I’ve been reading through Rilke’s Book of Hours and came across the following, which moved me deeply. In a course I’m teaching on the Powers of the Universe and the Path of the Christ, we are contemplating the power of allurement. Its cosmological expression is gravity. In the human realm it is the gravity that love exerts on our hearts. The line “to patiently trust our heaviness” slayed me.
The Book of Pilgrimage, Book 2, Section 11-16, (From Rilke’s Book of Hours)
No one lives his life.
Disguised since childhood,
haphazardly assembled
from voices and fears and little pleasures,
we come of age as masks.
Our true face never speaks.
Somewhere, there must be storehouses
where all these lives are laid away
like suits of armor or old carriages
or clothes hanging limply on the walls.
Maybe all paths lead there,
to the repository of unlived things.
And yet, though we strain
against the deadening grip
of daily necessity,
I sense there is this mystery:
All life is being lived.
Who is living it, then?
Is it the things themselves,
or something waiting inside them,
like an unplayed melody in a flute?
Is it the winds blowing over the waters?
Is it the branches that signal to each other?
Is it flowers
interweaving their fragrances,
or streets, as the wind through time?
Is it animals, warmly moving,
or birds, that suddenly rise up?
Who lives it then? God, are you the one
who is living life?
All who seek you
test you.
And those who find you
bind you to image and gesture.
I would rather sense you
as Earth senses you.
In my ripening
ripens
what you are.
I need from you no tricks
to prove you exist.
Time, I know,
is other than you.
No miracles, please.
Just let your laws
become clearer
from generation to generation.
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 things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
For even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.
Bruce – This and the previous post I see you were moved to write as you prepare yourself for teaching each installment of “The Powers of the Universe” course up there in BC. Both are terrific! In this way, those of us who cannot physically attend your course get a chance to benefit from it, too. Keep up The Great Work!
Thanks Connie,
So beautiful…thank you. Heavy so that we can be light…lost so that we can be found…without so that we can be within…mystery.
Yeah…
Thanks, Bruce. I’ve just said to myself on reading this, “Whoo-eee!! So simple yet so complex and so beautiful.”
Perfect response!
Thanks, Bruce. I’ve just said to myself on reading Rilke’s poem, “Whoooo- eeeee! So simple, yet so complex. So beautiful!”
Beautiful. Can you tell me who the translator is?
Good point, Carol. It’s an award-winning translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. I found it quite interesting to follow along in the German (although I don’t speak German). But you can see how challenging translation is, because there are so many plays on words, rhymes, rhythms, etc. that are impossible to do justice to. (This translation has the German text alongside the translation.
Nice.
Ordered a Rilke and Rumi book.
Your fault.
I don’t mind being responsible for this! Thanks Don
LIkewise, nice one, Bruce. I, too, said to myself, similarly. WOW!! This, too, captures it for me, as, for many years,now, I’ve seen G-D as NOT some ethereal supreme being “up-there”. That undertanding of the divine, of course, died out 2000 years ago, but rather as, as Lloyd Geering brilliantly descrbes as, simply Nature.(i.e his brilliant paraphrase of Ecclesisates 11″For now, you have heard it all! Stand in awe of NATURE, and do whatever it requires of you. For everything NATURE will bring to judgement. Even things done in secret”. I’ve read a bit about Rilke through another one of the many things to which I subscribe, “C3 Exchange”, Spring Lake MI’s e-zine, and his/her? wisdom seemed far ahead of his/her? time! Thanks!
Thanks Phillip,
I’ll have to read up on Lloyd’s meaning of NATURE.
I was thinking again about this allurement thing again this morning. I was contemplating Rohr’s take on Meeting the Holy as both mysterium tremendum (unreachable and beyond) and mysterium fascinosum (fascination, allurement, seduction). He said you needed both parts. If you only had the first part you would feel utterly powerless and separated and overwhelmed and if only had the latter part it would be just sentimental, emotional religion without deep reverence. I thought this was quite interesting because Swimm was talking about how we can choose to shrink to allurement or fall into it. Rohr talks about tremendum as experiencing God as all powerful and dreadful. Language of a fearful God does not work for me but now that I understand God and depth (Haught – thanks, brilliant book), I understand how the tremendum could be that element of insignificance I feel looking into the cosmos that makes me shrink away, makes me feel insignificant. Seduced and scared right out of your pants at the same time, kind of thing. I’ve had too much tremendum and not enough reverence in fascinosum. It makes my shrinking self not the shadow to allurement. A well discerned allurement could only go somewhere good. I was having trouble understanding where being allured to negative attachments was fitting with the theme of allurement. Now it makes sense. thanks.
Thanks Jill,
Yes, I saw Rohr’s piece. I like the association of tremendum with unreachable and beyond. I had never thought about associating this with the feeling of insignificance given the size and expanse of the universe. Thanks for that. I have to say I’ve never felt that myself, although many people I know do feel that.
To me this “unreachable and beyond” dimension is associated with the limits of my rational mind to comprehend. But it’s not dread that I feel. I sometimes wonder if Otto’s primary source material was mythic religious (and Western) accounts, which portray G_d as all-powerful, at times capricious, in charge of natural events (even using these to punish sin and correct “His” people), and jealous. That kind of G_d would give rise to “dread”, with the sense that it could all turn on a dime, and that G_d was doing the spinning. I haven’t come across this reference to dread before Reality in either Buddhist or Hindu scriptures (although I’m no scholar in either lineage).
Wilber talks about the confusion of span with significance—the bigger the thing in relation to us the more significant. But when I think that the whole cosmos, all that span (exterior) and depth (interior) con-centrates itself in a Jill, a Bruce, and in everything, I more feel like this process of evolution is living in, through, and as me/us. It’s thrilling actually.
Again, I don’t understand it. But I feel it. It thrills me, yes. But also silences me. Sometimes, after I go on and on about I feel like I could have written that old REM song, “O no, I’ve said to much…I haven’t said enough”. (And the only religion I’m losing is the version that I’m happy to lose). But words fail before this Mystery. It is as the Psalmist wrote, “too wonderful for me” (Psalm 139).
Thanks Jill, your post has given me reason to reflect on this some more, because when I read what Richard wrote the first time, I realized that I couldn’t actually relate to dread…but I can to unreachable and beyond.