This is the eighth in a series of Lenten devotionals put together by Mother Leslie for this season of Lent, 2025. We hope this proves to be uplifting to you through your Lenten journey.
Day 8: Wednesday after the 1st Sunday in Lent
Poem: Poem: Sabbath Poem: Amish Economy
We live by mercy if we live.
To that we have no fit reply
But working well and giving thanks
Loving God, loving one another,
To keep Creation's neighborhood.
And my friend David Kline told me,
"It falls strangely on Amish ears,
This talk of how you find yourself.
We Amish, after all, don't try
To find ourselves. We try to lose
Ourselves"-- and thus are lost within
The found world of sunlight and rain
Where fields are green and then are ripe,
And the people eat together by
The charity of God, who is kind
Even to those who give no thanks.
In morning light, men in dark clothes
Go out among the beasts and fields.
Lest the community be lost,
Each day they must work out the bond
Between goods and their price: the garden
Weeded by sweat is flowerbright;
The wheat shocked in shorn field, clover
Is growing where wheat grew; the crib
Is golden with gathered corn,
While in the world of the found selves,
Lost to the sunlit, rainy world,
The motor-driven cannot stop.
This is the world where value is
Abstract, and preys on things, and things
Are changed to thoughts that have a price.
Cost + greed - fear = price:
Maury Tulleen thus laid it out.
The need to balance greed and fear
Affords no stopping place, no rest,
And need increases as we fail.
But now, in summer dusk, a man
Whose hair and beard curl like spring ferns
Sits under the yard trees, at rest,
His smallest daughter on his lap.
This is because he rose at dawn,
Cared for his own, helped his neighbors,
Worked much, spent little, kept his peace.
--------- Wendell Berry (1934- ), American farmer, poet, essayist, agrarian, 1995, from This Day: New and Collected Sabbath Poems 1979-2013, 2013
Proverb:
To the present hour we are hungry and thirsty, we are poorly clothed and beaten and homeless, and we grow weary from the work of our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we speak kindly.
---------1 Corinthians 4:11-13a
Painting: Short Hoe, Consuela Soto, 2017 (a migrant worker in Bellingham Washington)
Prayer: Remembering Others
O God, when I have food,
help me to remember the hungry;
When I have work,
help me to remember the jobless;
When I have a home,
help me to remember those who have no home at all;
When I am without pain,
help me to remember those who suffer,
And remembering,
help me to destroy my complacency;
bestir my compassion,
and be concerned enough to help;
By word and deed,
those who cry out for what we take for granted.
----------- The Rev. Samuel F. Pugh (1904-2007), Disciples of Christ minister, author, and poet