The following comes from a journal entry I wrote at the end of the sabbatical and I want to share with you.
I start with a poem by Wendell Berry. I have not been a person to quote poetry but in this case it seems to fit. I like Berry’s poetry. Berry has written essays on culture and novels but at the center of his work are his poems. A farmer through and through, his is a kind of rural expression unique to America. It is not simple or quaint in the slightest, though. Living near family, animals and the land it is a rigorous and often tough stance. I like the intensity of his work.
The Wild Geese
Horseback on Sunday morning,
Harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer’s end. In time’s maze
over the fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed’s marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.
Several themes touch with my life: ”Sunday morning, harvest over, summer’s end”. The sabbatical has been everything I had hoped and so much more. Opportunity to “taste and see” that God is good. For the past week as my sabbatical was winding down I have experienced the wonder of ending. It felt a little like the last week of summer vacation when I was in school: I know I’ll miss the freedom, but it will be good to be back. I’ll get to see the congregation again, sit at my familiar desk, look around to see what has changed and what has stayed the same. Certainly one thing that has changed is my outlook. I feel rested, renewed, and ready. I am ready to return, I think. I have missed the people at church. Even so, I experienced the grief at ending the sabbatical. I loved writing and know that will suffer in the return. I loved the freedom I had to choose how I will spend each day. It has been fabulous, without a doubt. I am running the gamut of emotions from grief to anticipation. I go back different than the Pastor I was three months ago and congregation that has changed as well.
And so, as I have come off of sabbatical, as I have returned and unpacked books I also come unpacking my new energy, ideas and resolve.
I also return embracing the other theme of Berry’s poem:
“What we need is here.” It is hard for us to believe this is really true. And yet the word of St Paul came to mind when he writes, ‘For in him we live and move and have our being’ he is not handing us a notional theological abstraction. He is saying that we live in a God drenched universe. He is agreeing with the Psalmist when he says, “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” A few hundred years later St Augustine put it this way: “God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.” A few hundred years after Augustine, Pascal wrote, “God is that reality whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”
If all this is true, if God’s loving presence suffuses the whole of creation then I can trust God and not be worried. Everything we need is already here. On a personal note “everything I need in returning to Bemidji Evangelical Covenant is already here”.
On this sabbatical I renewed my commitment to be a “contemplative”. The best definition of a contemplative comes from a book I read on sabbatical by Ian Crone and I take the liberty to adapt to my experiences on this sabbatical: A contemplative is someone who is being graced with a new perceptive appreciation, a capacity to see God in all things. They are arrested by God’s presence in the wind moving through trees in Bemidji, his majesty in the sight of a blue Jay perched in a tree in Grand Rapids Mn, by his glory in Mozart’s Coronation Mass or Hydn’s Creation Requiem heard in Salzburg, Austria.
The contemplative has a growing capacity to recognize the Vestigia Dei—the footprints of God everywhere she looks whether the Mediterranean Sea in Positano or the hillsides of vineyards in Umbria Italy. The contemplative sits at the “sacro desco” with friends and strangers in Lecce Italy and understands the welcome and hospitality of God. A contemplative gazes at an artists painting and sculptures and sees the scriptures come to life. As a result of receiving these new eyes the contemplative moves through life radically amazed, full of awe, graced with a rich awareness that all of life, as poet Elizabeth Barrett Brown wrote, is “crammed with God.” In short they are living lives full of wonder.”
The challenge will be to see it. It is the gap between what we see and what is available to be seen that will be the challenge as I return. Thank you for your prayers while on sabbatical and as I return to ministry.
Pastor Dean
