Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. New York: Vintage, 1986, p.88.
This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life; the experiences that are called “apparitions,” the whole so-called “spirit world,” death, all these Things that are so closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness been so entirely pushed out of life that the senses with which we might have been able to grasp them have atrophied. To say nothing of God. But the fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one human being and another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down in a fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens.
2 comments:
Loving God, help me to face what I cannot understand. Give me the courage to bear what I think I cannot bear. Give me the daring to live my life fully, being present with whatever comes. Help me to open to all your gifts, in their strangest forms.
Hear, here, Rilke! Godess, I thank you for bringing to my attention passages and experiences that validate my growing sense of Who you are and how pleased You are to share Your being, which is different than my own. I thank you from the bottom of my heart, spirit, body and mind for the grace you bestow through the postings of Lindsay here, through the teachings of my Womanhood Workshop and in myriad ways that you continually reach out to me and others. Thank you so much for your steadfast love. Jeanne
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