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First Sunday in Advent
My dear friend Pastor Sue Schmidt alerted me to a Rilke poem that provides a beautiful entry into the Advent season. Advent is a time when, in the face of darkness, we search and pray for the numinous. When the poet says of himself, “I am dark. I am a forest,” I think of the opening of Dante’s Inferno:
Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood. How shall I say
what wood that was! I never saw so drear,
so rank, so arduous a wilderness!
Its very memory gives a shape to fear.
Death could scarce be more bitter than that place!
(trans. John Ciardi)
In Rilke’s telling, however, the numinous is always present, even though we don’t always notice it. “Of all who move through the quiet houses, / you are the quietest,” he writes, and “your shadow falls over the book we are reading/ and makes it glow.”
This glow enters the dark forest as well:
Often when I imagine you
your wholeness cascades into many shapes.
You run like a herd of luminous deer…
The poem concludes with an image of a wheel “whose dark spokes sometimes catch me up,/ revolve me nearer to the center.” Always with Rilke there is this play of dark and light that is central to Advent . Sue writes, “I really like the idea of moving into the center of the wheel – to God – and then seeing that all I do widens. When I work with God, then what I do has so much more impact.”
Let this poem bring light to you as the days get colder and darker and as the world, whether in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, or here at home, does what the world too often does. Listen for that presence that comes and goes, swinging the door so gently that it closes “almost without a shudder.”
You Come and Go
By Rainer Maria Rilke
You come and go. The doors swing closed
ever more gently, almost without a shudder.
Of all who move through the quiet houses,
you are the quietest.We become so accustomed to you,
we no longer look up
when your shadow falls over the book we are reading
and makes it glow. For all things
sing you: at times
we just hear them more clearly.Often when I imagine you
your wholeness cascades into many shapes.
You run like a herd of luminous deer
and I am dark. I am a forest.You are a wheel at which I stand,
whose dark spokes sometimes catch me up,
revolve me nearer to the center.
Then all the work I put my hand to
widens from turn to turn.
(Poem 45 from The Book of Hours, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)
