Hello, fellow pilgrims. Here we are closing out our third week of Lent and entering into our fourth week. This fourth Sunday of Lent is one of two Sundays known as “Refreshment Sundays”. One occurs during Advent and is known as Gaudete Sunday, and the other occurs during Lent and is known as Laetare Sunday. Both occur midway through each season and offer us, through the Grace of God, temporary relief from the heaviness of the season. During Advent, it is relief from the intensity of preparation for Christ’s birth as we recall the challenges that Joseph, Mary, and the Jewish people experienced during that time. During Lent, it is relief from the heaviness of penitence and the preparation for Christ’s death and resurrection. Both are symbolized by the color pink, rose pink to be precise, representing a softening of the season. Laetare, the Lenten day of refreshment, means “REJOICE!” This Sunday’s day of refreshment is intended for us to rejoice and be glad in the abundant gifts of Creation, especially in the midst of the challenges of our lives. To refresh ourselves. It is an invitation into Sabbath rest.
Laetare Sunday is a wonderful opportunity for us to lean into this year’s Lenten Practice of exploring Wendell Berry’s Sabbath poetry and the beauty of Creation all around us. One of the poems that our Devotional explores this week is Wendell Berry’s Poem I, 1987, Coming to the wood’s edge. In the spirit of the poem, I invite you to read this poem and consider all of the distractions in your life that don’t serve you well. Rather than being distracted by the barren branches of a ragged half-dead plum tree in bloom, perhaps focus on the sweet scent of its blooms, the softness of its petals, the beauty of its embrace of hope at the wood’s edge. Where do you notice half dead branches in your life? Where do you notice hope abloom?
I invite you to seek a green space, a park or a woodland this week. As you approach its edge consider where you might be standing half broken at the edge of something difficult in your life? Consider the struggle (and the HOPE) of the half dead plum tree in bloom. Where might you notice a glimpse of beauty in your own struggle? Where might you sense the sweetness of hope? Allow the sweetness and beauty to distract you from despair. Allow them to quiet your mind and your heart as they bid you welcome into Sabbath. Then step beyond the edge and into that green space knowing that God so loves the world—and that Love includes YOU!
You are Beautiful and you are Beloved.
Here is the poem.
Angela+
I, 1987 by Wendell Berry Coming to the woods’ edge on my Sunday morning walk, I stand, resting a moment, beside a ragged half-dead wild plum in bloom, its perfume a moment enclosing me, and standing side by side with the old broken blooming tree, I almost understand, I almost recognize as a friend the great impertinence of beauty that comes even to the dying, even to the fallen, without reason sweetening the air. I walk on, distracted by the letter accusing me of distraction, which distracts me only from the hundred things that would otherwise distract me from this whiteness, lightness, sweetness in the air. The mind is broken by the thousand calling voices it is always too late to answer, and that is why it yearns for some hard task, lifelong, longer than life, to concentrate it and to make it whole. But where is the all-welcoming, all-consecrating Sabbath that would do the same? Where is that quietness of the heart and the eye’s clarity that would be a friend’s reply to the white-blossoming plum tree?