Saturday, December 6th in the season of Advent

As we end our meditations on living with intentionality, we look forward to the incarnation of Jesus.  Wendell Berry, a contemporary writer and farmer, brings us by poetry into a space where all the purposeful moments in our lives seem worth it.  For him as a farmer, endings and beginnings are ends of the same rope, tying back into each other.   In the same way, may our waiting produce in us a birth and a death this Advent season: the death of our rhythm-less selves and the birth of a true expectation for the history and future of love.

A Sabbath Poem by Wendell Berry

finally will it not be enough,
after much living, after
much love, after much dying
of those you have loved,
to sit on the porch near sundown
with your eyes simply open,
watching the wind shape the clouds
into the shapes of clouds?

Even then you will remember
the history of love, shaped
in the shapes of flesh, everchanging
as the clouds that pass, the blessed
yearning of body for body,
unending light.
you will remember, watching
the clouds, the future of love.