Dear Friends in Christ,
Over these many years together, one of the insistent issues I have tried to raise is the problem of what I call the glibness of church talk about God. I desperately fear that in doctrinalizing God, we domesticate God, even trivialize God. The mystics have been the great antidote to this diminishment of God, and also poets, those close cousins of mystics–people like Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson, but this month I want to share with you an extraordinary passage from a letter of the great German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke:
I began with Things, which were the true confidants of my lonely childhood,
and it was already a great achievement that, without any outside help,
I managed to get as far as animals. But then Russia opened itself to me and
granted me the brotherliness and the darkness of God, in whom alone there is
community. That was what I named him then, the God who had broken in
upon me, and for a long time I lived in the antechamber of his name, on my
knees. Now, you would hardly ever hear me name him; there is an indescribable
discretion between us, and where nearness and penetration once were, new
distances stretch forth, as in the atom, which the new science conceives of as
a universe in miniature. The comprehensible slips away, is transformed; instead
of possession one learns relationship, and there arises a namelessness that must
begin once more in our relations with God if we are to be complete and without
evasion The experience of feeling him recedes behind an infinite delight in
everything that can be felt; all attributes are taken away from God, who is no
longer sayable, and fall back into creation, into love and death. It is perhaps
only this that again and again took place in certain passages in the Book of Hours,
this ascent of God and of the breathing heart–so that the sky was covered with
him–, and his falling to earth as rain. But saying even that is already too much.
I love Rilke’s progression: from Things to God, then from “possession of God” (as in church doctrines) to “relationship with God,” and then an “ascent” of God into Things again (God “falls back into creation, into love and death.” Only a mystic poet can call such a fall an ascent!). Here is Rilke putting these thoughts into poetry:
I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all
my fellow creatures, pulsing with your life;
as a tiny seed you sleep in what is small
and in the vast you vastly yield yourself.
The wondrous game that power plays with Things
is to move in such submission through the world:
groping in roots and growing thick in trunks
and in treetops like a rising from the dead.
One of the reasons that I love the ancient liturgy, even with all the smells and bells, is that it asks us to respond with awe. A lot of “contemporary worship” feels trivial to me, like another domestication of God; but I know that for other people this style of worship speaks powerfully–it is why we need to have the flexibility to engage worship on many different levels. The goal must be worship that leads to relationship, not possession, and that finally returns us to our daily lives with eyes open and hearts alert to God’s presence, his Shekinah, that gives us a mystic’s infinite delight in all that is. “God falls on the earth as rain. But saying even that is already too much.” God is always more.
The year 2009 lies before us. What will it bring? Good and evil, tragedy and comedy, progress and defeat will all be there. But God will also always be there with God’s grace to offer us a way of coping with everything that happens, good and ill. I pray that for you this will be a year of grace. I pray that you will experience life in God. In this prayer I extend to you my hope that you will have
A most blessed New Year,
–Pastor Bastien
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