Every week, as I sit down to prayerfully reflect on what I am experiencing during this extended time of solitude – and what some of you may be encountering, too – I listen for clues to share with you as we make this journey together albeit apart. Sometimes it shows up in a poem, other times in a song; periodically one arrives while taking-in the nightly news on PBS, and from time to time, a notion catches my attention while I am reading. For the past few weeks, I have been playing an old tune by Kate Wolf as a meditation. I’ve known it since before my daughters were born – forty plus years – and I’ve wondered why it chose to show up again right now?
· So, I’m starting a new/old spiritual practice that begins with the words: I just don’t know. Whenever I can’t figure out why I am thinking or feeling, singing or doing something mysterious these days, I say to myself and to the sacred: Hmmm, I just don’t know. It’s a liberating little prayer to acknowledge my limitations and uncertainties – a path towards a certain humility, too. Those four little words help me “release those things to which I too often cling too tightly,” things Christine Valters Paintner names as “my need to be in control, my need to feel secure” and all the rest. (The Slow Ripening of the Soul, p. 3) “I just don’t know.”
· Accepting and trusting the unknown by stepping into the mystery is an embodied prayer – what the ancient Celtic monks called “crossing the threshold” – and it doesn’t come easily to me. Maybe that’s true for you, too. But the more I, “let go of controlling the outcome, the more these thresholds become rich and graced places of transformation.” (ibid) For as I step through the certainties of what I know into the mystery of what I don’t, I start to notice, “the threads of synchronicity, serendipity and beauty” as they unfold before me. Dr. Paintner likes to call this, “honoring the slow ripening of the soul” rather than insisting upon fast tract solutions for the bottom line.
One of these enigmatic threads that I am noticing as my soul slowly ripens during my solitude is a link between St. Paul’s call to live as a fool for Christ and Kate Wolf’s desire for rest. Both sense a sacred symmetry between the longing of our heart and the tranquility of grace hidden within our humanity this is aching to be discovered like a treasure in a field. Stepping into and then through our uncertainties is what Kate prays for when she sings: won’t you lay me down easy. And what the apostle promises whenever we foolishly honor God’s upside-down grace knowing that in Jesus:
God chose what is small in the world to challenge the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to challenge the strong; God chose what is vulnerable in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are so that no one might boast about themselves…. In this we have become fools for Christ… choosing to live on the edges of society by faith to honor God’s love and offer alternatives to those ensnarled in the rat race.
Let me play Kate’s song for you as one pilgrim’s reflection on the mystery of the ordinary. Like so many of the tunes I use for personal prayer, not all her words sound meditative – and they’re not at all religious. Yet there’s something about this tender, little tune that cuts deep for me – could be the synergy of melody and mood – or the chorus that sounds like so many of my own prayers since March – or the invitation of Jesus to come all ye who are tired and heavy laden - I just don’t know for sure – except to say it calls to me…
Sitting in the sunshine, trying to sing the blues away
Wondering why they came and how long they'll stay
Picking out a little tune I never heard before
Yes, and wishing you were here at the door
Won't you lay me down easy - lay me down easy in my mind
'Cause babe, I've got the blues and there's something you can do
You can lay me down easy in my mind, in my mind
Well babe, you know how it is when you wake up feeling old
You wonder if you’re doing what you should
And everyone around you — they can’t read what’s on your mind
And they might not want to if they could if they could…
Now the seasons of my life they go turning through the days
I’ve seen bitter winters come and go
And here I am in sunny times not feeling like I could
And wondering when the winds will start to blow…
There is a pathos and integrity – an honesty and humility, too – in this song that feels like deep calling to deep: won’t you lay me down easy. It’s what I pray almost every day for myself, for you, and for so many in this world: Lord, in your mercy, won’t you lay us down easy this day and by your grace help us be at rest with ourselves, our world and your love? Sometimes it feels foolish to keep offering up that prayer: life feels harsh and demanding right now – exhausting and maybe suffocating, too – even while sheltering at home. And watching the news? Trying to make sense of the magnitude of death in the US? And the world? The uncertainty and cruelty of it all? I really don’t know what to do with all of that except to say that sometimes it all feels like too much.
