Sabbath Poems
2002
X
Teach me work that honours thy work,
the true economies of goods and words,
to make my arts compatible
with the songs of the local birds.
Teach me patience beyond work –
and, beyond patience, the blest
Sabbath of thy unresting love
which lights all things and gives rest.
For decades Wendell Berry has written and spoken, argued and protested, enacted and demonstrated what true economies are. The economy of agrarian stewardship; the economy and ecology of words; the economics of community; the economy of friendship, love and neighbourliness - each of these he has described, explained, and most of them he has incorporated into the way he lives his own life.
Behind his lifelong persistence and patience with alternatives to frantic, grasping human wastefulness is a fully confessed love for the natural order as a divine gift. Berry is a critical friend of Christianity, acknowledging and at times exposing its distortions, failures and responsibility for much that has gone wrong with the way the world is exploited and pushed to the edge of ruin.
But when he listens to the songs of birds, watches a river carve a landscape, lies on a forest floor and sees a green cathedral illumined by light refracted through a million leaves, he knows he is celebrating someone else's work. And he wants emulate its creativity, beauty and exuberant hopefulness. It is deeply human to create, and to take such care and imaginative skill so that work becomes an art form.
The prayer for patience giving way to Sabbath blessing is a further acknowledgement that all around us is gift. The One addressed in this poem is ceaselessly active, a sustaining and recreating love that is the light of life, illuminating, vitalising and energising and enabling to be. These moments of address to the divine by giving thanks and surrendering to the beauty and miracle of this place and this moment, are clues to Berry's overall vision.
Panentheism is the conviction that God is active, present and invested in all that God has made, the belief that 'thy unresting love lights all things, and gives rest.' Running through this poem are two dispositions familiar to readers of Berry; contentment to receive the gift of life and shared existence with the earth; responsibility to receive that gift gratefully and to add to its value, not diminish its richness. The economies of goods and words are constructive, conserving, and creative all at once.
I read this poem and sense in my own responses a deep emotional, almost physiological agreement, a recognisable longing to make my arts compatible with a world serenaded by the songs of birds, local birds. The arts of words and goods, economies of community, sharing and compassion, receiving gratefully the gift of life and our world, and responding with arts that enrich and do not diminish the gift it is.
That word local. Berry uses it often. He is an apologist for the local; people, fields, woods, towns, roads, rivers, the known locales that give a person place, identity and relationships.
When it comes to local birds, these past months of lock down, I have been out on the back roads on my bike, past fields and farms, woods and the occasional burn. Every time I have seen and heard goldfinches, yellowhammers, wood pigeons, skylarks, sparrows, blackbirds, coal tits, chaffinches, blackcaps, and others that flitted past or sang their pieces in the distance.
And so this brief Sabbath poem becomes a prayer to be taught a way of being, a way of seeing the unresting love that lights all things, and gives rest. It is a gentle rebuke to living for things, pursuing the limited goals of acquisition and functional possessiveness. Berry is right. "Teach me work...and patience beyond work..."
Comments