Invitation to Rest
“The Summer Day” is one of Mary Oliver’s more beloved poems. The line that often makes it into sermons comes at the end: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
But I’m not thinking about my plan for life. Not this week, anyway. I’m in the middle of a couple of weeks of vacation. I’m focusing on a different line: “Tell me, what else should I have done?”
“Should” is a powerful word. It can motivate us to fulfill our duty or make us feel guilty when we’ve failed to do what is expected of us. Years ago, a friend in New Hampshire said something I’ve never forgotten: “I’m so tired of living by ‘oughts’ and ‘shoulds.’”
In her poem, Oliver uses the word “should” mischievously. She feels no duty or guilt. Instead, she wonders about those who claim being “idle” and taking a “stroll through the fields” is an activity without purpose. That she should be more productive. Not only is being idle a worthy action, Oliver tells us, but it is also a kind of prayer. For me, the poem is a call to sabbath. Oliver invites us to understand rest and recreation as acts of prayer and faithfulness.
Here is the full poem:
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean -
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down -
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
(From New and Selected Poems, Beacon Press, 1992)
Whether your sabbath rest comes this summer or in some other season of the year, I pray you will make time to be idle, to stroll through the fields or on the beach or in your neighborhood. Let go of the ‘oughts’ and ‘shoulds’ for a day or a week or even an hour. Accept God’s invitation to rest.