I don’t know if you’ve said this out loud – or kept it to yourself – but it is increasingly clear that we’re going to be in this chaos until at least Christmas – and probably longer. Winter is the earliest we can expect a vaccine no matter what lies come out of the White House. Add to this grim fact what we know about the final 100 days of this election cycle - how this regime is already ginning-up fear and hatred by sending 21st century storm troopers into Portland – and what we said after the 2016 election is increasingly true: it is going to get worse – much worse – before it gets better.
I suspect that is why I keep praying: lay me down easy, Lord. It’s my hunch as well that my affinity with Paul’s call to live as fools for Christ right now is another thread of synchronicity for it insists that NOW is the time for more sacred fools incarnating God’s love. When life is at its most complex, when all we can see is the madness and cruelty of our days, the Spirit often intercedes for us with sighs too deep for human words and invites us to become servants of love even as the chaos rages. It's a call to step through the threshold of what we know into the mysterious reality of what we don’t, trusting the Lord of tenderness to empower us with a holy love that feels intellectually foolish – but ethically right and so soul satisfying. St. Paul talked about the early church as those who “had become fools for Christ” when they visible chose to live on the edge of society by trust, and offered tender-hearted loving alternatives to the empire to all who were tired and heavy-laden.
That’s what I hear in this weird little parable from Jesus, too: the foolishness of sacred love. It has long been perplexing to me what we are to do with this story. For decades it has been relegated to the “well, I don’t really know” pile. Some preachers try to render it with piety by scrubbing away the gritty scandal of grace as they insist it is about discovering the precious beauty of God as our treasure. Others insist that the promise of blessings that could be ours is revealed only to those who work hard enough to dig up the treasure box. But both of those solutions violate the scandal of grace and just don’t ring true. So, while there’s a lot in this weird little story that I don’t get, I have come to trust three insights:
· One is that the treasure in this parable had been sitting there in the ground all along just waiting to be discovered. It has nothing to do with anything the man did: he didn’t earn it or create it and he wasn’t rewarded because of his virtue. Rather, like grace, this treasure just popped up in the middle of his work as a total surprise and it was absolutely free.
· A second insight is that the treasure doesn’t automatically make this man’s life better. Truth is, it caused a dilemma. After discovering this free gift, the laborer secretly reburies it and uses all of his resources to deceptively purchase the land without ever once revealing to the original owner anything of the hidden treasure. See where this is going?
· And third, it is this secret selfishness that reveals the scandal of the story: Without an honest and public way to share this treasure, its bounty becomes useless to the man. In his zeal to possess the treasure all for himself, he acted unethically – understandably, of course, but still dishonestly – and now although he physically owns it, he must keep the treasure in the ground. Hidden. His greed and delight over finding it has trapped him: he is secretly wealthy after spending everything to buy the field but publicly worse off than before.
One thing that helps me make sense of what to do with this parable is where it takes place in the story of Jesus. St. Matthew’s gospel places it by the seaside shortly after Jesus tells his mother and brothers that he must move beyond the limits of family with God’s love. You may recall that after a year of wandering through ancient Palestine teaching and healing, Mary and the brothers of Jesus became increasingly worried that the Roman state and the religious authorities were going to crack down on Jesus because he was challenging their shared power.
There is always trouble when the power of the state gets mixed up with religious authority and that was as true then as it is now. Still, Jesus kept going out to the grain fields to teach the working people of his day that there was more than one way to live in alignment with God’s steadfast love: observing only the outward rules of the Sabbath may not nourish our hearts. This infuriated and frightened the sincere but fundamentalist believers of his day. And it still does. Strict guidelines help some feel safe and Jesus was saying it was spiritually ok to say, “I don’t know? Let’s trying something different.” No wonder the family of Jesus was worried about a crackdown.
I worry that our daughters could be snatched up and carted away in an unmarked car by anonymous paramilitary soldiers wherever they join Black Lives Matter demonstrations – so the family of Jesus had reasons to be concerned. In time, the family of Jesus went and asked him to give it a rest: take a break until the heat dies down. That’s a reasonable request from any parent. But when the crowd noticed that Mary and her other sons were waiting to bring Jesus home, Jesus replied: “Who is my mother and who are my brothers? And pointing to his disciples he replied: Here is my family, too, my extended family by God’s love. For whoever is doing the will of my Father in heaven – making sacred love flesh – is brother and sister and mother to me.”
