Where to Find Real Rest

 

I sat in my hairdresser’s chair this morning feeling too worn out for small talk. Summer days at home with four children will do that.

She asked about my trip to Tuscany: “Did you bring home ideas for your writing?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, maybe,” I added.

*

What did I bring home from this spiritual retreat for writers?

Two bottles of olive oil. A duty-free bottle of lemoncello. Hard candies in pretty little boxes for the kids.

Also, a retreat journal full of prayers, epiphanies, and meaningful quotations from the likes of Henri Nouwen.

Your future depends on how you choose to remember your past. – Henri J.M. Nouwen

*

How do I remember my time in the Tuscan countryside of Italy? How do I remember those days lived in community, in a garden, around a table, surrounded by beauty?

I remember rest.

Simple rest. A total focus on the here and the now and the people right at my elbow.

The kind of rest I believe is available to those walking the Jesus way.

The kind of rest I rarely, if ever, manage to enter on my ordinary day to day.

*

What is rest? What is its substance?

It feels like being held. It feels like the absence of fear. It feels like no anxiety for tomorrow and a quiet acceptance of yesterday.

It feels like stillness.

It feels like freedom.

It is a spacious place.

*

I am a gardener who has never yet found rest in my own garden. Who can rest when mosquitos are biting, weeds are waving, and overgrown cucumbers are beginning to rot on the vine?

Who can rest when children are growing, my cellphone is dinging, and the cucumbers I meant to make into pickles are beginning to rot in the fridge?

I found rest in a garden in Tuscany because that garden wasn’t mine. It wasn’t my responsibility. Someone else made that place, and I had only to enjoy it.

*

If rest is a place made for us, where is the door?

In Tuscany, rest was a stone bench beneath sheltering leaves, a kind of green grotto within an enormous shrub.

Our word grotto is related to the Greek for hidden place, the same Greek that gave us our word crypt. That should not surprise us. “Blessed are the dead,” we read in Revelation, “they will rest from their labor.” In this life we sometimes glimpse the ultimate rest, but ours is only a glimpse, a momentary vision, for “there remains … a Sabbath-rest for the people of God” (Hebrews 4:9).

Man-made grottos, whether green and growing or stony and still, are often markers of gratitude: gratitude for some miraculous encounter or some answered prayer. Grottos shape how we remember the past. They tell us God is near. They say all shall be well. They hint at a reality we have yet to enter.

*

My own garden has no grotto, but, since returning from Tuscany, I have discovered it is possible to shelter within gratitude, as if leaf by leaf or stone by stone, I can be transported, not leaving my ordinary everyday but somehow sinking, a little more deeply, within it.

When fear or worry invade, I say Thank you for this and thank you for that and I find that the list goes on and on.

Until the list becomes a door.