Category: random thoughts

Go To The Limits Of Your Longing

On By MaryIn poetry, random thoughtsLeave a comment

Go To The Limits Of Your Longing

Rainer Maria Rilke

translation by Joanna Macy + Anita Barrows

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 a 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.

Book of Hours, I 59

I kind of love this poem. Every time I read it, a different line resonates with me. Sometimes it’s the title: “go to the limits of your longing.” And I find myself thinking about, wondering about, what is my longing? Not just my longing of the moment (that’s usually pizza or a hot fudge sunday.) But what is my real longing, the longing of my heart, of my soul? That’s a whole other order of longing. And what am I willing to do to move one step closer to fulfilling that longing?

Other times, like today, it’s the lines: “flare up like a flame, and make big shadows I can move in.” Really, both of those lines raise the same kinds of questions. How might I flare up like a flame? Where/what is my passion?

It used to be social justice. Then it was human rights (similar, but a step more practical). For a moment, I was taken with practicing random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty. That came to feel a bit shallow. Important, but not enough, maybe.

More to the moment, if I had to say, I would say love. But love as an active verb, as doing. Love in relationship with others, with our world in an ecologically responsible kind of way of being. I remember a course I took with Father Jim Finnegan. I taught us that love means to see the goodness in someone, and to will and act to enable that goodness to grow, for their sake. That kind of love is what I would go to the limits of my longing for. That kind of love flare up like a flame for.  … what about you? What would you go to the limits of your longing for? What lines from the poem most resonate with you?

Who Made You?

On By MaryIn growth into humanity, In-spiration, lost goddesses, mysticism, random thoughts, spiritual growth2 Comments

I will confess, I am a product of too many years of Catholic school education. My earliest years at Holy Trinity school devoted more time to catechism than to math or penmanship. The good Sisters burned the question, “Who made you?” into my brain early on. (The Baltimore Catechism rote answer was always, “God made me . . .”) Recently, again, I’ve been thinking about the whole God-ness thing. Who is God/Goddess? What can our/my relationship to God, the Goddess be? How do I even begin to think about her/him/they/all of that which is? What name do I use? How do you/I adequately respect the Creator of every-thing?

Respect is tricky. I’m not even sure how it is possible to adequately respect my parents, my particular creators, who are human and flawed, yet who literally gave me my start in the world, who fed me, clothed me, sheltered me when I was helpless. God knows my parents were not perfect. I could go on about how I might wish they had been different. But where would I be without them?

How much more respect (and I know that is a profoundly inadequate word), is due to the Creator of every-thing? The one who was before every-thing, the one who always was and always will be, the Ground of All Being (thank you Paul Tillich). When I try to think about this, my brain feels caught in a centrifugal spin cycle! I need some structure and boundaries to bring my brain back into focus.

But the traditional Roman Catholic lines of thinking that first shaped my thinking just don’t do it for me anymore. Too patriarchal. Too God the Father.

Just when I was feeling particularly lost, I came across Sallie McFague’s book: Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age. In the book she cautions that it is not possible to construct a definition of God. It just can’t be done. My words, but it would be like trying to draw a map that included everything! Maps and metaphors and models include some bits and necessarily leave out others. And, what is left out is often as telling as what’s included. That said, she describes one possible model built on experiences of relating to God. … that was just what I’d been fumbling to sus out, so I was delighted!

Here’s a very condensed version of some of her core ideas. First, she begins with the grounding assumption that the power of the universe is gracious.  … I take some comfort in that. The power of the universe is gracious, not dominating, not judgmental, but gracious. When we related to God in prayer, she encourages us to remember that we are addressing, not describing, God, and she suggests a three-part model for our relationship: mother-father, lover, friend.

Mother-father: creator, who says it is good that you exist, who says that you are good.

Lover: savior (and haven’t our best lovers been saviors to us in a way?), who says that you are valuable beyond all measure.

Friend: sustainer, who invites us to work and celebrate together as collaborators in the process of creation, as we nurture each other.

It is not a perfect picture. There are lots of gaps. But for me, right now, it is a nice start, and a comforting beginning answer to the question, “Who made you?”

A mid winter montage

On By MaryIn random thoughtsLeave a comment

(Oh, please let it be MID winter! We’ve already had a winter’s worth of snow in just one go . . . )

“One kind word can warm three winter months.”  Japanese proverb

“The snow doesn’t give a soft white damn whom it touches.” E. E. Cummings

“If there were no tribulations, there would be no rest; if there were no winter, there would be no summer.” St. John Chrysostom

 

“January is the quietest month in the garden.  …  But just because it looks quiet doesn’t mean that nothing is happening.  The soil, open to the sky, absorbs the pure rainfall while microorganisms convert tilled-under fodder into usable nutrients for the next crop of plants.  The feasting earthworms tunnel along, aerating the soil and preparing it to welcome the seeds and bare roots to come.”  Rosalie Muller Wright, Editor of Sunset Magazine, 1/99

 

“Every gardener knows that under the cloak of winter lies a miracle … a seed waiting to sprout, a bulb opening to the light, a bud straining to unfurl.  And the anticipation nurtures our dream.”  Barbara Winkler

 

Clichés for the Cold:

Dead of winter.
Cold hands warm heart.
As pure as snow.
Now is the winter of our discontent.
Left out in the cold.