For years I have been negotiating the tension that I both yearn for sabbath and I am very bad at it. Inspired by Wendell Berry, I have found writing poetry to be just about the most helpful thing I can do to slow down and quieten my anxious, frantic and driven mind, and enter into sabbath rest.
29th May 2021
After a week when I have slipped again Into the tempting lure of frantic activity With an aching back and caffeine-spiked mind With malnourished soul and adolescent anger I confess again my frailty and my need For the disarming notes of grace To interrupt the churning din Of tasks and toil, of seizing and achieving To prize me away from the self-inflicted pressure That hungers to perform and impress To bid my soul ‘be still’ and my ego ‘be done’ To remind me with gentle whispers That I am not the sum of what I achieve Nor the aggregate of strangers’ opinions I am not what I can earn by strife Nor the polished image I can ably parade Only in stopping long enough In the slow, elusive embrace of solitude Are those imposters unmasked To reveal the truth That I am only what is given to me And I can lay down my tools Unclench my fists, breathe deep and rest Because what is given is always enough
19th December 2020
No sooner could I cross an ocean my walking than enter into sabbath rest by strength or skill. Instead, I must accept my need and enter the grace that prizes me from the six days’ world to dispossess me of my possessiveness This narrow gate requires me to lay down the hopes and fears, the plans and projects, the wounds and weapons, so carefully curated. I fear what will remain. Such is the reach of my un-sabbathed regime that I am a stranger to uncluttered alertness, to the sacred ease of time and place simply given As I watch the whirling arcs of two doves at play over the neighbours’ rooftops I find myself longing to inhabit that space and that spirit, neither fretting over yesterday nor scheming over tomorrow, but settled and grounded, peaceful in the familiar sufficiency of Love inspired by Wendell Berry’s Sabbath Poem, 1985, V
10th October 2020 My mind is bombarded with worry of viruses and politics of uncertain futures and unmade plans of hurt I may have caused and wounds I have received Or else my mind is absent distracted by trivia or fantasy held in numbing captivity by the calculated doses of industrial entertainment I yearn for the promise of sabbath but could it be that the yearning only tightens the worry? Sometimes the promise seems cruelly elusive always out of reach unable to live up to the veneration which I wishfully bestow upon it But the problem is mine I still believe that I can market sabbath rest to myself I still mistake gluttony for delight I still try to manufacture joy all the while distracting myself from the simple act of receiving what I cannot earn or consume or make Slowly I am learning that if I am to enter sabbath rest I must come as a novice not a master My lack is not of skill or effort or knowledge but of humility and grace May sabbath be the unmaking of all in me that is fractured fraught and frantic and my remaking in gentle ease childlike simplicity and whole and holy love
Notes From the Potting Shed 