The Way In: A Rilke Poem

The Way In
Rainer Maria Rilke

Whoever you are: some evening take a step
out of your house, which you know so well.
Enormous space is near, your house lies where it begins,
whoever you are.
Your eyes find it hard to tear themselves
from the sloping threshold, but with your eyes
slowly, slowly, lift one black tree
up, so it stands against the sky: skinny, alone.
With that you have made the world. The world is immense
and like a word that is still growing in the silence.
In the same moment that your will grasps it,
your eyes, feeling its subtlety, will leave it. . . .

[Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Robert Bly, p. 71.]


I have lived with this Rilke poem for the better part of a year now. It first appeared on my radar as I considered a change of work and a move to another state. Last week I read it to a group on retreat at a Benedictine monastery. It seemed to have as much resonance with persons in that body as it has had with me.

Initially, the overlay on my life was obvious. I held a job I loved for 18 years, among a people I dearly loved. As such, I lived in a comfortable "house" for all those years, a house that was cozy and somewhat predictable, with regular rhythms and a consistent way for me to exercise my gifts. I was free to explore as needed, to occasionally move beyond the fences which would predictably arise. I found myself most fully "at home" in that house.

To step out of my "house" meant distance from friends and life-companions who were my extended family . . . distance from practices that had grown to be second-nature . . . and distance from financial security as I enter the late afternoon and evening of life.

Yet, as Rilke described the house, I knew it "so well." As familiar and cozy as it was, once the door cracked open and the light from outside the house rushed through the door-ajar, I had to step through . . . for reasons I did not fully understand then, and which I still cannot adequately verbalize.

I had other, previous experiences leaving "a house I knew so well," but in those experiences I was suffocating inside the house. In order to live and offer my life in service to the world, I had to step out of those houses. Last year, though, I was not pushed out the door, nor stepping away with a sense of desperate survival. I could have rocked along, business as usual, for a good, long while.

Nonetheless, it was time to "step outside the house." In a sense, this time as at other times, I had to do it. The invitation to step outside the house, as Rilke says, is the opening into the "enormous space" nearby . . . into the wild immensity of the world.

I'm no hero, villain, or saint for stepping out of that particular house. People make life-altering decisions all the time, sometimes out of courage, sometimes out of desperation, and sometimes just to survive. And truth be told, there are still plenty of houses I live in which I've yet to step out of.

A house is a structure, a confinement, a place of dwelling. It roots us, in the sense of limiting our movement, travel, or journey. Even on an intentional journey, a spiritual journey, humans seem to want to build dwelling places in which to settle. Maybe we do that out of our fear or for the sake of security. Whatever the reason, we seem to be very good at building and living confined within houses.

If "journey" is metaphor for moving onward in life, then "house" is metaphor for staying put where we are. Rilke simply says, "step out of your house some evening, the house that is so familiar to you."

Growth, especially spiritual becoming, does not consist in making sure everything is comfortable and well-ordered, safe and secure within the confines of my current "house," but rather, stretches, reaches, explores. Spiritual becoming means always expanding, including, opening. Authentic growth never keeps us confined, never makes us smaller, but always thrusts us into the world as redeeming, reconciling presences.

But taking a step out of our houses is no simple act. Many of our houses are well-constructed and have served us well for a lifetime.

The houses in which we dwell differ for each of us.
There is the house of what you believe.
Or the house of what you hold dear.
Or the house of what you belong to.
Or the house of your deepest loyalties.
Or the house of your politics.
Or the house of your ideology.
Or the house of your religious tradition.
Or the house of your roles.
Or the house of the way your parents raised you.
Or the house of what is required at your work.
Or the house of that toxic relationship.
Or the house of your identity group (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.).

Most of us live in many houses, and we stay in them because they are so familiar to us . . . we "know them so well." We may even say things like, "This is just who I am."

When Rilke says, "Take a step out of your house," he is not suggesting we should forsake the house, burn it down, or turn our backs on it. (Of course, there is a time to make a complete break from the house we know so well . . . but not in all cases.)

He simply says, "Step outside."
"Enormous space is near."
"The world is immense."

This is poetic wisdom: Just a simple step outside our role, our belief, or our must/should/oughts is a step into the world, into the vastness for which we were created. Most often, it is the first step that is most crucial, because without the first step there can be no successive steps. Take the first step, he says.

