Sabbath Thought: The Blessing of Good Work to Do

    Connemara Mowers, County Mayo, Ireland ©A. Rutherford

                                      
In Ireland every time you go around a new bend in the road, there is something which takes your breath away.  And the people, too, seem to be filled with it, a sensitivity to wonder and delight.  Not so jaded as most Americans who are so intrenched in the material world, most of the Irish still seem able to connect in some deep way with the world around them, above their heads and under their feet, the same connection as the mower in Frost's poem from Thursday felt with his world and his work.

The day I took the photo above I was walking on a graveled path above these fields with a local artist who was guiding me to find some ancient Celtic ruins, a burial dolmen on a hill beyond the farmer's field.  As we walked along, we came upon these men scything their fields, working away in a scene of incredible beauty.

As we passed by close enough, my fellow artist raised her hand in greeting to them, and her voice sang out across the field in a lovely lilt, "God bless the work," which she explained to me was the traditional Irish greeting to those engaged in their daily chores.

I loved it, and I thought how wonderful to have someone pass by you who didn't even know you and sing out to you, "God bless the work!"  How affirming that would be!  How it would connect you to your fellow man, to your work, and to God . . .  how very real . . . and what a blessing to feel connected to God in the labor of your work week as well as in your Sabbath worship and rest.

The One

Green, blue, yellow, and red—

God is down in the swamps and marshes

Sensational as April and almost as incredible

the flowering of our catharsis.

A humble scene in a backward place

Where no one ever looked

The raving flowers looked up in the face

Of the One and the Endless, the Mind that has baulked

The profoundest of mortals. A primrose, a violet,

A violent wild iris—but mostly anonymous performers

Yet an important occasion as the Muse at her toilet

Prepared to inform the local farmers

That beautiful, beautiful, beautiful God

Was breathing his love by a cut-away bog.

-Patrick Kavanagh, Irish poet

There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God, for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment?  

                                                                                   -Ecclesiastes 2:24-25
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The Wisdom of Delight

      Click for larger image- ©A. Rutherford

Still reflecting on the "music of what happens," I read this sonnet below by Robert Frost last night, and I was struck by the fact that of all the poetry by Frost I've read in the course of all my study and teaching, I don't remember paying any attention to this one, if indeed I had  read it at some point in time.

Perhaps it's like certain verses or passages in the Bible that jump out at you at certain times in your life and you think, "Hmmm, I've never noticed that verse before." And yet you know, because of where it is in the book or chapter, you know your eyes must have seen it dozens of times, but your mind or your spirit or your heart never noticed it before. It didn't speak to you then because of where you were in your life or who you were . . . but now it says something that causes a response in you or answers a burning question of your "now," or comforts a sorrow you didn't have before— all of a sudden there it is.

I'm not sure why all of a sudden this poem spoke to me last night.  I'm not even really sure what it is saying to me now . . . it is so understated . . . as Frost often is.  He usually doesn't come right out and tell you what the message of a poem is to the extent he does in his poems "Wild Grapes" or "Birches."

But after reading the poem and reflecting on it this phrase popped in my head, so it must have something to do with the poem, or where the poem meets me—the “wisdom of delight.”

But now it's like a puzzle that I have to figure out, although I’m sure it’s connected with our talking about learning to become musicians of the everyday.

Mowing

There was never a sound beside the wood but one, 

And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground. 

What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself; 

Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun, 

Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound— 

And that was why it whispered and did not speak. 

It was no dream of the gift of idle hours, 

Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf: 

Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak 

To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows, 

Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers 

(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake. 

The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows. 

My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

As I wrote yesterday . . . “As musicians of the everyday, we would be more attentive to the ways of nature and of our own emotions.  We would bring a musician's or an artist's sensitivity to all issues of daily living.  We would always have a sense of the beautiful or the harmonic in everything we do.”

Is that why the mower seems to feel the rhythm of the scythe?

Is that why he notices (attends to) the flowers amongst the grasses even though they are "feeble-pointed" and don't stand out in the environment?  He even tells us that they are "pale orchises."  

He notes the snake, and he goes on to describe it (bright green) which seems to indicate a deeper visual awareness . . . 

He seems to delight both in his everyday work (the earnest love that laid the swale in rows) and in the environment.

. . . . Has the mower tuned his heart to the music of what happens? . . .

His scythe whispers . . .
not a "dream" (false promise) of the easy life ("idle hours")
or easy money ("gold") coming out of nowhere by magic ("fay or elf")

but it whispers the “truth” (line 9)

His conclusion seems to be “The fact (truth? reality?) is the sweetest dream that labor knows.”

But, says she scratching her head, exactly what is the “fact” that “is the sweetest dream that labor knows.”

Frost makes it seem like a secret or lesson that is important to know!

Yes, I think that's what I sense in the mower in Frost's poem . . . he is doing a very mundane task, repetitive and tiring, but he is so in tune, in the present moment, with the rhythm of what he is doing and where he is that the material world around him fades away, leaving him to see the minutiae of the environment . . .  flowers . . . the snake . . . and to delight in them and to hear the music of his scythe and the hum of the earth, even as he is laboring.

Come, Thou fount of every blessing, 

Tune my heart to sing Thy grace. 

Streams of mercy, never ceasing, 

Call for songs of loudest praise.

            -Robert Robinson

©A.Rutherford

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