CREATION NEVER STOPPED

I did an earlier opinion entry about the state of public, media reported Christianity in America. I hold to that opinion but what the media reports isn't the whole story. I love the essays of Wendell Berry but the farmer who writes essays on the land and how we misuse it also writes poetry about the land and our relation to the land and to creation. One of his favorite subjects is the Sabbath. This is an excerpt from his collection This Day. A collection that spans years from the late seventies to the new millennium.

"But I am a bad weather churchgoer. When the weather is good, sometimes when it is only tolerable, I am drawn to the woods on the local hillsides or along the streams. The woodlands here are not 'the forest primeval' or 'wilderness areas.' Nearly all are reforested old tobacco patches abandoned a lifetime or more ago, where you can still see the marks of cropland erosion now mostly healed or healing, 

In such places, on the best of these sabbath days, I experience a lovely freedom from expectations; other people's and also my own. I go free from the tasks and intentions of my workdays, so my mind becomes hospitable to unintended thoughts, to what I am very willing to call inspiration. The poems come incidentally or they do not come at all. If the Muse leaves me alone, I leave her alone. To be quiet, even wordless, in a good place is a better gift than poetry.

On these days and other days also, the idea of the sabbath has been on my mind. It is as rich and demanding an idea as any I know. The sabbath is the day, and the successive days honoring the day, when God rested after finishing the work of creation. This work was not finished, I think, in the sense of once and for all. It was finished by being given the power to exist and to continue, even to repair itself as it is now doing on the reforested hillsides of my home country.

We are to rest on the sabbath also, I have supposed,, in order to understand that the providence or the productivity of the living world, the most essential work, continues while we rest. This work is entirely independent of our work, and is far more complex and wonderful that any work we have ever done or will ever do. It is more complex and wonderful than we will ever understand. 

From the biblical point of view, the earth and our earthly livelihood are conditional gifts. We may possess the land given to us, that we are given to, only by remembering our intimate kinship with it. The condition of the people is indistinguishable ultimately from the condition of the land. Work that destroys the land, diminishing its ability to support life, is a great evil for which sooner or later the punishment is homelessness, hunger, and thirst. For some, the context of this thinking has switched from religion to science, but the understanding of the land as a conditional gift has not changed."

More later.