What We Need is Here

On Sunday mornings at our church, our adult education class is currently engaged in conversations that are growing out of our reading of the book Longing For Enough in a Culture of More. This end-of-year time, with the seasons of Thanksgiving, Advent and Christmas upon us, seemed a perfect time to consider all that is good in our lives. The reading and our conversations are helping us - or at least helping me - to differentiate between wants and needs.

The downturn in the economy and the ways in which it is impacting us lurks just below the surface of our conversations. So much of our lives, so much of our activity, flurries around what we've acquired. The acquisition of stuff is just part of being American (weren't we told by our president to support our country by going shopping?). The idea of being content with what we've already got is not a message that we often hear.

And here we are, a week before Thanksgiving, an entirely American holiday, worried about jobs, balancing budgets and making ends meet. Getting centered in our souls will not pay the bills, but it may help us to take stock of what we do have and help us to find contentment, not in more, but in enough.

The book we are reading makes reference to a poem by Wendell Berry entitled "The Wild Geese." I hope you enjoy it. And Happy Thanksgiving.

Horseback on Sunday morning,
harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer's end. In time's maze
over fall fields, we name names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed's marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.