Idle and Blessed

The Sycamore by Wendell Berry In the place that is my own place, whose earth I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing, a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself. Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it, hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it. There is no year it has flourished in that has not harmed it. There is a hollow in it that is its death, though its living brims whitely at the lip of the darkness and flows outward. Over all its scars has come the seamless white of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection  in the warp and bending of its long growth. It has gathered all accidents into its purpose. It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate. It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable. In all the country there is no other like it. I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling the same as itself, and grea...

Lent. Fasting. Remembrance of hard times. Acknowledgement of weakness. A sitting with pain.  Attentiveness to mortality, echoing: “You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Lent reminds us even God was tested, starving in the desert, like our father Moses and his fearful people. And so we expect this dark season of testing, in our yearly calendar but also in our lives. We expect and acknowledge the darkness. Jesus’ excruciating isolation in the desert, like the Israelites’ before him, had the paradoxical effect of fortifying his spirit against the things that would destroy it. If we pay attention, we may learn that times of testing – fasting – darkness – isolation –  strengthen our spirits for the journey ahead. The paradox of fasting. The paradox of Lent. A paradox of our faith. During Lent, we do not temporarily abstain from evil, but renew our commitment to wholly reject it. We do not put aside...