Last week on retreat, my friend David heard this poem for the first time. He pointed out something about the poem I had overlooked completely in months of pondering it. He noted the poem's title . . . while the main action of the poem is taking a step "out of your house," the poem is showing us "the way in."

This is how it goes. The way in, the way of living soul-fully, the way into a deepening life of significance, the way of accessing your own interior riches . . . all are accessed by taking a step out of the house you know so well!

Rilke: Flare up like flame

God speaks to each of us
by Rainer Maria Rilke
I, 59

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you:
beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.


[Rainer Maria Rilke, “Gott spricht zu jedem nur, eh er ihn macht,” I, 59, Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, 88.]


Rilke imagined our creative beginnings as God's walk with us out of the darkness, speaking into us the words we will take a lifetime to recover, to hear fully, and to live into. We hear them dimly. Any journey of enlightenment or illumination is partially the journey of recalling our original purpose, our original identity.

Part of what we slowly hear again is the invitation to "flare up like flame." Perhaps this became Rilke's way of saying, "You are the light of the world." Let the inner fire of your origins, your purpose, your identity become flame. Live from the center of that fire, so that which enflames your life will enlighten others also.

Rilke was a complex man -- aren't we all, after all, complex? -- who heard faint voices most all of his life. I imagine he, like me and you, "dimly heard" these words. Did he live them well? Or not so well? Did he, in his life, "flare up like flame"? I do not know.

But I do know he heard the voice, if only dimly.

And I know we are here, a century later, reading his poem and talking about his vision of our genesis.

YOU are the light of the world. Flare up like flame.

When I Die: A Poem

When I die
read nothing that rhymes
and tastes like sugar

read some Rilke
something fierce
and raw

something that
shapes the awe
and cloud

that compels us
toward the mystery
of what has not yet
appeared.

A Rilke Poem about Your Beauty

Initial
by Rainer Maria Rilke

Let your beauty manifest itself
without talking and calculation.
You are silent. It says for you: I am.
And comes in meaning thousandfold,
comes at long last over everyone.


Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images, a bilingual edition trans. by Edward Snow (New York: North Point Press, 1991) 107.

One Foot in the Dark and One Foot in the Light: A Rilke Poem

I'm aware of my tendency to label things as "good" or "bad" depending on how they impact me. It may be that way with most all of us. Our vantage point is always self-referenced, so that we evaluate the events in our lives and in our world by the measure of how they impact us. Those things that are "good" bring me happiness and well-being. Those things are "bad" that cause me pain and discomfort. These are the standard value-judgments with which most of us live.

I'm convinced that a growing life with God relies less and less on such value judgments. Over time we recognize that there are some things that are "good" for me that don't necessarily feel good in the moment. Pain and struggle are valuable parts of the human experience, as well as laughter and gladness. As we grow up spiritually, we acknowledge that we can't fully see through every situation to the bigger picture. Our sight is limited, so that we don't often see the larger work God is accomplishing in our lives and in our world, even in the struggle and uncomfortable seasons of life.

[I read an excerpt from Richard Rohr a couple of weeks ago in which he mentioned discernment as the spiritual gift of being able to see that what may be "good" for me may also be "bad" for someone else in the world . . . for someone close to me or for someone somewhere else on the planet. It takes a maturing person, a person who is becoming a spiritual grown-up, to recognize that not everything that feels good or appears beneficial to me is also good for others and for the created world.]

It is difficult to hold this tension, to live in this liminal space where things are not as we wish them to be. We tend to want one or the other. We want the bad turned into good, the water turned into wine, the darkness turned into light, the earthy turned into the celestial.

Most often in life we are invited to stand between the two, to wait at the threshold, to live with one foot in the light and another foot in the darkness. It is a marvelous grace to be able to do this, and one that runs counter to what most of us want from life.

Last week a poem from Rainer Maria Rilke's Book of Images found me. The poem, in German, is entitled "Abend." In English, that would be "Evening" or "Sunset." It speaks, at least to me, of this way of holding the tensions, of living the "both/and" rather than the "either/or."


Evening
by Rainer Maria Rilke

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion
of what becomes a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.