The key is NOT that Jesus wanted to separate from his family, but that he wanted to expand it. His vision of God’s love – the will of his Father to use traditional language –was to make the circle of the covenant bigger. I love you – he told his flesh and blood – and will always love you. But right now, I have some important public work to do in the Spirit of God’s love, so please don’t get in my way. There is a Beloved Community to be birthed within and among us now in the ordinary world – an alternative to the rat race and a way of healing what is broken among us – so please help me out. And this is the context for the collection of parables found in chapter thirteen of St. Matthew’s gospel: they are all about empowering the Beloved community in the most ordinary albeit unexpected places.
Now, scholars of the Scriptures note that the word parable – parabole in Greek and mashal in Hebrew - means to toss or lay one thing beside another for the sake of comparison. Here Jesus is saying that God’s kingdom – God’s presence and the soul of right living – can be discerned by “laying it beside certain symbols or signs.” Fr. Thomas Keating of the Centering Prayer movement writes:
Unlike a simile (which compares one thing to another for emphasis as in ‘brave as a lion’ or ‘crazy like a fox’) a parable actually contains the truth within that comparison… By using a parable Jesus is saying that the kingdom really IS like… a mustard seed. Or a lost coin that is found. Or here as a treasure. (Keating, The Kingdom of God Is Like, p. 75)
To claim that the kingdom of God is like a treasure was nothing new. Jewish wisdom literature often made such comparisons and Jewish rabbis created thousands of comparable parables to those of Jesus during the early years of the Christian community. What makes this parable unique – and even problematic and scandalous – “is what happens once the treasure is found.” Keating writes: The man in this tale was a day laborer. In those days, people did not always have a bank handy… and sometimes hid their treasures in a field. Think of another parable where one servant hides his talents in the ground while the other two invest and multiply theirs and increase its value. It would not have been unusual for a day laborer working in somebody else’s field to come upon a buried treasure. But how in the world can the kingdom of God be compared to a treasure that gives rise to such improper and even deceitful conduct? Clearly the laborer was trying to conceal the treasure from its rightful owner – the one who first possessed the field – so how is this deception like the kingdom? (Keating, p. 76)
I think it has something to do with the fact that the treasure was there in the field before the man ever found it. Jesus is saying that the kingdom of God is often right there among us whether we recognize it or not. The kingdom is a part of our everyday, ordinary circumstances whether we have eyes to see or not. But that’s not all he’s saying because Jesus uses the symbol of the treasure in a unique way. In his story the treasure does not appear as a reward for the man’s efforts or virtues. Unlike other morality tales like Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings or Galahad and the Holy Grail where the hero gets the ring, the prize or the princess after enduring the rigors of a trial or a series of events that prove his courage and tenacity. Here Jesus is saying, “God makes the treasure of grace available” to everyone without respect to our proving anything. Grace is the scandalous blessing that trumps karma every time.
Another scandalous aspect is that while we love grace for ourselves, we often feel uncomfortable accepting that God’s love and forgiveness – God’s sacred presence – is just as available to those we hate and fear as it is for us. In our insecurity we know that we need forgiveness. But when it comes to the same failings and weaknesses in others, we want them to be punished.
I remember walking through what was then Leningrad in the former Soviet Union, talking with a Russian Orthodox priest about the struggle for God’s peace and justice in the world. In those days I was a hot head pushing a one-size fits all understanding of God’s judgement. And after some strong words had been share, he looked at me with tenderness and asked, “At the end of your life, and you come face to face with the Holy, who do you want to meet? The God of grace or the God of judgment?” Now I was then – and still am – a straight, white man of privilege and had probably never been confronted by such theological acuity. Walking on in silence for a few minutes, I considered my life to date. Then I confessed that if I was honest, I hoped to meet the God of grace at the end of my life. “Me, too,” he smiled and added “to be a follower of Jesus you can’t be such a hard ass, ok? Ask and ye shall receive. Seek and ye shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened. When you pray the Lord’s Prayer, open your heart to grace for you will be forgiven by God in the same measure that you forgive others.” That’s part of what this parable: we experience judgment in the presence of grace.
