Lenten Day 6: Giving up Despair - Operation Beauty

When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be -- I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry in front of his solar panels

Several years ago I enjoyed the reading-side of a college poetry club’s clandestine spread of beauty when I visited my daughter’s college. The students had taped up poems on the inside of bathroom doors across the campus. We all know the premium focus of bathroom reading, right?! I still remember the poem by Shelley I read in that stall about clouds.

For Lent today, I will release despair and share beauty by printing out Wendell Berry’s poem above. I will find a suitable stall to bless some lucky readers’ eyes and heart and tape up this poem.

Who knows…maybe the peace of the readers will increase, their energy renew, and they will add some visible and invisible good to the world. I hope also to contact a political representative about care for our world, precious gift it is to each of us. Let this come to pass, Amen.