[Rainer Maria Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage International, 1980, 1981, 1982), 13.]


Some contemporary critics of Rilke's poetry call this poem "ludicrous" and "bombastic." I'm not up on my poetry criticism, so I don't know about that. I do know that the poem stirred me with its images.

First, there is the image of evening or sunset, that twilight (literally, "twin lights" or "two lights") when the daylight lingers but also the darkness of night is closing in. I recognize that much of life is lived in this evening time, holding onto the light of day and resisting the darkness of night. In this twilight, a person belongs to both the light and the darkness, while at the same time belonging to neither one.

As the poem unfolds, Rilke shifts the image from the light/dark of evening to the two movements represented by stars ("journeying to heaven") and earth ("one that falls"). Again, Rilke says that we live in both realms. Both are true of us.

The old rabbis taught that each human has two pockets. In one pocket is the message, "You are the dust of the earth." In the other pocket, the message says, "For you the universe was made." I think of the "dust pocket" as my humanity. I'm not to deny it or to change it. I am invited to live a fully human life. I am the dust of the earth. From dust I have come and to dust I will return.

I am also, however, created in and for connection with God. There is a grand, bigger-than-life design woven into my DNA by God. I, like you, have a destiny that is larger and more expansive than I can possible imagine. So there is a part of me that lives fallen to the earth ("stone in you," Rilke says) and a part of me that "journeys to heaven" (the "star" in me).

So here's the challenge: I am invited to recognize each within me, simultaneously, and to live into the fullness of both. In Rilke's poetic language, he says it leaves you, "inexpressibly to unravel your life (or "untangle your life") with its immensity and fear" . . . both "bounded" and "immeasurable."

"Immensity" speaks to the feet which stand with light and with the heavenlies . . . and "fear" speaks to the part of us that is familiar with darkness and with the earth/dust.

In fact, in the original poem, "immensity" and "fear" are only two of the three words Rilke used in that line. The third word is rendered in other translations of the poem as "growing" or "ripening."

These are the challenges of every human life . . . to untangle our lives in their immensity and fear and ripening. I sense the invitation to live into my God-designed life in all its hugeness and fearfulness and growing edges. I can have feet planted in all those places. I don't have to choose one or the other.

It is in this way, I believe, that I'm invited to live fully with and for God in every season.

Good and Bad Pain . . . with a Little Rilke Thrown In

Last week several of us round-tabled about pain, gathered around the idea that perhaps there are such things as good pain and bad pain. My friend Peter Johns came up with some insightful analogies and included them last week in his blog. It's worth reading. You can read Peter's thoughts at this address:

http://edensong.blogspot.com/2012/01/lessons-from-gym.html

As a result of the open and honest discussion among soul-friends and fellow pilgrims, I was pushed to come to my own sense of what pain is and how I either step into it or avoid it. I realize that I don't like pain any more than the next person. And it's not always easy for me to differentiate emotional pain from spiritual pain, physical pain from mental pain. Often, especially when I am in the midst of it, pain is pain, and all the philosophizing or psychologizing about it in the world does not make it better. When I'm in the midst of it, I just want to cry out and make it go away.

I suppose in some things I have a pretty high pain threshold. I've been surprised from time to time, for instance, when doctors have said to me in the midst of pain or bad health, "How are you still standing this?" Then, at other times, the mere sight of a needle while I'm sitting in the chemo chair is enough to put me on the floor. I don't get it, but that represents the wide spectrum of my experience and tolerance of pain.

And I do recognize that I am largely shaped by my Western cultural heritage that insinuates that all pain is bad, that it is to be relieved, medicated or dispersed by any means possible. Our cultural emblem is "onward and upward," as if anything that holds us back from success, achievement, and prosperity must be bad. As a people, we don't have much tolerance for pain, for difficulty or for struggle.

The stories we tell in the corporate world are stories of success, accomplishment, and getting ahead.

The stories we tell in the ecclesial (church) world are the stories of the pain turned to glory, struggle that turned to victory. We have little heart-space for stories of perpetual struggle . . . for stories that do not end up with gold medals in the end . . . for stories that do not end with a heart-warming, inspirational moral.

