Practice Resurrection 

A good friend of mine posted a favorite poem of his on Facebook. It is also a favorite of mine: Wendell Berry’s, Practice Resurrection.

Here, I may have given a wrong impression. While this poem often stands on its own it actually is the ending of a larger piece: Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.

Practice resurrection. What does that look like? For me it means doing the things that breathe life into duty, bring cheer into disarray, give meaning to my own life, and to another’s. Reaching out to another person, offering hope to those grown hopeless, bringing food to those who hunger. And, sometimes, we are the people in need of an encouraging word.

I celebrate Berry’s work for offering us the term of practice resurrection. It reminds me that, like many worthy efforts in life, we are given the very shareable gift of resurrection.

Enjoy the words:

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

I hear God in the call to: 

Ask the questions that have no answers.

Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same …

At age nine (or thereabouts) I met Rudyard Kipling as I flipped through pages of “The Best Loved Poems of the American People.”

It was a book I frequented, guaranteed to be full of laughter and tears, poetry to meet you in whatever condition you arrive. It’s been on my mind lately, so this morning I ordered a used copy from Abe’s Books.

In Kipling’s poem “If” his words stretch across a lifetime of encounters and challenges of one human being, presumably a son.

My basic takeaway is, “If this can happen and that can happen, and you’re still standing, you have succeeded at life’s journey.”

The example atop this blog has stuck with me over seventy decades. In it he talks about two imposters—triumph and disaster. The advice is to treat them the same. Imposters? They can seem very real at the time. Gloriously real and painfully real.

Yet they both offer an opportunity to see ourselves for what we are. Bold, sweet, fleeting, flitting through our lives, and eventually out again.

They are incidents in a day, a month, a year. They are parts of the whole, but they are not the whole.

In us, if we are paying attention, these incidents can lead to wholeness. Paying attention is crucial.

Here’s a link to the full poem: https://poets.org/poem/if