I attended our church’s women’s retreat this weekend. It was a beautiful time: so many women I know– and many others I don’t– gathered to enjoy one another, to learn more about our God, to rest from the pull of our daily lives.
I remember going on youth group retreats when I was a teenager. I remember that I never wanted them to end. Somehow, the return to the everyday at the end of the weekend was not at all what I was wanting.
The everyday is often difficult. What does the worker gain from his toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on men. We wake daily to the demands of the day before– and new ones, too, assert themselves. Meanwhile, there are the persistent and quotidian that can weigh us down: once again, today, this morning, my eyes not really entirely awake, I had to make the lunches.
And then there are things like weekend retreats, or that vacation last month or even last summer: plots in time where we would set up camp and live forever. I’m guessing you know what I mean.
Through my kitchen window, I can see under the holly trees that border our yard and the neighbors’. Just under their lowest branches, I have a small view onto their yard– the yard that Will mowed the other day.
It’s not an easy lawn to mow. One side of it is a steep hill, and there is a large garden he must maneuver the mower around. Due to a broken mower, the yard had recently grown into a meadow, and I had been caught off guard when, mulling over the blackspot on my budding rosebushes, I spied the patches of ajuga blooming in that lawn. Tall purple spires in thick pools, and lavender-colored ones, too. The lower half of the hillside was broken here and there in sudden and surprising choruses of purple– all of them upright and looking modestly pleased, as was only appropriate.
I did not want him to mow that lawn– er, meadow. But there are ordinances against meadows where we live, and the quotidian, always, will assert itself.
Will mowed.
And yesterday I was washing the dishes (oh, the dailiness) when I glimpsed it under the hollies: the patch my son had left for me. It was there in the neighbors’ freshly mowed lawn: the oval pool of lavender spires, just where I could see them.
He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end. Ecclesiastes 3:10-11
Here is a poem I recently met. It changed me, which would seem to be one of the effects of a good poem, and I’m glad.
Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;
Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down in so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks
From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”
Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.”
-Richard Wilbur
