Sabbath poetry for Lent
This Lent, we will be using SALT Project's devotional materials from Wendell Berry and the Sabbath Poetry of Lent. In this Lenten devotional, biblical texts walk hand-in-hand with Berry's Sabbath vision of the natural world, and together they suggest simple, accessible practices you can try yourself, with your family or friends, or with the congregation.
At its heart, sabbath keeping is an ancient technology of health, dignity, and joy. The idea is to enter God's symphonic rhythm. The sabbath is a day for delight, for participating in God's ongoing oy in creation. If we refrain from certain activities during the sabbath, we do so precisely in order to make room for this enjoyment. Sabbath keeping is for rest and for restoration, for experiencing and cultivating the deep, abiding goodness of God and the world God has made. And so you are invited to join in, to spend the forty days of Lent strengthening our sabbath keeping - with both scripture and Wendell Berry's sabbath poems as our guides - as a way to prepare for the joy and light of Easter morning.
Wendell Berry is an American novelist, poet, essayist, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer. Closely identified with rural Kentucky, Berry developed many of his agrarian themes in the early essays of The Gift of Good Land. Berry has published more than eighty books of poetry, fiction, essays, and criticism, but he's perhaps best known for “The Unsettling of America,” a book-length polemic, from 1977, which argues that responsible, small-scale agriculture is essential to the preservation of the land and the culture. Berry’s Sabbath Poems are filled with spiritual longing and political extremity, memorials and celebrations, elegies and lyrics, alongside the occasional rants of the Mad Farmer. On July 4, 1965, Berry, his wife, and his two children moved to Lane's Landing, a 12-acre farm that he had purchased, and began growing corn and small grains on what eventually became a homestead of about 117 acres. His writing is grounded in the notion that one's work ought to be rooted in and responsive to one's place.
