“Summer Blessings: Rest”
Genesis 1:31 – 2:3
Exodus 20:8-11
“The Summer Day,” by Mary Oliver
Many years ago now, I’m guessing around 1991, I lived in a Washington, D.C. neighborhood called Mount Pleasant. When the weather was nice, I would open the windows of my first-floor apartment and, depending on the direction of the wind and the time of day, I might hear a roar—not from a crowd or traffic noise, but from the lions that lived at the National Zoo.
The back entrance to Zoo was just a short walk from my apartment, and sometimes I would visit the animals while cutting through the zoo on my way to the Cleveland Park neighborhood.
Cleveland Park was many things but, best of all of them in my mind was the Uptown Theater, a legendary Art Deco-style movie house. The Uptown had one huge screen, a balcony, and an impressive history: “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Jesus Christ Superstar” had their world premieres there, and the Uptown was one of just 32 movie houses across the country that screened “Star Wars” on its opening day.
I don’t remember what movie I had gone to see or where my friends were or what else was happening on what turned out to be an unexpectedly significant day in my life—only that I arrived early to the movie theater and went into the bookstore next door to kill some time.
I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but the title of a poetry book caught my attention: Dream Work, it was called. I was unfamiliar with the author, a Mary Oliver, but when I read a few of her poems, I felt something shift in my heart. By the time I left the bookstore for the movie theater I was the awed owner of two of her books, Dream Work and American Primitive, for which she had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983.
Some 35 years later, both the Uptown Theater and the Calliope Bookstore have closed. Mary Oliver is gone, too—taken by cancer in 2019 on a day I remember well because, after hearing the news, when I was driving to be with Ken Langley in the Baystate Hospital emergency department, a flock of wild geese flew directly over my car. It felt like a visitation.
All these years since that day in the bookstore, the poetic spirituality of Mary Oliver has been a touchstone in my life. Hers is a spirituality of attention, wonder, contemplation, gratitude, the natural world, dogs, and devotion, and it speaks deeply to my spirit.
I am deeply grateful that in 2009, when Mary Oliver did a reading to a packed house at Smith College, I was able to thank her personally for her poetry’s impact on my life.
So when I saw that the SALT Project had created a summer devotional drawing on Mary Oliver’s poetry, my first thought was, “Why didn’t I think of that?” And my second, not far behind, was, “How can I share something like this with First Church Amherst?”
So here we are: On the first of four consecutive Sundays when we’ll pair Oliver’s poetry with scripture to consider four delightful blessings and callings of summertime: rest, trust, play, and singing.
Now, you don’t have to like poetry to appreciate the work of Mary Oliver. And you don’t have to really know your Bible to appreciate the connection between her poetry and all that is holy: Both collections of words invite us to notice and enjoy all that we’ve been given. Both bodies of divine spirit and human work call us to awe, wonder, and life-giving connection.
We begin this morning with the blessing of rest, which is not so much the idea of relaxing or chilling out, not only the gift of blessed idleness, but an invitation—and a command!—to regularly put aside our focus on doing and producing so that we might just be.
Thomas Keating, the late Catholic priest often called the father of contemplative prayer, taught that God gave us two great gifts: those of being and doing. For most of us, doing comes either naturally or from necessity, whereas we must cultivate and practice the gift of being.
The Bible’s first account of creation gives us some sense of what that looks like. After six days of creating light and darkness, land and sea, moon and sun and stars, swimming creatures and flying creatures and roaming-on-land creatures, and humans in the divine image—and noticing that each and every thing was good and very good—on the seventh day, God rested.
God sat back, as it were, looked over all that they had made, and enjoyed it. God rested in the goodness of all God had made.
In that sense, rest is closely tied to the enjoyment of what we’ve been given. Rest, or just being, opens the door to gratitude and delight and joy—all things that God wants for us, all things that make our lives so much richer and make living in this beautiful but broken world so much more possible.
Yes, life is filled with big, pressing, existential questions. Yes, life and all that’s happening in the world can be so overwhelming that we feel torn between panic and despair, between working all the time to fix things and putting our head in the sand.
So many questions and so much need, so much injustice and so much pain, so much to enjoy and so many things on our to-do list, so many people to love and care for and not enough time or energy.
Or so it’s easy to believe.
But in “The Summer Day,” Mary Oliver takes a different approach to living and loving.
Sure, she starts with the big questions: “Who made the world?” What do I believe? What am I supposed to be doing with my life?
But then she notices what’s right in front of her—a grasshopper—and gives herself over to the moment. She rests in what she’s been given—and simply enjoys it. She connects with the beautiful reality of another creature—and finds herself ushered into the realm of the sacred simply by being present to this world, simply by being, simply by resting in what is.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is, she writes.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
It is a trick question—what do you plan to do?—(a beautiful and poetic question, but a trick question nonetheless) because the program she has laid out is not about doing; it is about being. It is about noticing, delighting, and resting in the natural world, the original and ongoing divine revelation.
In a brief section of a long poem she wrote much later, called “Sometimes,” Oliver boiled it down:
Instructions for living a life, she wrote:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.Which is to say:
Rest in God’s goodness.
Rest in the gift of what is.
Let yourself be blessed.
Let yourself be loved.
The questions and the crises, the outrages and the injustices, the needs and the demands will still be there. They will always be there.
But for now, just rest. Just be. Rest in the gift, so that,
after letting yourself be filled with love and light, you might better know yourself to be blessed and, in that knowledge and with that sense of belovedness, you might be better able to love and heal the world.
