A Planting of the Lord: Oaks Of Righteousness

Posted by Jeff Crawford on November 5, 2014 in

11/2/14
Chris Breslin
Isaiah 61:3b-4

Testimony by Abby Wilson

“I don’t think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is…a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther out of doors the better.” –Wendell Berry

“Righteousness denotes not so much the abstract idea of justice or virtue, as right standing and consequent right behaviour, within a community.” –N.T. Wright

“[Righteousness] denotes a healthy relationality among creatures, between creature and Creator.” –Ellen Davis

“Stability is a commitment to trust God not in an ideal world, but in the battered and bruised world we know. If real life with God can happen anywhere at all, then it can happen here among the people whose troubles are already evident to us.” –Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

“Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.

Say that your main crop is the forest

that you did not plant,

that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested

when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus

that will build under the trees

every thousand years.” –Wendell Berry

“Every beauty also suffers.” He is an artist that in his craft, the Japanese art of Nihonga, uses ground precious metals and pigments…“Beauty is in the brokenness, not in what we can conceive as perfections, not in the “finished” images but in the incomplete gestures…through the beauty of broken limitations.” –Makoto Fujimura

“We grow to resemble what we love.” –St. Bernard of Clerveaux

“I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the sweet earth’s flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,