Here is the last in my little round of seven Roundels for the primal week in Genesis Chapter One. Today we enter the Sabbath, the blessed rest in which God contemplates his own creation with delight and love and pronounces it good, a sabbath which he also graciously invites us to share with him. Sabbath is always a sheer gift whenever and wherever we keep it, a gift more and more need in our pressurised 24/7 world. So here is my roundel celebrating that blessing and rest. as before it is preceded by the verses in Genesis ( in this case chapter 2 verses 1-3) that inspired it and, as before, you can hear it by clicking on the ‘play’ button or the Roman Numeral. If you have enjoyed these poems and want to use them for a church or prayer group please feel free to do so. Feel free to reproduce them in a bulletin etc. but if you do so could you add that they will be published next year in my forthcoming book of poetry: Parable and Paradox, published by Canterbury Press. Tomorrow I will publish the whole sequence as a single post which may be more convenient for those who want to use them in services etc.
Chapter 2:
1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.
2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.
3 And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made.
VII
Blessing and rest, delight in everything
Sustained by your strong love and richly blest,
This is the the gift you give, the day you bring
Blessing and rest.
This is indeed the ‘gladness of the best’,
From first lines in the east where linnets sing,
To where the last light lingers in the west,
You lift the cares to which I used to cling,
As you yourself descend to be my guest
And show me how to find in everything
Blessing and rest.
Last one, and very apposite!!!
I hope you are OK. We still have two days to do, my brain feels like it is going to explode! We’re doing as much this week as we did together in that whole year! I’m still enjoying it, but there’s not enough time to commit stuff to memory, so I need to find a way to keep up with it after I go home. It hasn’t helped that I haven’t slept well most of the week.
I’m going to go home on Sunday so that I can go and see Richard and Kelly, otherwise there won’t be time until after we get back from Austria. But I’ll still do the trip to Ely with Diana later in the week.
Keep resting!!!!
love Brenda
Brenda Wallace
Priest in Charge of Rettendon and Hullbridge
93 Ferry Road
Hullbridge Essex SS5 6EL
01702 233354 07853 088907
The work He viewed
Was wholly blest
And “very good”
So He could rest.