Unfortunately, that is a truth we must learn through the slow ripening of our souls. Organically, in our bottom-line culture, we believe we must grab all the treasures for ourselves as quickly as we can. We are rarely as generous to others as we want God to be to us no matter how many times we recite the Lord’s Prayer. Until the words become flesh, we’re just passing. This tiny parable’s offense is that the man who found this blessing by accident – and did everything is his power to make it his own – finds himself following the rules of the status quo not the Beloved Community. He’s a working man who wants a break and does everything in his power to hold on to his treasure. But once he owns it, he can’t do anything with it without creating a public scandal when people ask: where did all this new money come from? There was no lottery ticket to buy. So even though he is now in possession of a fortune, he’s worse off than before because he’s sold everything he owned to buy the field – and still can’t honorably access its bounty. Keating writes: “This parable alerts us to the fact that the kingdom, although given as sheer gift, is not given to us just for our personal benefit. To share this gift with others is part of the joy in receiving it. And not being able to do so becomes a scandal and even a curse.” (p. 78)
This free gift, you see, was not fully considered – there was no sacred wisdom at work here– so he finds himself in a bind because of his own actions. It’s not the fault of the treasure just his own response. Jesus would have us know that God, like the father in the story of the Prodigal Son, is always there to take us back repeatedly. But knowing this can be risky, too: for like Bonhoeffer said, part of the scandal of grace is that “we often treat divine mercy like cheap grace.” And while this never alters God’s love for us, it serves as a warning that we are prone to putting ourselves through hell as a consequence of confusing the steadfast love of the Lord for cheap grace.
To claim that the kingdom of God is like a treasure was nothing new. Jewish wisdom literature often made such comparisons and Jewish rabbis created thousands of comparable parables to those of Jesus during the early years of the Christian community. What makes this parable unique – and even problematic and scandalous – “is what happens once the treasure is found.” Keating writes: The man in this tale was a day laborer. In those days, people did not always have a bank handy… and sometimes hid their treasures in a field. Think of another parable where one servant hides his talents in the ground while the other two invest and multiply theirs and increase its value. It would not have been unusual for a day laborer working in somebody else’s field to come upon a buried treasure. But how in the world can the kingdom of God be compared to a treasure that gives rise to such improper and even deceitful conduct? Clearly the laborer was trying to conceal the treasure from its rightful owner – the one who first possessed the field – so how is this deception like the kingdom? (Keating, p. 76)
I think it has something to do with the fact that the treasure was there in the field before the man ever found it. Jesus is saying that the kingdom of God is often right there among us whether we recognize it or not. The kingdom is a part of our everyday, ordinary circumstances whether we have eyes to see or not. But that’s not all he’s saying because Jesus uses the symbol of the treasure in a unique way. In his story the treasure does not appear as a reward for the man’s efforts or virtues. Unlike other morality tales like Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings or Galahad and the Holy Grail where the hero gets the ring, the prize or the princess after enduring the rigors of a trial or a series of events that prove his courage and tenacity. Here Jesus is saying, “God makes the treasure of grace available” to everyone without respect to our proving anything. Grace is the scandalous blessing that trumps karma every time.
Another scandalous aspect is that while we love grace for ourselves, we often feel uncomfortable accepting that God’s love and forgiveness – God’s sacred presence – is just as available to those we hate and fear as it is for us. In our insecurity we know that we need forgiveness. But when it comes to the same failings and weaknesses in others, we want them to be punished.
I remember walking through what was then Leningrad in the former Soviet Union, talking with a Russian Orthodox priest about the struggle for God’s peace and justice in the world. In those days I was a hot head pushing a one-size fits all understanding of God’s judgement. And after some strong words had been share, he looked at me with tenderness and asked, “At the end of your life, and you come face to face with the Holy, who do you want to meet? The God of grace or the God of judgment?” Now I was then – and still am – a straight, white man of privilege and had probably never been confronted by such theological acuity. Walking on in silence for a few minutes, I considered my life to date. Then I confessed that if I was honest, I hoped to meet the God of grace at the end of my life. “Me, too,” he smiled and added “to be a follower of Jesus you can’t be such a hard ass, ok? Ask and ye shall receive. Seek and ye shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened. When you pray the Lord’s Prayer, open your heart to grace for you will be forgiven by God in the same measure that you forgive others.” That’s part of what this parable: we experience judgment in the presence of grace.
