The Breath of God

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Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, breath, desire, dream, I AM, longing, Rainer Maria Rilke, strong, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

I felt the need for poetry this morning. Everything is gray and drenched with last night’s rain – definitely Friday. Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours had been sitting silently on the shelf under my side table for a long time waiting for attention. The subtitle of this translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy is Love Poems to God. I read page 81 as a continuing stream of words, a paragraph, which seems suitable to me right now.

I am, you anxious one. Don’t you sense me, ready to break into being at your touch? My murmurings surround you like shadowy wings. Can’t you see me standing before you cloaked in stillness? Hasn’t my longing opened in you from the beginning as fruit opens on a branch? I am the dream you are dreaming. When you want to awaken, I am that wanting: I grow strong in the beauty you behold. And with the silence of stars I enfold your cities made by time.

Can you feel the power within those words? The desire that is waiting for a response? The reason I could not allow a breath between the lines but plunged in and kept swimming until the end? I need to sit now in the silence of which he speaks, even though the morning begins to lighten everything inside and out. Are you there with me?

Encouraging Words To God

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Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, God's strength, Rainer Maria Rilke, relationship, solitude, strength, sunlight, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

In Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God I found this morning the following lines of what a future relationship with God might look like from his perspective at the turn of the 20th century. I was especially struck by the personal tone and vivid images that he used as he encouraged God about God’s strength in the world – perhaps still in the future today or ready for manifestation now through us.

You too [God] will find your strength. We who live in this time cannot imagine how strong you will become – how strange, how surprising, yet familiar as yesterday. We will sense you like a fragrance from a nearby garden and watch you move through our days like a shaft of sunlight in a sickroom. We will not be herded into churches, for you are not made by the crowd, you who meet us in our solitude. We are cradled close in your hands – and lavishly flung forth. (II, 26)