Gurgling and Rest

This last week, during a time of offering and prayer, a woman in our church (thank you, Lorine and Audrey Chang!) unearthed a 17th-century artifact of words, blew off the dust, burnished it with a chamois cloth, and let us peer into at a long-lost idea worth more than $2,440 an ounce. It was George Herbert’s “The Pulley.” Gently restored and replicated in pixels for your reading pleasure:

When God at first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by,
“Let us,” said he, “pour on him all we can.
Let the world’s riches, which dispersèd lie,
Contract into a span.”

So strength first made a way;
Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honour, pleasure.
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that, alone of all his treasure,
Rest in the bottom lay.

“For if I should,” said he,
“Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature;
So both should losers be.

“Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep them with repining restlessness;
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast.”

Summarized: Creation—or anything material— can deliver a dizzying array of sensation and enjoyment, but it can’t deliver true rest. Rest, true rest, can only be found in One place.

Being a bibliophile and a scholar, Herbert almost assuredly read St. Augustine’s memorable phrase: “Because God has made us for Himself, our hearts are restless until they rest in him.”

My mother bought our family a gluggle jug— a water pitcher created by a potter who engineered the clay to deliver that satisfying glawgerburguggling sound when you pour it into a glass. [Editorial search terms: gluggle jug, gurgle pots] To my knowledge, Wendell Berry, first identified that playful, joyous sound in Jayber Crow. He heard the churgling guh, guh, guh as good, good, good. Berry’s ear was notably hearing the Creator’s pleasure after seeing creation fresh from the ex nihilo assembly line: good, good, good. The Edenic satisfaction of creation was a glutted panoply of very real phantasmagoria. Not just imagined in a sketch book but put into a production so real you could bite into it and have the juice overflow down your chin. So much. Too much. So good. So delicious. I want to taste it all, see it all, do it all, grab it all, catch them all. Over 10,000 varieties of tomatoes alone. Unless you made it an oddly shaped life goal, you won’t taste them all. A veritable buffet, a pitcher, a glass, a person who can’t possibly partake of it all. Or take it with you.

These glurglings aren’t just the whimsical fancy of be-birkenstocked artist at the Sawdust Festival in Laguna Beach. No, “Joy is the serious business of heaven,” C.S. Lewis wrote. The glut and the glurgling and the pleasures must be enjoyed. It would be a sin not to enjoy them.

But they can’t give you rest. Not real rest. Herbert was so right.

The Judge in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (a veritable stand-in for the devil incarnate), is fascinated with anything crafted, created, made from an imagination. An imago pressed into something else (because of course, Satan can’t create a durn thing, he can only diminish, degrade and pervert an existing good thing). Satan has no imagination, no creative power. In one particular scene, The Judge happens upon some ancient-dweller’s cave in the American Southwest. He marvels at the drawings; he turns over the fine craftsmanship of a decorated conquistadorian helmet—a fine specimen for any museum. Tooled, twisted, and beaten into shiny loveliness. He stares at it, stupefied and mystified. And then he crushes it nonchalantly, abruptly.

We don’t get rid of matter or destroy it. But we certainly can’t squeeze rest from it, either.

The late Timothy Keller often said that Christianity is the most materialistic of all religions. He meant that matter matters. A Creator loves his creation and wants his image-bearers to love creation. Eat it up; it’s all good. Our very same Creator wants those loveable things to be ordered in their comparative ultimacy and function. Every disordered love devolves into a minimized Creator at the price of an inferior love being inappropriately promoted. Take a brief inventory of your passionate pursuits. You might have wanted rest from them, too.

But only the Creator gives rest. Hence a Sabbath.

In Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, he describes the unscratchable itch that followed his pursuit of every thing under the sun, “There was a disturbance in my heart, a voice that spoke there and said, I want, I want, I want! It happened every afternoon, and when I tried to suppress it got even stronger.” Around the time for an untimed siesta.

But only a Creator gives true rest. Hence a Sabbath.

In Ruth Haley Barton’s Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation, she writes of this type of sabbath, “There have to be times in your life when you move slow, times when you walk rather than run, settling into each step . . . There have to be times when you stop and gaze admiringly at loved ones, marveling that they have been given to you for this life . . . times when hugs linger and kisses are real, when food and drink are savored with gratitude and humility rather than gulped down on your way to something else. There have to be times when you read for the sheer pleasure of it, marveling at the beauty of words and the endless creativity in putting them together . . . times when you settle into the comforts of home and become human once again. There have to be times when you light a candle and find the tender place inside you that loves or sorrows or sings and you pray from that place, times when you let yourself feel, when you allow the tears to come rather than blinking them back because you don’t have time to cry. There have to be times to sink into the soft body of yourself and love what you love simply because love itself is a grace . . . times when you sit with gratitude for the good gifts of your life that get lost and forgotten in the rush of things . . . times to celebrate and play to roll down hills to splash in water or make leaf piles to spread paint on paper or walls or each other. There have to be times to sit and wait for the fullness of God that replenishes body, mind, and soul— if you can even stand to be so full. There has to be time for the fullness of time or time is meaningless.”

But even sabbaths are only as good as Who they bring you to, because only our Creator gives true rest. What daily exercises (or disciplines) bring you straight to your Creator? Him for his own sake. Not what for what He might do for you, but for Himself alone. You’ll find some rest, friend.