I believe that most of us will endure a little pain only if we feel promised that it will not last long, or that it will somehow be turned to glory, or that we will be rewarded for it with some kind of earthly or celestial reward.

The difficult, wrenching spiritual discipline is to step into pain, to live in it, and perhaps to embrace it, even if we are not promised an end to it or a pleasing outcome to it. Our spiritual teachers for centuries have reminded us that in order to live a life of soul, that is a life in which we are our most authentic, God-created selves, we must make a downward journey -- often imaged as a "descent." That downward journey is most always traumatic, deathly, and painful (either physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually).

So after last week's discussion, and Peter's helpful meditation, I remembered this poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. It has spoken to me for many years, especially in the difficult days of my life, the days when I have cried out, "Where are you, God? Where are you in all this hurt?!?!"

Read it a couple of times. Visualize the image Rilke paints with words . . . a massive rock . . . a vein of ore . . . the terrible darkness . . . the pressing in . . . the weight of the pain like stone. . . .


It feels as though I make my way
through massive rock
like a vein of ore
alone, encased.

I am so deep inside it
I can’t see the path or any distance:
everything is close
and everything closing in on me
has turned to stone.

Since I still don’t know enough about pain,
this terrible darkness makes me small.
If it’s you, though –

press down hard on me, break in
that I may know the weight of your hand,
and you, the fullness of my cry.


[Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 127.]


I am drawn especially to Rilke's line, "I still don't know enough about pain . . ." I confess, that even after 53 years . . . numerous heart-breaks, vocational struggles, disease, years of soul-work . . . I still don't know enough about pain.

And maybe in the end, what Rilke most wants is what I most want . . . to know that somehow God is present in the pain . . . and for God to hear me when I cry.

A Rilke Poem: For Being Rooted and Rising Up

I'm thinking today about the movements of growth, which both descend and ascend. In Western society, growth is conceptualized mainly as an upwardly ascending movement in which we rise to more and more lofty heights. Most of us, I believe, intuit the lie in that imagery, yet the cultural pressure to buy into this mentality of ascent is almost overwhelming.

Yet the created world knows better . . . she knows that the journey downward sinks roots deep that are necessary before the journey of ascent begins. Descent -- or a movement to the center -- is a movement of growth, too. Sinking long, sturdy roots into the soil is essential in order to grow tall.

This work of descent mostly happens underground, beneath the realm of physical sight. In unseen ways seeds germinate, roots spread and the context for growth is laid. You cannot immediately rush to the heights without this prior, more interior work.

Rainer Maria Rilke saw this as well as anyone I've ever read. In this poem there are a number of images, mostly from the natural world, that speak to this God-created reality of movement and growth. I offer it to you for consideration and reflection on growth and becoming.


How surely gravity's law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing --
each stone, blossom, child --
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God's heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.


[Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), 116 - 117]

A Rilke Poem: About Attending to the Patterns of Our Days

Orchard and Road

In the traffic of our days
may we attend to each thing
so that patterns are revealed
amidst the offerings of chance.

All things want to be heard,
so let us listen to what they say.
In the end we will hear what we are:
the orchard or the road leading past.

[Rainer Maria Rilke, "Orchard and Road" from the Collected French Poems, quoted in A Year with Rilke, trans. by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 131.]


Quakers say, "Let your life speak" or, "Listen to your life." It's more than just a saying that encourages us to live large.

I realize that when I'm faced with a decision or with some choice that feels significant, something inside me already knows what to do. I think that's true for all of us. It's the part of a human being I'd call "soul," or the "God-seed" within, that part of our being that already is connected and rooted in the soil of God's goodness. The soul is grounded in the reality of all that is. It knows what to do.

[Note: Mary Oliver begins her classic poem, "The Journey," with those very words:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began . . .]

So Quakers might say to us, "Listen to your life. Let it speak. It will tell you what to do." For many of us, that may seem easier said than done.

In the poem above, Rilke suggests much the same thing. "In the traffic of our days," he says, pay attention to each thing, to the movements and patterns and thoughts and reactions. Attend to what happens. Don't stumble blindly through the day, through the "traffic," as if the ordinary and mundane did not have some significance. Maybe in another day or from the wisdom of another tradition, he would say, "Live reflectively" or "Be mindful."

Because there are patterns at work within us, and perhaps there are predictable patterns at work in the world. The patterns of the world may have to do with image and conformity and popular notions of what it means to be successful; we are invited, though, to notice the more intimate patterns of our own DNA through the traffic of our days.

And to quote yet another poem that has come to mean a great deal to me, if we are not mindful of the exterior patterns or rhythms which press in upon us and to which we give ourselves and which we assume to be true in the world,

"a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong God home we may miss our star."
(William Stafford, "A Ritual to Read to Each Other")

We tend to assume the patterns others have made (the "wrong gods") and miss the patterns that live within us ("our star")! The patterns and assumptions that are woven into our essence are waiting to be heard. They are, in Stafford's image, the "star" we must follow.

In the second stanza of Rilke's poem, he repeats three times the image of "heard . . . listen . . . hear."

Then he says it: The attending and listening is so that we might "hear what we are."

It takes a radical leap of faith to trust God . . . maybe even more radical to trust ourselves and our own capacity to hear and live into "what we are."

This, however, is the ultimate vocation of every human being. This is what we are made for. This is who we are.

We begin to live into this vocation by attending to the patterns of our days.

The Beauty of You: A Rilke Poem

The Beauty of You
by Rainer Maria Rilke


In deep nights I dig for you like treasure.
For all I have seen
that clutters the surface of my world
is poor and paltry substitute
for the beauty of you
that has not happened yet . . .



[In A Year with Rilke, trans. and ed. by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows (New York: HarperOne, 2009), 25. Originally in Rilke’s The Book of Hours II, 34.]

Reaching out for the Things I Can't Reach

Where Does the Temple End, Where Does It Begin?
by Mary Oliver


There are things you can’t reach. But
you can reach out to them, and all day long.

The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God.

And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.

The snake slides away; the fish jumps, like a little lily,
out of the water and back in; the goldfinches sing
from the unreachable top of the tree.

I look; morning to night I am never done with looking.

Looking I mean not just standing around, but standing around
as though with your arms open.

And thinking; maybe something will come, some
shining coil of wind,
or a few leaves from any old tree –
they are all in this too.

And now I will tell you the truth.
Everything in the world
comes.

At least, closer.

And, cordially.

Like the nibbling, tinsel-eyed fish; the unlooping snake.
Like goldfinches, little dolls of gold
fluttering around the corner of the sky

of God, the blue air.

[Mary Oliver, Why I Wake Early (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 8 – 9.]


This Mary Oliver poem found me last week as I spent a day on retreat. I've stayed with it in the days since and it keeps speaking into my life. There are images that strike me in the poem, but I really haven't moved beyond the first two lines yet.

There are things you can’t reach. But
you can reach out to them, and all day long.

The poem came to me in a season in which I have some uncertainty about what the future holds. I have a sense of interior unsettledness about the days ahead, and it has threatened to shut me down. I'm tending to feel myself withdrawing, pulling into myself, to keep from getting too far outside of myself. In my honest, self-reflective moments, I realize that my vision has gotten small and narrow. My capacity to dream is constricting.

I was drawn to these words in the poem, though, and for days brought them into my prayer. I considered the things in my life I was invited to reach out for, even if I would never reach them. I felt invited to continue extending myself outward, reaching out, not contingent on whether I would reach the end or not.

My reflections were fruitful. I wrote some poetry around the ideas that arose in me. I worked with the image artistically.

A few days into the poem, someone asked me about my health. I recited the most recent medical report. Then this person asked, "What are your dreams? What are you stretching toward?" Even though I had been working with this poem, I gave some lame, health-based answer about not being able to look very far ahead, not feeling like I was in a place to dream any longer. This wise friend said, "So what? Do you think you should let that stop you from dreaming?" I realized she was right.

Over a decade ago, one of the poems that drew me into poetry, and specifically to the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, was a poem in his Book of Hours in which he said, "I live my life in expanding orbits . . . I don't know that I shall reach the last, but that is my aim." Rilke and Mary Oliver are talking about the same thing.

To live life in expanding orbits . . . whether I ever come to the last or not. . . .

There are things I cannot reach . . . but I will reach out to them.

A Rilke Poem: About the Poverty of the Body

Rainer Maria Rilke's body was weak throughout his life. As a child he was often sick. A difficult childhood and home life did not help his physical strength.

In adulthood Rilke moved throughout Europe often and lived something of a vagabond's life. Late in life he was often a patient at a sanitarium because of bad health. Already weak, his body seemed to have played out. He died at the age of 51.

This poem comes from the final months of his life during one of his sanitarium stays. It goes to the way we often neglect the body until we come to some physical situation in which our bodies no longer function as we would like them to.

Rilke's demeanor toward his failing health and fragile body in this poem reminds me of how Francis of Assisi nicknamed his own body, "Brother Ass."

I wonder . . . in what ways are we invited to befriend our bodies, to recognize their limitations and the poverty of our human condition? We are, after all, made of flesh and not stone. All the health initiatives, diets and miracle drugs in the world cannot stall forever the inevitable deterioration of our bodies. We fight aging, we fight disease, we fight loss of appearance. It is the Western way, the contemporary way to deal with any poverty or deterioration.

Personally, I think we're frightened of admitting our own poverty, confessing that we are anything less that on top or on the up-and-up. In fact, it's a sham and a huge falsehood, but it is part of the cultural illusion under which many of us live.

I hear Rilke, here at the end of his life, advocating for a gentler, more friendly stance toward ourselves, reconciling the divisions we've created between body and soul, bringing the various aspects of our being into a congruent whole.

This is his poem:

Brother body is poor . . . : then we'll have to be rich for him.
Often he was the rich one: so may he be pardoned
the meanness of his worst moments.
If he then acts as though he scarcely still knows us,
let us gently remind him of everything shared.

Granted, we are not one, but a solitary two:
our consciousness and he;
but how much we owe each other
past conceiving,
the way it is with friends! and one learns in illness:
friendship is hard!


(in Uncollected Poems: Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Edward Snow, p. 239)

A Rilke Poem for Advent Darkness

This poem found me a few days ago. For me it matches the mood of Advent, the darkness and waiting to which we are each called. It calls me to a rootedness that doesn't fight the darkness, but rather allows the darkness to make me more fully and completely human.

There is a contradiction in darkness and waiting that makes us terribly uncomfortable, especially as persons who want our pain wrapped up in a tidy bow. But the task of becoming fully human is never clean. Seldom does it draw in straight lines and in perfectly square corners. Growing up is messy work. Maturity, including spiritual maturity, comes at a cost. Every experience of life has within it the capacity to be our teacher.

Rilke was familiar with darkness. As with most artists, his creativity emerged from this seedbed which was very much underground, cold, dank, still and in some ways seemed to be without life.

So this is an expression of Rilke's stance toward darkness.


Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.


[Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29, trans. by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows]

The Voices: A Rilke Poem

This piece of a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke introduces a section in his Book of Images that includes the "songs" of several groups Rilke saw as marginalized . . . The Song the Beggar Sings, The Song the Drunkard Sings, The Song the Widow Sings, The Song the Orphan Sings, The Song the Idiot Sings, and so on. . . .


The Voices

The rich and the happy can choose to keep silent,
no need to bid for attention.
But the desperate must reveal themselves,
must say: I am blind
or: I am going blind
or: It's not good for me here on Earth
or: My child is sick
or: I am not holding it together . . .

But when is that really enough?
So, lest people pass them by like objects,
sometimes they sing.

And sometimes their songs are beautiful.


[trans. by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows]

Want the Change: A Rilke Poem

Sonnets to Orpheus
Part Two
XII

Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.

Every happiness is the child of separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.



[in In Praise of Mortality: Selections from Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. and ed. by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, p. 117]

Leaving Home as a Prodigal

The younger son got together everything he had and left for a distant country. (Lk. 15:13)

Our growth as human beings, as spiritual beings, is difficult and sometimes harsh work. It takes discipline and diligence. We don't happen upon growth and healthy life-change by accident. Our life-journey as spiritual beings is about engaging this work of becoming fully human, fully the person God created us to be.

Let's connect an image to our situation. Our starting place is something like home. This home consists of all the norms and values that are familiar to us and with which we have become very friendly. While it entails the literal family and the place in which we were raised, home is much more than that. In computer-ese, home is our operating system, the default system from which we operate. It is the life framework to which we return to make sense out of our existence.

Our home may be built upon faulty assumptions, inaccurate perceptions, and coping strategies we have developed to deal with life in all its difficulties. We live underneath the illusion that our home works for us. While it may help us make sense out of life, very rarely is the home we live in expansive enough to cover all of life's uncertainties. We think home is the way life really is. It almost never is.

Because we think our home works for us, we don't have cause to question it or to think that we might need to leave it. So generally, we only begin to question our home or to leave it when confronted with some life-crisis. At some point life begins to fall apart, the old assumptions don't work anymore, and our usual coping strategies don't make sense of life any longer. Generally some kind of crisis pushes us away from home to the far country.

Thus, growing up as a human almost always means leaving home at some point. We generally don't know where we're going, only that where we are is not working. So we leave the constriction of home for the mystery of the far country. (That may or may not mean a literal leaving of mother and/or father. And just because a person physically leaves mother and/or father does not mean that they have truly left home.)

This is the leaving, the going away that is fundamental to the spiritual journey. Many biblical stories reflect this pattern. Most obvious is the story of the young man -- the prodigal son -- who took his inheritance and left home for a far country, leaving behind his family and all that home represents.

All the sermons and lessons about the prodigal son I've heard in the Church for almost 40 years have painted his actions as rash and irresponsible. He was impulsive and reckless, we've said, as we castigate him for leaving a place of safety and comfort.

I find him, though, to be the truly courageous character in the story, the one willing to risk, the one not satisfied to buy blindly into the answers of home, who insisted on asking his own questions and coming to a sense of life for himself. If you want some idea of what home was like in that story, take a look at the elder brother.

So I love the younger son. I haven't always felt that way, but in recent years he has become the biblical character with whom I most identify. With that in mind, a couple of weeks ago I found a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke called "The Departure of the Prodigal Son." The poem begins this way:

Now to go away from all this tangleness
that is part of us and yet not ours,
that like the water in old wells
reflects us trembling and ruins the image;
from all this, which as if with thorns
still clings to us -- to go away . . .

The entire poem is full of images and language about "going away" and what happens to our seeing when we "go away." There are images for the mystery we step into when we finally "go away." The poem speaks to the new life that awaits us when we step away from what is comfortable, known, and "sure." This is how the poem ends:

To take all this upon yourself and in vain
perhaps let fall things firmly held,
in order to die alone, not knowing why --

Is this how new life begins?

Yes, it is.

["The Departure of the Prodigal Son," trans. by Edward Snow in Rainer Maria Rilke: New Poems, p. 39]

Carrying Wind and Open Spaces

I give you these lines from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke:


Don't be afraid to suffer, give
the heaviness back to the weight of the earth;
mountains are heavy, seas are heavy.

Even those trees you planted as children
became too heavy long ago -- you couldn't carry them now.
But you can carry the winds . . . and the open spaces . . .


[Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Robert Bly]

Attending to the Interior

Only that which is interior is near; everything else is far away.
And this interior is dense and every day
overfilled with everything, and entirely unspeakable.

(From Rainer Maria Rilke, "The Island")


The Christian spiritual path invites us to a deeper attentiveness and love in four specific realms. We are invited to attend more deeply to God, to self, to others, and to the created world.

I find the most challenging realm for myself and others is that of attending to and loving myself. We tend not to do this well. We don't see ourselves honestly. We wear self-blinders. It's not that we intentionally deceive ourselves, but to see ourselves as we truly are requires an unflinching honesty that can be painful. Such seeing, though, is a crucial part of the spiritual journey.

Noverim te, noverim me, St. Augustine prayed. "May I know you, may I know myself."

The interior of our lives, however, is the context we cannot afford to overlook. Too many times we seek to find ourselves in the outer world, named by what we produce or how others estimate us. We identify with a particular tribe, group, or symbol of status. We accumulate symbols of well-being that we think will label us . . . titles and possessions and accomplishments.

All of those things, though, are exterior to what is most real, to who we truly are. Rilke says that what is within us, the interior of our lives, is dense and so full of "every day's everything" that we cannot even speak of it accurately. This inner density is dark and light, cloudy and clear, obvious and mysterious. No wonder we are hesitant to explore it!

