrarian

Sabbath Poem I (1986)-- A Timbered Choir

Slowly, slowly, they return

To the small woodland let alone:
Great trees, outspreading and upright,
Apostles of the living light.

Patient as stars, they build in air
Tier after tier a timbered choir,
Stout beams upholding weightless grace
Of song, a blessing on this place.

They stand in waiting all around,
Uprisings of their native ground,
Downcomings of the distant light;
They are the advent they await.

Receiving sun and giving shade,
Their life’s a benefaction made,
And is a benediction said
Over the living and the dead.

In fall their bright and leaves, released,
Fly down the wind, and we are pleased
To walk on radiance, amazed.
O light come down to earth, be praised!

-- Wendell Berry, American  poet, farmer, and essayist, from A Timbered Choir: the Sabbath Poems 1979-1997

Sabbath Poem I (1985)

Not again in this flesh will I see
the old trees stand here as they did,
weighty creatures made of light, delight
of their making straight in them and well,
whatever blight our blindness was or made,
however thought or act might fail.

The burden of absence grows, and I pay
daily the grief I owe to love
for women and men, days and trees
I will not know again. Pray
for the world's light thus borne away.
Pray for the little songs that wake and move.

For comfort as these lights depart,
recall again the angels of the thicket,
columbine aerial in the whelming tangle,
song drifting down, light rain, day
returning in song, the lordly Art
piercing out its humble way.

Though blindness may yet detonate in light,
running all, after all the years, great right
subsumed at last in paltry wrong,
what do we know? Still
the Presence that we come into with song
is here, shaping the seasons of His wild will.


-- Wendell Berry, American poet, farmer, agrarian, and essayist, from A Timbered Choir: the Sabbath Poems 1979-1997

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

I (I go among trees and sit still)

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
what I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.

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

Sabbath Poem I: 1979

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labor,
mute in my consernations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.

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

Sabbath Poem: Amish Economy

We live by mercy if we live.
To that we have no fit reply
But working well and giving thanks
Loving God, loving one another,
To keep Creation's neighborhood.

And my friend David Kline told me,
"It falls strangely on Amish ears,
This talk of how you find yourself.
We Amish, after all, don't try
To find ourselves. We try to lose
Ourselves"-- and thus are lost within
The found world of sunlight and rain
Where fields are green and then are ripe,
And the people eat together by
The charity of God, who is kind
Even to those who give no thanks.

In morning light, men in dark clothes
Go out among the beasts and fields.
Lest the community be lost,
Each day they must work out the bond
Between goods and their price: the garden
Weeded by sweat is flowerbright;
The wheat shocked in shorn field, clover
Is growing where wheat grew; the crib
Is golden with gathered corn,

While in the world of the found selves,
Lost to the sunlit, rainy world,
The motor-driven cannot stop.
This is the world where value is
Abstract, and preys on things, and things
Are changed to thoughts that have a price.

Cost + greed - fear = price:
Maury Tulleen thus laid it out.
The need to balance greed and fear
Affords no stopping place, no rest,
And need increases as we fail.

But now, in summer dusk, a man
Whose hair and beard curl like spring ferns
Sits under the yard trees, at rest,
His smallest daughter on his lap.
This is because he rose at dawn,
Cared for his own, helped his neighbors,
Worked much, spent little, kept his peace.

-- Wendell Berry (1934- ), American farmer, poet, essayist, agrarian, 1995, from This Day: New and Collected Sabbath Poems 1979-2013, 2013


Photo: "Amish Father and Child," by Julie Horn, from flickr.

Relevant scripture: Proper 4B, Mark 2:23-3:6

Not By Might Nor By Power

O Lord, may we never become complacent, faltering in our effort to build a world of peace for Your children. Let the nations know and understand that justice and right are better than conquest and dominion; may they come to see that it is not by might nor by power, but by Your spirit, that life prevails.

--Shabbat prayer from Gates of Prayer: The New Union Prayer Book, Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1975, p. 233.

Sabbath Poem V, 1980

Six days of work are spent
To make a Sunday quiet
That Sabbath may return.
It comes in unconcern;
We cannot earn or buy it.
Suppose rest is not sent
Or comes and goes unknown,
The light, unseen, unshown.
Suppose the day begins
In wrath at circumstance,
Or anger at one’s friends
In vain self-innocence
False to the very light,
Breaking the sun in half,
Or anger at oneself
Whose controverting will
Would have the sun stand still.
The world is lost in loss
Of patience; the old curse
Returns, and is made worse
As newly justified.
In hopeless fret and fuss,
In rage at worldly plight
Creation is defied,
All order is unpropped,
All light and singing stopped.

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

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