Metanoia

George Herbert: Man

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Since then, my God, thou hast

So brave a Palace built; O dwell in it,

That it may dwell with thee at last!

Till then, afford us so much wit;

That, as the world serves us, we may serve thee,

And both thy servants be.

-- George Herbert from "Man" in George Herbert: The Complete English Works

Wendell Berry: I Tremble with Gratitude

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I tremble with gratitude 

for my children and their children

who take pleasure in one another.

At our dinners together, the dead

enter and pass among us

in living love and in memory.

And so the young are taught.

-- Wendell Berry in Leavings: Poems

Wendell Berry: Again I resume the long lesson...

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Again I resume the long

lesson: how small a thing

can be pleasing, how little

in this hard world it takes

to satisfy the mind

and bring it to its rest.

Within the ongoing havoc

the woods this morning is

almost unnaturally still.

Through stalled air, unshadowed

light, a few leaves fall

of their own weight.

The sky

is gray.  It begins in mist

almost at the ground

and rises forever.  The trees

rise in silence almost

natural, but not quite,

almost eternal, but

not quite.

What more did I

think I wanted?  Here is

what has always been.

Here is what will always

be.  Even in me,

the Maker of all this

returns in rest, even

to the slightest of His works,

a yellow leaf slowly 

falling, and is pleased.

-- Wendell Berry in Given: Poems

T.S. Eliot: There are three conditions which often look alike

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There are three conditions which often look alike

Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:

Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment

From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between

     them, indifference

Which resembles the others as death resembles life,

Being between two lives - unflowering, between

The live and the dead nettle.  This is the use of memory:

Of love beyond desire, and so liberation

From the future as well as the past.  Thus, love of a country

Begins as attachment to our own field of action

And comes to find that action of little importance

Though never indifferent.  History may be servitude,

History may be freedom.  See, now they vanish,

The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,

To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

       -- T.S. Eliot from Little Gidding in T.S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays

Wendell Berry: On Ducking Doctrines

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If I'm a theologian I am one to the extent I have learned to duck when the small, haughty doctrines fly overhead, dropping their loads of whitewash at random on the faces of those who look toward Heaven.  Look down, look down, and save your soul by honester dirt, that receives with a lordly indifference this off-fall of the air.  Christmas night and Easter morning are this soil's only laws. The depth and volume of the waters of baptism, the true taxonomy of sins, the field marks of those most surely saved, God's own only true interpretation of the Scripture:  these would be causes of eternal amusement, could we forget how we have hated one another, bloodying the world, by means of such questions, wrongly asked, never to be rightly answered, hour after hour, day after day; year after year - such is my belief - in Hell.

-- Wendell Berry in Leavings: Poems

George Herbert: Prayer

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Of what an easy quick access,

My blessed Lord, art thou! how suddenly

May our requests thine ear invade!

To show that state dislikes not easiness.

If I but lift mine eyes, my suit is made:

Thou canst no more not hear, than thou canst die.

-- George Herbert, "Prayer (2)" in George Herbert: The Complete English Works

Walter Brueggemann: Against a closed sky....

We pray against a closed sky;

our hopes reduced to auto-suggestion;

our petitions are more habit than hopes;

our intercessions are kindly gestures of well-being.

Sometimes more, many times not,

because your silence and absence,

your indifference and tardiness are glaring among us.

We are drawn to lesser gods,

easier loyalties,

many forms of self-trust,

that do not even fool us....

We pray for new measures of passion,

for fresh waves of resolve,

for courage, energy, and freedom, to be our true selves...

waiting in confidence,

and while waiting, acting our life toward you

 
  your ways of forgiving generosity.

We pray in the name of Jesus who trusted fully, and

who is himself fully worthy of our trust.  Amen

-- Walter Brueggemann, from "Against a Closed Sky" in Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth