Just a note . . . through the season of Lent, which began March 9 with Ash Wednesday, I'll write a brief daily reflection on the Scripture for the day at A Daily Lent (www.dailylent.blogspot.com). The meditations are intended to help you begin to consider the daily readings in a way that might draw you more deeply into prayer and reflection.
I may not show up at Only a Sojourner much over the next few weeks. The daily writing is a good discipline for me, but it stretches me creatively. So I'll camp out at www.dailylent.blogspot.com through Lent, Holy Week and Easter. I may pop back to Only a Sojourner periodically, but no promises . . .
See you soon.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Lazarus Walking
I want to tie a couple of cords together. Stick with me for a moment. It's going to take me a minute or two to get there.
First, over the past 15 years or so I have discovered within me a deep love for poetry and art. If you've read much of this blog over the last couple of years, you know that. Names like Rilke, Stafford and Oliver show up quite a bit.
I remember about 20 years ago reading some poems written by a noted poet and thinking to myself – with more than a little embarrassment, I’ll add – “I just don’t get it!” But slowly over a long period of time I kept reading poetry and began to be intentional about noticing works of art. Looking back, the interest in poetry and art was not coincidental. It coincided with an expanding immersion into prayer and a more soulful exploration of my own life with God, with others and with the created world.
The interest has not been a fleeting fancy. I still read poetry as a part of my daily discipline. I’ve found reading poetry to be a contemplative act. To read a poem I must slow down. Read, repeat, read, repeat. I digest a line, a phrase. I ponder an image. Like artists, poets don’t tell you everything. They leave great spaces unfilled. In those spaces, the reader is invited to insert his or her life. The same, I believe, is true of great art. The spaces – or absences – are intentional invitations, extended by the artist to the one viewing the work of art.
Some poetry and art has been especially meaningful to me because there are poets and artists with whom I feel a unique kinship. For instance, I first came into poetry through the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the English Jesuit priest. His stunning poetry became all the more meaningful to me as I studied his life and felt as if I shared in his personal struggles.
I’ve also sensed a kinship with Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke was a German-speaking poet who wrote as the 19th century turned into the 20th, as Hopkins had. Like Hopkins, his personal life was often scattered. A difficult childhood and meandering adulthood notwithstanding, Rilke wrote with a ferocity that immediately appealed to me. His intensity has drawn me magnetically over the years. I feel as if I’ve known him as a brother for a long, long time. (Perhaps you've noticed my fondness for him!)
The artist with whom I’ve felt most connected has been Vincent van Gogh. Even before I knew much about his mental and psychological state, I picked up the tension of his life from his paintings. I’ve read many of his letters. I’m drawn to his faith and to his struggle for faith. I’ve traveled long distances to see his paintings.
Hopkins . . . Rilke . . . van Gogh . . . I feel like I know them, and they know me. In fact, I’ve often found myself – or lost myself – within their poems and paintings.
That’s some background into my love of poetry and art, and into some folks who stir my soul. File that for a moment.
Second, I pulled out a poem recently that I had filed away a few years ago, written by contemporary poet David Whyte, and entitled, “The Lightest Touch.” The short poem is about how good poetry gets inside you, stirs you, awakens you to something you didn’t know could possibly be alive in your interior. This is the last stanza of the poem:
In the silence that follows
a great line
you can feel Lazarus
deep inside
even the laziest, most deathly afraid
part of you,
lift up his hands and walk toward the light.
A great line of poetry . . . a beautiful chord in a piece of music . . . the shape or color of an object in a painting . . . there are so many ways that our breath can be taken away, that something lifeless and limp within us can be stirred to spirit again, as the voice of Jesus awakened his dead friend Lazarus to life out of his stony tomb (John 11:43 – 44). We may not know just what the stirring is, but we do know that for just a brief moment, we are fully alive, fully engaged, fully opened up to what is most real in the world. I have those moments and you have those moments. We all have experienced what David Whyte lined out poetically.
The spiritual path is not about capturing and holding onto those moments, but about recognizing them more and more, being open to them and receiving them, then releasing them so we can receive the next “great line”.
So those are the cords. Here is the tying together:
Two weekends ago I went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston to see the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist exhibition on loan from the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. . . . My visit was a Christmas gift from my son and daughter-in-law. The exhibition features 50 paintings by the artists who represent the shift toward impressionism in the late 19th century: Monet . . . Renoir . . . Cassatt . . . Manet . . . Degas . . . Cezanne . . . and of course, van Gogh.
I could have stayed for a long, long time, but the rooms were pack with folks who wanted time with these artists and works as I did. So I slowly worked my way through each room of the exhibition, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers, in awe of what I found on each wall. The name of each artist was painted in their unique signature-style on the walls above that artist’s work. Thus, as I entered each room I was able to see whose work was displayed there.
I used those signatures as markers to locate the works by van Gogh. First room, no van Gogh. Second room, third room, fourth room, still no van Gogh. By the fifth and final room I anticipated that I would finally find the paintings I had most looked forward to seeing.
As I went through that last door, my eyes scanned the walls around the room, beginning to my left. I noticed a couple of Vincent’s paintings on that left wall as I panned the room, but it was what I saw when I turned to the right that I remember most. On the floor-to-ceiling pedestal on the right side of the room, standing apart from the wall displays, I saw the cursive “Vincent” about 9 to 10 feet off the ground. Directly beneath it was the unmistakeable self-portrait of van Gogh, painted in his characteristic bold, broad strokes at the end of a period of illness which left him pale and weak.
I simply stood at the door for a moment – at a distance – and noticed my eyes moistening.
I froze, motionless for about ten seconds or so, and everything inside me shut down to silence.
And I felt Lazarus deep inside the laziest, most deathly afraid part of me lift up his hands and walk toward the light. For just a moment, I was alive again.
First, over the past 15 years or so I have discovered within me a deep love for poetry and art. If you've read much of this blog over the last couple of years, you know that. Names like Rilke, Stafford and Oliver show up quite a bit.
I remember about 20 years ago reading some poems written by a noted poet and thinking to myself – with more than a little embarrassment, I’ll add – “I just don’t get it!” But slowly over a long period of time I kept reading poetry and began to be intentional about noticing works of art. Looking back, the interest in poetry and art was not coincidental. It coincided with an expanding immersion into prayer and a more soulful exploration of my own life with God, with others and with the created world.
The interest has not been a fleeting fancy. I still read poetry as a part of my daily discipline. I’ve found reading poetry to be a contemplative act. To read a poem I must slow down. Read, repeat, read, repeat. I digest a line, a phrase. I ponder an image. Like artists, poets don’t tell you everything. They leave great spaces unfilled. In those spaces, the reader is invited to insert his or her life. The same, I believe, is true of great art. The spaces – or absences – are intentional invitations, extended by the artist to the one viewing the work of art.
Some poetry and art has been especially meaningful to me because there are poets and artists with whom I feel a unique kinship. For instance, I first came into poetry through the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the English Jesuit priest. His stunning poetry became all the more meaningful to me as I studied his life and felt as if I shared in his personal struggles.
I’ve also sensed a kinship with Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke was a German-speaking poet who wrote as the 19th century turned into the 20th, as Hopkins had. Like Hopkins, his personal life was often scattered. A difficult childhood and meandering adulthood notwithstanding, Rilke wrote with a ferocity that immediately appealed to me. His intensity has drawn me magnetically over the years. I feel as if I’ve known him as a brother for a long, long time. (Perhaps you've noticed my fondness for him!)
The artist with whom I’ve felt most connected has been Vincent van Gogh. Even before I knew much about his mental and psychological state, I picked up the tension of his life from his paintings. I’ve read many of his letters. I’m drawn to his faith and to his struggle for faith. I’ve traveled long distances to see his paintings.
Hopkins . . . Rilke . . . van Gogh . . . I feel like I know them, and they know me. In fact, I’ve often found myself – or lost myself – within their poems and paintings.
That’s some background into my love of poetry and art, and into some folks who stir my soul. File that for a moment.
Second, I pulled out a poem recently that I had filed away a few years ago, written by contemporary poet David Whyte, and entitled, “The Lightest Touch.” The short poem is about how good poetry gets inside you, stirs you, awakens you to something you didn’t know could possibly be alive in your interior. This is the last stanza of the poem:
In the silence that follows
a great line
you can feel Lazarus
deep inside
even the laziest, most deathly afraid
part of you,
lift up his hands and walk toward the light.
A great line of poetry . . . a beautiful chord in a piece of music . . . the shape or color of an object in a painting . . . there are so many ways that our breath can be taken away, that something lifeless and limp within us can be stirred to spirit again, as the voice of Jesus awakened his dead friend Lazarus to life out of his stony tomb (John 11:43 – 44). We may not know just what the stirring is, but we do know that for just a brief moment, we are fully alive, fully engaged, fully opened up to what is most real in the world. I have those moments and you have those moments. We all have experienced what David Whyte lined out poetically.
The spiritual path is not about capturing and holding onto those moments, but about recognizing them more and more, being open to them and receiving them, then releasing them so we can receive the next “great line”.
So those are the cords. Here is the tying together:
Two weekends ago I went to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston to see the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist exhibition on loan from the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. . . . My visit was a Christmas gift from my son and daughter-in-law. The exhibition features 50 paintings by the artists who represent the shift toward impressionism in the late 19th century: Monet . . . Renoir . . . Cassatt . . . Manet . . . Degas . . . Cezanne . . . and of course, van Gogh.
I could have stayed for a long, long time, but the rooms were pack with folks who wanted time with these artists and works as I did. So I slowly worked my way through each room of the exhibition, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers, in awe of what I found on each wall. The name of each artist was painted in their unique signature-style on the walls above that artist’s work. Thus, as I entered each room I was able to see whose work was displayed there.
I used those signatures as markers to locate the works by van Gogh. First room, no van Gogh. Second room, third room, fourth room, still no van Gogh. By the fifth and final room I anticipated that I would finally find the paintings I had most looked forward to seeing.
As I went through that last door, my eyes scanned the walls around the room, beginning to my left. I noticed a couple of Vincent’s paintings on that left wall as I panned the room, but it was what I saw when I turned to the right that I remember most. On the floor-to-ceiling pedestal on the right side of the room, standing apart from the wall displays, I saw the cursive “Vincent” about 9 to 10 feet off the ground. Directly beneath it was the unmistakeable self-portrait of van Gogh, painted in his characteristic bold, broad strokes at the end of a period of illness which left him pale and weak.
I simply stood at the door for a moment – at a distance – and noticed my eyes moistening.
I froze, motionless for about ten seconds or so, and everything inside me shut down to silence.
And I felt Lazarus deep inside the laziest, most deathly afraid part of me lift up his hands and walk toward the light. For just a moment, I was alive again.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
A Window into My World
Last week someone shared a short book review with me about a new book of poetry by Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry journal. I read the review and added the book -- Every Riven Thing -- to my wishlist.
Tuesday, my poet/English teacher/soul-friend son in Arkansas sent me a magazine article from Poets & Writers magazine about Christian Wiman. Turns out he has the same form of “incurable cancer of the blood” that I have . . . Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia. I placed the order for his book of poetry that day.
Yesterday I read an online essay Wiman wrote about 4 years ago in which he wrote eloquently and passionately about his faith, life and the disease that lives in his blood. This is the link:
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/gazing-into-the-abyss/
In the article he writes about love, disease and a faith reclaimed with words like these:
I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the earth, but into it. And by some miracle I do not find that this experience is crushed or even lessened by the knowledge that, in all likelihood, I will be leaving the earth sooner than I had thought. Quite the contrary, I find life thriving in me, and not in an aestheticizing Death-is-the-mother-of-beauty sort of way either, for what extreme grief has given me is the very thing it seemed at first to obliterate: a sense of life beyond the moment, a sense of hope. This is not simply hope for my own life, though I do have that. It is not a hope for heaven or any sort of explainable afterlife, unless by those things one means simply the ghost of wholeness that our inborn sense of brokenness creates and sustains, some ultimate love that our truest temporal ones goad us toward. This I do believe in, and by this I live, in what the apostle Paul called “hope toward God.”
Today his poetry book came. I opened it randomly and read the first two poems I came to. They were intense, containing familiar images I recognized from our common disease, real with pain and real with hope. I had to put the book down after those two poems -- painful to read -- yet I cannot wait to pick up the book again.
Most often I don't know what to say about the disease I live with. People who love me want to know how I'm doing. But generally, most folks really don't want to hear that much about the disease. In my silences and alone-moments, it can be depressing enough for me. Surely it must be so for others as well.
Often, people will ask in kindness how I'm doing, but I'm never sure how much to say, how much they really want to know.
Two lines in one of Wiman's poems:
"How are you?" Pity soaks the moment like wet bread.
Do I spit it out, or must I gum this unguent down?
It's difficult to put my inner landscape into words. Sometimes when I try to find language for the shape of my inner world, it just feels cheap.
I shared these Wiman articles with colleagues this afternoon. I'm writing this out tonight in this space because the two articles and the book of poetry provides as much of a window into “my life and world” as anything I’ve read. I suppose I would say, "Here. Read this article. Read this poem and that poem. This is how I feel. This is what it feels like to be me. These are my doubts and these are my hopes. Here are my dreams and there is my dream-impotence. This is something of the shape of my inner world."
Certainly his experience is different from my experience, but many of the questions and struggles are similar. His vocabulary is familiar. He says eloquently what I struggle to put into words in my own existence about my life and the cancer within me. It feels like I'm getting a glimpse into my own soul from a fresh angle.
So I share it with you.
Tuesday, my poet/English teacher/soul-friend son in Arkansas sent me a magazine article from Poets & Writers magazine about Christian Wiman. Turns out he has the same form of “incurable cancer of the blood” that I have . . . Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia. I placed the order for his book of poetry that day.
Yesterday I read an online essay Wiman wrote about 4 years ago in which he wrote eloquently and passionately about his faith, life and the disease that lives in his blood. This is the link:
http://www.theamericanscholar.org/gazing-into-the-abyss/
In the article he writes about love, disease and a faith reclaimed with words like these:
I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the earth, but into it. And by some miracle I do not find that this experience is crushed or even lessened by the knowledge that, in all likelihood, I will be leaving the earth sooner than I had thought. Quite the contrary, I find life thriving in me, and not in an aestheticizing Death-is-the-mother-of-beauty sort of way either, for what extreme grief has given me is the very thing it seemed at first to obliterate: a sense of life beyond the moment, a sense of hope. This is not simply hope for my own life, though I do have that. It is not a hope for heaven or any sort of explainable afterlife, unless by those things one means simply the ghost of wholeness that our inborn sense of brokenness creates and sustains, some ultimate love that our truest temporal ones goad us toward. This I do believe in, and by this I live, in what the apostle Paul called “hope toward God.”
Today his poetry book came. I opened it randomly and read the first two poems I came to. They were intense, containing familiar images I recognized from our common disease, real with pain and real with hope. I had to put the book down after those two poems -- painful to read -- yet I cannot wait to pick up the book again.
Most often I don't know what to say about the disease I live with. People who love me want to know how I'm doing. But generally, most folks really don't want to hear that much about the disease. In my silences and alone-moments, it can be depressing enough for me. Surely it must be so for others as well.
Often, people will ask in kindness how I'm doing, but I'm never sure how much to say, how much they really want to know.
Two lines in one of Wiman's poems:
"How are you?" Pity soaks the moment like wet bread.
Do I spit it out, or must I gum this unguent down?
It's difficult to put my inner landscape into words. Sometimes when I try to find language for the shape of my inner world, it just feels cheap.
I shared these Wiman articles with colleagues this afternoon. I'm writing this out tonight in this space because the two articles and the book of poetry provides as much of a window into “my life and world” as anything I’ve read. I suppose I would say, "Here. Read this article. Read this poem and that poem. This is how I feel. This is what it feels like to be me. These are my doubts and these are my hopes. Here are my dreams and there is my dream-impotence. This is something of the shape of my inner world."
Certainly his experience is different from my experience, but many of the questions and struggles are similar. His vocabulary is familiar. He says eloquently what I struggle to put into words in my own existence about my life and the cancer within me. It feels like I'm getting a glimpse into my own soul from a fresh angle.
So I share it with you.
Friday, February 18, 2011
The Loaf That's in the Boat: Trusting What's within You
Mark 8:14 - 17
The disciples had forgotten to bring bread. They had only one loaf with them in the boat.
"Be careful," Jesus warned them. "Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees. And watch out for the yeast of Herod."
They talked about this with each other. They said, "He must be saying this because we don't have any bread."
Jesus knew what they were saying. So he asked them, "Why are you talking about having no bread? Why can't you see or understand? Are you stubborn?"
This passage is a head-scratcher. Read straight through with a literal mind, it raises questions.
The disciples of Jesus forgot to bring bread . . . but there was a loaf of bread in the boat with them.
The disciples said, "We don't have any bread," . . . but there was a loaf in the boat with them.
Jesus said, "Why are you talking about having no bread? Why can't you see or understand?" . . . because there was a loaf in the boat with them.
At one level, this takes the dullness of these disciples of Jesus to a new level. Are they really such slackers that they can't even see the one loaf they have in the boat? Are they truly that unobservant?
I think the story may have other levels of meaning for us. The Gospels, after all, are always working on us at multiple levels. Certainly, there is a way of looking at the obvious meaning of the text, at what it says right there at surface level. But there are also levels of meaning which must be uncovered. Part of the work of prayer is to listen more deeply, to hear some of the subterranean rumblings in a given passage with the ear of the heart.
Early Christians understood many of the "boat" stories in the four Gospels as stories that described both their personal lives and their life together as the people of God. For instance, in the story of the disciples on the stormy sea, the Church saw herself as that boat drifting amidst a stormy society which was trying to eliminate the followers of Christ. Their experience with the Roman Empire colored their understanding of the text. They became the boat, lonely and against the odds of wind and wave. But in that story, Jesus walked out to the boat, he came to them in the dark of night.
Further, "bread" is an image for sustenance and nourishment. A single loaf of bread may hearken back to the experience of the Israelites in the wilderness who were fed manna each day. There was only enough for that day, then the next day they had to go out and collect it again. On top of that, Jesus taught us to pray for "daily bread," no more and no less. This daily bread is enough and it is provided. God gives what is sufficient for the day.
So you might say that these disciples had in their boat "daily bread," enough for that moment.
So imagine for a moment that in the Mark 8:14-17 text, the boat stands for the Church or for the lives of those who follow Christ. There is a loaf of bread in the boat that represents what they have within themselves. You would think they could notice what was already present to them, but they do not.
Instead, the disciples lament that they did not bring more bread. This is consistent with how they are portrayed often in the Scriptures. For example, they want to feed hungry crowds by "going to buy" bread in the outside world. When Jesus says, "YOU give them something to eat," they have no idea what to give the hungry people. While they want to find resources in the outside world to give people ("go and buy bread"), Jesus wants them to give of the resources they already have within themselves ("you give them something to eat").
I think this little story in Mark 8 is about the inner resources that the followers of Christ have. The story seems to say, "There is a loaf within the boat, but you have to recognize it and acknowledge that it is present."
Most all of us are like the disciples, not recognizing the resources that God has placed within us already. We are continually looking in the outside world for something that will make us complete, that will help us achieve our goals, that will make us "more" of what we think God wants us to be. We read books and attend classes and go to conferences and try to be faithful to our congregation, trying desperately to get what we think we need.
I wonder if God might be saying to me or to any of us: "What is within you already is enough. You just need to uncover it and trust it. Enough has been given. Look within. Let the connection you have with Me grow, deepen, strengthen. You have a loaf in your boat. You don't need someone else's loaf. Your boat doesn't need to look like someone else's boat. Trust what you have. Trust what I've given you."
That may be the biggest part . . . trusting what I already have. In spiritual conversations with folks, I find that many people don't find it nearly as hard to trust God as to trust themselves, to trust that they hear God, that they are connected to God in unbreakable ways, that they can be loved, that they have a vocation and a life to offer in the world. We don't trust what God is doing within us. We don't trust those things about ourselves. We may see it in others, but we often don't trust it in ourselves.
So here's a word about trusting what's within you, trusting your inner resources. I doubt that you'll ever find anything in the external world that will make you complete, if you can't first of all embrace what is within you, what has been given already.
You have a loaf in your boat.
The disciples had forgotten to bring bread. They had only one loaf with them in the boat.
"Be careful," Jesus warned them. "Watch out for the yeast of the Pharisees. And watch out for the yeast of Herod."
They talked about this with each other. They said, "He must be saying this because we don't have any bread."
Jesus knew what they were saying. So he asked them, "Why are you talking about having no bread? Why can't you see or understand? Are you stubborn?"
This passage is a head-scratcher. Read straight through with a literal mind, it raises questions.
The disciples of Jesus forgot to bring bread . . . but there was a loaf of bread in the boat with them.
The disciples said, "We don't have any bread," . . . but there was a loaf in the boat with them.
Jesus said, "Why are you talking about having no bread? Why can't you see or understand?" . . . because there was a loaf in the boat with them.
At one level, this takes the dullness of these disciples of Jesus to a new level. Are they really such slackers that they can't even see the one loaf they have in the boat? Are they truly that unobservant?
I think the story may have other levels of meaning for us. The Gospels, after all, are always working on us at multiple levels. Certainly, there is a way of looking at the obvious meaning of the text, at what it says right there at surface level. But there are also levels of meaning which must be uncovered. Part of the work of prayer is to listen more deeply, to hear some of the subterranean rumblings in a given passage with the ear of the heart.
Early Christians understood many of the "boat" stories in the four Gospels as stories that described both their personal lives and their life together as the people of God. For instance, in the story of the disciples on the stormy sea, the Church saw herself as that boat drifting amidst a stormy society which was trying to eliminate the followers of Christ. Their experience with the Roman Empire colored their understanding of the text. They became the boat, lonely and against the odds of wind and wave. But in that story, Jesus walked out to the boat, he came to them in the dark of night.
Further, "bread" is an image for sustenance and nourishment. A single loaf of bread may hearken back to the experience of the Israelites in the wilderness who were fed manna each day. There was only enough for that day, then the next day they had to go out and collect it again. On top of that, Jesus taught us to pray for "daily bread," no more and no less. This daily bread is enough and it is provided. God gives what is sufficient for the day.
So you might say that these disciples had in their boat "daily bread," enough for that moment.
So imagine for a moment that in the Mark 8:14-17 text, the boat stands for the Church or for the lives of those who follow Christ. There is a loaf of bread in the boat that represents what they have within themselves. You would think they could notice what was already present to them, but they do not.
Instead, the disciples lament that they did not bring more bread. This is consistent with how they are portrayed often in the Scriptures. For example, they want to feed hungry crowds by "going to buy" bread in the outside world. When Jesus says, "YOU give them something to eat," they have no idea what to give the hungry people. While they want to find resources in the outside world to give people ("go and buy bread"), Jesus wants them to give of the resources they already have within themselves ("you give them something to eat").
I think this little story in Mark 8 is about the inner resources that the followers of Christ have. The story seems to say, "There is a loaf within the boat, but you have to recognize it and acknowledge that it is present."
Most all of us are like the disciples, not recognizing the resources that God has placed within us already. We are continually looking in the outside world for something that will make us complete, that will help us achieve our goals, that will make us "more" of what we think God wants us to be. We read books and attend classes and go to conferences and try to be faithful to our congregation, trying desperately to get what we think we need.
I wonder if God might be saying to me or to any of us: "What is within you already is enough. You just need to uncover it and trust it. Enough has been given. Look within. Let the connection you have with Me grow, deepen, strengthen. You have a loaf in your boat. You don't need someone else's loaf. Your boat doesn't need to look like someone else's boat. Trust what you have. Trust what I've given you."
That may be the biggest part . . . trusting what I already have. In spiritual conversations with folks, I find that many people don't find it nearly as hard to trust God as to trust themselves, to trust that they hear God, that they are connected to God in unbreakable ways, that they can be loved, that they have a vocation and a life to offer in the world. We don't trust what God is doing within us. We don't trust those things about ourselves. We may see it in others, but we often don't trust it in ourselves.
So here's a word about trusting what's within you, trusting your inner resources. I doubt that you'll ever find anything in the external world that will make you complete, if you can't first of all embrace what is within you, what has been given already.
You have a loaf in your boat.
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.]
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.]
Friday, February 11, 2011
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.
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.
Monday, January 31, 2011
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)
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)
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