The Breath of God

Tags

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?

Thirsting, Yearning, Pining…

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beauty, desire, Jan Phillips, light, luminous, No Ordinary Time, psalm 42, soul, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, yearning

Psalm 42 is one of the most evocative tracts in Scripture of our desire for God. Many church hymns and spiritual songs are written using the actual words or others that speak of the deep longing we experience in life. It’s difficult to read lines like: As a deer longs for running streams, so my soul longs for You, O God, without feeling a pull toward prayer or simply to silence.

Last evening I spoke with Jan Phillips, whose books I have often quoted in this blog. Jan will join us at the Sophia Center at the end of April to share some of the wisdom she has gathered from her life experience and personal reflection. (Keep watching the homepage for details.) I was not surprised when I opened her book, No Ordinary Time, this morning to find in her reflections for Saturday a perfect complement to Psalm 42. Beginning with a short poetic verse, she then gives an opening to how our desire for the Divine is mirrored in all of life. Here’s just a snippet of what she writes:

My desire is deep and enduring/You are here and yet do I yearn/To see you, Beloved, to feel you/O would my heart turn to fire.

It is the gift of our essence that attracts others to our light. It is our speaking out that calls forth the one we seek. Just as the beauty of a rose summons the bee when it is time for pollination, or the flickering flame charms the moth, so does the brilliance of our soul draw others toward us when we dare to bare it. There is nothing more luminous and alluring than the human soul revealing itself. (p. 148)

It will be our joy to welcome Jan in the spring of the year to experience the beauty of her creative self in word and music – and in the light shining out from her essence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of Words and Voice

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desire, God, Kahlil Gibran, love, mystic, Mystic of the Month, poet, The Sophia Center for Spirituality, understanding, voice, winged heart

Last evening, at our Mystic of the Month gathering, I – and some of the attendees – reconnected with Kahlil Gibran, a mystical poet and “old friend” who lived from 1883 to 1931 and whose work was quite popular in the 1960s and ’70s. The most well-known of his books is The Prophet which contains 26 short, poetic essays on aspects and issues of life. It was a very meaningful text for those of us who grew up in the ’60s and I was happy to have a conversation about Gibran and his work.

The most meaningful part of the presentation, however, for me and the participants was the reading aloud of some key passages in a few of the essays. The process reminded me of how voice adds meaning to words. One of the women present spoke of the different interpretation she noted from her own previous understanding when I read a section. Hearing it aloud with my inflection made all the difference. So now I will copy a few lines of the essay on love and hope that in some places in the world there will be voices raised in praise of Love, bringing beauty and peace to this day.

When you love you should not say, “God is in my heart,” but rather, “I am in the heart of God.” And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course. Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself. But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires: to melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night, to know the pain of too much tenderness, to be wounded by your own understanding of love; and to bleed willingly and joyfully. To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving…

Believing Is Seeing

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Advent, believe, believing, blindness, bounty of the Lord, desire, expect, Lord, Matthew, Messiah, miracle, seeing, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

We often hear the sentence, “Seeing is believing.” In the readings for today, however, it is just the opposite. From the psalmist we hear, “I believe that I shall see the bounty of the Lord in the land of the living” and calls others to courage and stoutheartedness in waiting for his vision to be realized in the coming of the Messiah. (Ps. 27) In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus encounters two blind men who ask him to heal them of their blindness. (MT 9) His question to them is interesting and instructive. He asks, “Do you believe that I can do this?” In other words, if you want to see, you’d better believe it’s within the realm of possibility to have it happen.

I have a friend who has preached positive thinking for many years. Her trademark trio of verbs is: desire, believe, expect. As we wait during this season of Advent for the “bounty of the Lord” we might choose to consider what it is that we want to see happen in our lives. What blindness might we wish to overcome that is possible because we believe in Jesus and in ourselves?