Unfortunately, that is a truth we must learn through the slow ripening of our souls. Organically, in our bottom-line culture, we believe we must grab all the treasures for ourselves as quickly as we can. We are rarely as generous to others as we want God to be to us no matter how many times we recite the Lord’s Prayer. Until the words become flesh, we’re just passing. This tiny parable’s offense is that the man who found this blessing by accident – and did everything is his power to make it his own – finds himself following the rules of the status quo not the Beloved Community. He’s a working man who wants a break and does everything in his power to hold on to his treasure. But once he owns it, he can’t do anything with it without creating a public scandal when people ask: where did all this new money come from? There was no lottery ticket to buy. So even though he is now in possession of a fortune, he’s worse off than before because he’s sold everything he owned to buy the field – and still can’t honorably access its bounty. Keating writes: “This parable alerts us to the fact that the kingdom, although given as sheer gift, is not given to us just for our personal benefit. To share this gift with others is part of the joy in receiving it. And not being able to do so becomes a scandal and even a curse.” (p. 78)
This free gift, you see, was not fully considered – there was no sacred wisdom at work here– so he finds himself in a bind because of his own actions. It’s not the fault of the treasure just his own response. Jesus would have us know that God, like the father in the story of the Prodigal Son, is always there to take us back repeatedly. But knowing this can be risky, too: for like Bonhoeffer said, part of the scandal of grace is that “we often treat divine mercy like cheap grace.” And while this never alters God’s love for us, it serves as a warning that we are prone to putting ourselves through hell as a consequence of confusing the steadfast love of the Lord for cheap grace.
Finding a treasure encourages us to escape from everyday life… this treasure freed the day laborer from the rigors of working and dealing with everyday experiences in ordinary reality… and that’s where the scandal hits because when we get lost in grandiosity we live like we’re the center of the universe. Most of us would love to win the lottery or experience the bounty of a miracle to which Jesus says, “Ok, but watch out.” Most of us don’t know how to handle such extraordinary things. Often, without our knowing, we become trapped in the habits of our culture. Would that we quit looking for a magic bullet or get rich quick schemes and open our eyes to the treasures in every day – the presence of the kingdom already within and among us – “Seek ye first the kingdom of God” Jesus said, “and all these things shall added unto you. The treasures of the kingdom are NOT for ourselves alone and never release us from our commitments to the Beloved Community. (Keating, paraphrased.)
I can’t help but think of the scandal the United States has recently created over wearing a face-mask in public. What an ordinary blessing – a way to share the gift of life and safety with the most vulnerable among us – but some are so locked into the habits of the status quo that turns every-thing into a competition rather than a journey of solidarity – that this simple act of compassion has become an ideological battle ground.
Same for the suggestion NOT to sing for a while whenever public worship resumes. In late May, the Christian Century magazine reports, a CDC guideline was drafting saying the act of singing may contribute to the transmission of COVID-19 through the emission of aerosols. This scientific fact was scrapped and omitted from the final report because the Trump administration feared angering his white, evangelical base. What an ugly American – especially white American – spirituality of entitlement. Right here, right now we have the chance to share an ordinary blessing that strengthens God’s treasured gift of life and our selfish stupidity to have everything OUR way is causing an ever increasing morbidity rate to climb over 1000 every day. As someone far wiser than I said: this is the same death rate as if 50 planes fell out of the sky every day and killed everyone on board.
I hear this weird little parable telling us that the gifts of the kingdom are ordinary – filled with everyday possibilities for us to bask in joy and tenderness – if we have eyes to see. Tish Warren, an Episcopal priest and writer, hit a home run in her book: Liturgy of the Ordinary – Sacred Practices in Everyday Life when she wrote:
Of all the things he could've chosen to be done "in remembrance" of him, Jesus chose a meal. He could have asked his followers to do something impressive or mystical like climb a mountain, fast for forty days, or have a trippy sweat lodge ceremony. But instead he picked the most ordinary of acts, eating, through which to be present to his people. He says that the bread is his body and the wine is his blood. He chooses the unremarkable and plain, the average and abundant, the bread and wine to reveal the kingdom of God” and calls us to do it, too.
And this is where I see our lives having the greatest chance to strengthen the Beloved Community. There will be a time when we’re going to have to stand up to the evil of this era in bold, heroic and public ways. More than at any other time I’ve known since 1968, our land is open to encountering the foolishness of God’s love. Not so much in many traditional churches, although I sense that most of the time Pope Francis is pushing the envelope of gracious, foolish love in the Roman Catholic realm. And not in a majority of white, evangelical churches either for they have turned Jesus into some kind of paramilitary thug who kicks ass and takes names on behalf of a punitive, jingoistic, homo-phobic, and misogynist God. But out in the streets… yes? With Black Lives Matters and the Poor Peoples Campaign, yes. In Portland where anonymous, unaccountable fascist troops recruited from our most rabidly racist cadre of federal warriors have been met with moms creating a human shield around the young protesters – and then dads standing watch over the moms – in a beautiful display of people power guided by the foolishness of love in action.
