“Where we live without counting / where we have forgotten time / and have forgotten ourselves where eternity has seized us / we are entirely present / entirely trusting, eternal.”
–Wendell Berry, Sabbath Poems, 2007.IV
So muses Wendell Berry, the philosopher-farmer-prophet, whose words present a potent elixir to our restless, fragmented souls. From 1979 to 2012, Berry would walk his Kentucky farmstead alone on the Sabbath day with nothing but pad and pencil in hand. This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems is a transcript of Berry’s strolls.
His fourth poem in 2007 concerns the consciousness of time: a disease which left unchecked, he writes, “dooms us to the past.” To concern oneself with time, which we moderns have clearly mastered, is to forfeit any chance of real, authentic presence.
We know this all too well, especially those of us with packed-to-bursting schedules: the more we attune our consciousness to time, the more, it seems, time eludes us. We are left with no place to live, constantly remembering but never residing.
We focus on tasks to be accomplished and the measurable slivers of time available for use. All the while, we float through our days constantly looking back, back, back– remembering but never truly residing.
The word abide has really pollinated our church in recent years (cf. John 15:1-17). What does it mean to abide in God? And what does it mean to abide with others? Wendell Berry, I believe, can help with both.
To abide somewhere or in the presence of someone is to exercise a kind of forgetful presence. In the words of Berry, it is to “live without counting,” to forget one’s own self, to be “seized by eternity’s” grasp. Likewise, to truly abide with others is to let go of the measuring rod of consciousness, to quit quantifying and calculating, and to be, just be.
To abide with one’s children is to forget time, task, and tally. It is to lower the mirror of awareness, to slam shut –you could say– the mind’s-eye, and to lose oneself blissfully in their presence, if it is but for a moment.
Such moments though, I would argue, feel nothing like moments at all. There is no measurable quantity to them. Such moments are states of existence in which eternity itself has seized us, letting us live, finally –maybe for the very first time, exactly where we are.
As you consider, today, how to abide in God and with others, I urge you to practice forgetful presence, a mode of creaturely existence in which you are “entirely present, entirely trusting... eternal.”
Jonah Bissell
Associate Pastor