Module Six: Waiting

Giving the participant a chance to learn about the value of waiting.

The Mystic Way of Evangelism, chapter 6, "Redeeming the Earth"

After you have completed the above, choose one of the the following:

  • Wendell Berry and Mill Moyers “The Right Thing To Do” from Farm to Table Talk
    From Farm to Table Talk Website:

    Wendell Berry says, “We don’t have the right to ask whether we are going to succeed or not; the only question we have the right to ask is what’s the right thing to do? What does this Earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?” Ideas and beliefs like these in over 40 books, essays, poems and other expressions have established Wendall Berry as a legendary advocate for farmers, land-conserving communities and healthy regional economies. No one articulates the problems with industrialization of all types better than Wendell Berry.

  • "The Cold" from Wendell Berry: New Collected Poems, pg 65

  • Fred Bahnson, Soil and Sacrament, excerpt:
    On garden workdays, pay attention to the people who when you ask them to do a job will do it either halfheartedly or half-assed or not at all, those who wander among the cabbage beds muttering to themselves, those who are so fat they can't bend over to tie their own shoes much less weed a bed of Jericho lettuce, the ones who when you hand them a pen with the New Members form to fill out will pause, an embarrassed smile shadowing their face, and hand the form back to you saying could you just do it for me. Find these people, the meek and lowly and poor in spirit. Love them. They are your garden's prize crop.

    For theirs in the kingdom of heaven.

    With them did the Son of Man go eating and drinking.

    It is they who will inherit the earth.

    Fred Bahnson, Soil and Sacrament, pg 254-255

The seed carries the plant within it, but they who eat their seed will never reap the harvest.

A seed must be planted.

And a seed must grow.

And a seed must bear fruit.

And the fruit must ripen.

There is a rhythm to life. A beat. An alternation between action and rest.

In the biblical story of Creation there is a beautiful rhythm that establishes the universe.

Darkness, light, action, rest, calling, naming.

“I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light." Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark, p 5.

How do we as people pursuing a spiritual life discount the liminal space of darkness?