Easter Sunday For Easter I offer up two April poems that work as a before and after. First, Rainer Maria Rilke speaks of the “slumbering silence” before everything bursts into flower. Then William Carlos William describes that bursting as almost too much to bear. First the breathless anticipation, then the flowering. In the Rilke poem, […]
Tag Archives: Rainer Maria Rilke
Shafts of Golden Light
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The Leaves Are Falling
Rilke says that, like the leaves, we all are falling. But “there is one who holds this falling/endlessly gently in his hands.”
What Drives You to Go Forth?
Spiritual Sunday The prodigal son is one of Jesus’s most challenging parables. I once read about a rightwing Christian arguing that Jesus had it all wrong since the story’s outcome violated her views about who deserves to be helped, whether by God or the government. Writers have had their own interesting takes. Andre Gide, tormented […]
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What I Heard Was My Whole Self
Spiritual Sunday Today’s Gospel reading concerns Jesus’s awakening as he was being baptized by John. That moment was his own epiphany, when the membrane between the sacred and the profane was penetrated and he realized that God dwells within us (Luke 3:21-22): Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been […]
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The Eternal Doesn’t Want To Be Bent by Us
Rilke draws on the story of Jacob and the Angel in his poem “The Man Watching.” We grow, he writes, by “being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.”
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And a Woman Said, “Tell Us of Pain”
Is Kahlil Gibran right in seeing pain as a road to enlightenment. Or is this just wish fulfillment?
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We All Are Falling
A spiritual poem by Rilke about falling leaves.
