From “Be Still in Haste,” by Wendell Berry
How quietly I
begin again
***
Quiet. Beginning.
It’s funny how those two go together, and how often they’re juxtaposed in this season.
“Away in a manger.” “Silent night” (in which “the wondrous gift is given”).
Sabbath is a form of resistance, says Walter Brueggemann: the royal imagination, the status quo, is always acquisitive, pressed for time, scarce of resources. The more it hastens, the more it chafes to go faster; the more it acquires, the more it wants.
Beginnings aren’t loud, and they don’t come with the next acquisition. Not the important ones.
Stop. Look. Listen. What’s being born, quietly, not in haste, out of the spotlight, that could change everything?
Where might we begin again?
Colin Steele 