Saturday, January 22, 2022 (today’s lectionary)
Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times
Jesus came with his disciples, and again the crowd gathered, making it impossible for them even to eat. Jesus’ family heard this and set out to seize him, saying, “He is out of his mind.”
Outside Bardstown, Kentucky, midway between the bourbon lovers’ Old Talbott Tavern (1779) and Thomas Merton’s longtime home the Abbey at Gethsemani, Joe Zarantonello has spent twenty years in the woods with his wife and many travelers at his Loose Leaf Hollow retreat center. He writes poetry and on Mondays he sends a poem out to his internet sojourners and companions. Like me.
This week he switched things up and sent a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke.
Ever-Widening Circle
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
I have been circling around God, that primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and still I don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
Why not all three?
Rouse your power, Lord, and come to save us. Let us only see your face, and we shall be saved.
The journey Rilke describes carries me up and outside myself, where I no longer settle for earth-bound, ego-driven definitions – for the momebnt, I’m just flying, circling around God, that primordial tower. Joe’s meditation-teacher-self calls this “the ever-widening Night Pilgrimage to discover the True Self.” Oh yeah.
In 1972, outside Charlotte, North Carolina, my friends built a blimp which was intended to be controlled by a homemade remote, very sophisticated. The device worked just fine, up to about a thousand feet. When the blimp’s ever-widening circles expanded above that range, it was gone. We watched it go.
We had no idea this would happen. It got smaller and finally disappeared. Did it return to earth?
Turned out, it did. The blimp was thirty feet long and filled with hydrogen and therefore was dangerous to man and beast. We called the state police and they hooked us up with a farmer who called them after finding the blimp in his cornfield and towing it to his house with his tractor. He tied it to his backyard clothesline.
Alas! How can the warriors have fallen, O Lord, in the thick of the battle, slain upon your heights?
We waited till 4 am when traffic was slow, drove to the farmer’s house, hooked our old pickup to the blimp and brought it home. At every bridge, we had to pull it down toward the ground. For several long days my friend Tracy stood and leaned on the fence beside the still-inflated blimp on its mooring post. He didn’t say a word. His mind must have been traveling in ever-widening circles. He created the blimp, but it had taken on a life of its own.
Tracy was an engineer and a balloonist. Rilke was a poet and seeker after God. He included this poem in his Book of Hours: Love Poems to God. Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows translated Rilke’s German into English. What a gift.
During a 2014 Christmas podcast, Joanna talked about her desire to continue flying with Rilke in his ever-widening Night Pilgrimage:
The biggest gift you can give is to be absolutely present, and when you’re worrying about whether you’re hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you’re showing up, that you’re here.
I might be a falcon, flying faster every moment. I might be a storm, rushing through the electrified sky whirling and dangerous. I might be a song, and seek to fill the throats of both falcons and storms, praising God. And God might say to all of us, “Come. You are entering the kingdom of Heaven. I will be with you, even unto the end of the world.”
(The Suicide of Saul, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1562, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna)
(2 Samuel 1, Psalm 80, Acts 16, Mark 3)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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