This is not an invitation to intense introspection that shuts the world out. This is not a "navel-gazing" that displaces God with my own self or ego at the center of life -- I am never the center! This is not a narcissism that looks out only for itself while the rest of the world struggles and laments.

It does, however, seek to become familiar with its own landscape as a way of becoming whole, as a way of seeing clearly, and as a path to healing the pain of the world.

Becoming familiar with my own density means that I begin to recognize the ways that I offer my own unique toxicity to the world. Knowing my own toxicity, I'm more able to open myself for healing and wholeness.

It also means that I come to know the unique gifts and charisms that are mine to offer the world. If I don't offer myself for the healing and well-being of the world, no one else can offer me. Only I can offer myself, my own density, in that way.

"May I know You, may I know myself."

A Rilke Poem about Mary for Advent

And then that girl the angels came to visit
Rainer Maria Rilke

And then that girl the angels came to visit,
she woke also to fruit, frightened by beauty,
given love, shy, in her
so much blossom, the forest
no one had explored, with paths leading everywhere.

They left her alone to walk and to drift
and the spring carried her along.
Her simple and unselfcentered Mary-life
became marvelous and castlelike.
Her life resembled trumpets on the feast days
that reverberated far inside every house;
and she, once so girlish and fragmented,
was so plunged now inside her womb,
and so full inside from that one thing
and so full – enough for a thousand others –
that every creature seemed to throw light on her
and she was like a slope with vines, heavily bearing.


[Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Robert Bly (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1981), 35.]


This week I've been aware of Rilke's image of Mary as a "forest no one has explored, with paths leading everywhere." I've listened to those words for several days and allowed them to weave their way into me.

To be as open as Mary, as utterly unpretentious . . . paths would be everywhere. Everything would be a path. Wherever I walked, the path would become the ground beneath my feet. Walking on, I would make the path.

In saying, "Yes, let it be to me," Mary assented to a path "no one had explored," a path that led "everywhere."

Yes.

Rilke's Birthday

On December 4, 1875 Rainer Maria Rilke was born. His birth was a disappointment to his mother, who had wished for a daughter (thus, his name). She dressed Rainer as a girl early in life, and perhaps treated him so.

His father, on the other hand, dreamed of a life in the military for Rainer Maria -- can you imagine the tensions between mother and father? -- and sent him to military school, but Rainer was often sick and did not last in those academies.

Early in life he showed a native ability for words and images. He spent his adult years as a poet, living in most every corner of Europe and giving some time as a personal secretary to the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Inspired by Rodin and Cezanne', Rilke felt his calling was to "make things," not sculpted or painted, but "written things."

I was first handed a Rilke poem about 15 years ago by a wise nun. I was not much interested in poetry at that time, so mostly the poem bounced off me. Something within me, though, intuited that Rilke wrote about something important, so I kept at it. Over the years I grew to have a greater and greater appreciation for his poetry.

One Rilke poem in particular saw me through some of the darkest days of my life. I found the poem -- or the poem found me -- while on retreat at the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque several years ago. I could not put it down for days. Then over the next many months, I lived out the storm to which the poem testified . . . I wrestled with angels, as the poem suggests. The poem ushered me into a season of life that was deeply and painfully transformative. This is the poem:

The Man Watching

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler’s sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

One man said of Rilke that he is too fiercely honest and interior for most American readers, who prefer poems about flowers and clouds and bumblebees. I don't know about that.

I do know that he has had a deep and lasting impact on me. He is one of my 3 or 4 most helpful spiritual guides.

So this morning I have been glad to honor his birth by spending time with his words and images and prayers. I've also noted that he was my age when he died.

I sense that I have not yet come to the end of his influence.

The Solitary Person: A Rilke Poem

The Solitary Person
Rainer Maria Rilke


Among so many people cozy in their homes,
I am like a man who explores far-off oceans.
Days with full stomachs stand on their tables;
I see a distant land full of images.

I sense another world close to me,
perhaps no more lived in than the moon;
they, however, never let a feeling along,
and all the words they use are so worn.

The living things I brought back with me
hardly peep out, compared with all they own.
In their native country they were wild;
here they hold their breath from shame.


[ Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Robert Bly (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 87.]