Our time will come when the grand sweep of the Spirit calls us out of our safety and into the fray of dissent. But for most of us right now our calling is smaller. More humble. We’re on a search for the hidden, ordinary treasures and mustard seeds and invitations to rest that we can share wherever we find ourselves. Every person I hear speaking in the store these days or on the TV news is asking for a little bit of Kate Wolf’s prayer. Maybe not in her exact words. But we know we need a little lay me down easy time – time to feel some rest – and know some love in a safe and holy way. None of us knows when or where we’re going to be asked to share some of this treasure. That’s still another mystery – real to be sure– but a threshold still to be revealed.
Following the thread of Kate’s song, I suspect that’s part of why I’ve been singing it two or three times every day. I need to practice being ready to look for God’s treasure wherever I go. When we least expect it, we’re being asked to help celebrate the everyday treasures that are often hidden from our sight right but are just waiting to be revealed when we really need them. Every day I come face to face with the fact that my culture, my habits, my addiction to the ways of empire keep me from seeking first the kingdom of God in what is ordinary.
And this is precisely why we’re asked to practice an alternative. Jesus says when you feel like running away, do the opposite. Choose the foolishness of the kingdom rather than the logic of Cesar. The kingdom of God is like a treasure hidden in the place where we already live. Do we have eyes to see? Can we make it your own honestly and openly? For me, and maybe you, too, this sheltering in solitude is challenging my soul to slowly ripen. It is what I am starting to call my Wendell Berry retreat time – and brother Berry has just the poem to bring this all to a close in something he calls “How to Be a Poet.”
And this is where I see our lives having the greatest chance to strengthen the Beloved Community. There will be a time when we’re going to have to stand up to the evil of this era in bold, heroic and public ways. More than at any other time I’ve known since 1968, our land is open to encountering the foolishness of God’s love. Not so much in many traditional churches, although I sense that most of the time Pope Francis is pushing the envelope of gracious, foolish love in the Roman Catholic realm. And not in a majority of white, evangelical churches either for they have turned Jesus into some kind of paramilitary thug who kicks ass and takes names on behalf of a punitive, jingoistic, homo-phobic, and misogynist God. But out in the streets… yes? With Black Lives Matters and the Poor Peoples Campaign, yes. In Portland where anonymous, unaccountable fascist troops recruited from our most rabidly racist cadre of federal warriors have been met with moms creating a human shield around the young protesters – and then dads standing watch over the moms – in a beautiful display of people power guided by the foolishness of love in action.
Our time will come when the grand sweep of the Spirit calls us out of our safety and into the fray of dissent. But for most of us right now our calling is smaller. More humble. We’re on a search for the hidden, ordinary treasures and mustard seeds and invitations to rest that we can share wherever we find ourselves. Every person I hear speaking in the store these days or on the TV news is asking for a little bit of Kate Wolf’s prayer. Maybe not in her exact words. But we know we need a little lay me down easy time – time to feel some rest – and know some love in a safe and holy way. None of us knows when or where we’re going to be asked to share some of this treasure. That’s still another mystery – real to be sure– but a threshold still to be revealed.
Following the thread of Kate’s song, I suspect that’s part of why I’ve been singing it two or three times every day. I need to practice being ready to look for God’s treasure wherever I go. When we least expect it, we’re being asked to help celebrate the everyday treasures that are often hidden from our sight right but are just waiting to be revealed when we really need them. Every day I come face to face with the fact that my culture, my habits, my addiction to the ways of empire keep me from seeking first the kingdom of God in what is ordinary.
And this is precisely why we’re asked to practice an alternative. Jesus says when you feel like running away, do the opposite. Choose the foolishness of the kingdom rather than the logic of Cesar. The kingdom of God is like a treasure hidden in the place where we already live. Do we have eyes to see? Can we make it your own honestly and openly? For me, and maybe you, too, this sheltering in solitude is challenging my soul to slowly ripen. It is what I am starting to call my Wendell Berry retreat time – and brother Berry has just the poem to bring this all to a close in something he calls “How to Be a Poet.”
Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill—more of each than you have—inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity. Any readers who like your poems, doubt their judgment.Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensioned life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.
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