This week, I will be working with a text in Scripture that deals with the concept of rest, work, healing and the Sabbath (Mark 2:23 – 3:6). I am still mulling the various threads of the reading over in my mind, but I walk away from my first impressions of the text with a core conviction that we, as human beings, know little to nothing of rest. As a result, we know neither healing nor the holiness of the sabbath, the true Sabbath intended by God in which we and the world rest in the contentment that we simply are, and that it is good. What would our lives be if we were to rest content, even for a day, in the knowledge that we have been given being? Form? That we contain within ourselves the very breath of life?
I will continue to ponder such things, but I leave you with the work of one who hints at what this looks like:
The Peace of Wild Things
WENDELL BERRY
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Samuel Weddington 