In December of 1875 a boy was born in Prague, which at the time was then a provincial capital in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. They christened him René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke. That’s a mouthful for any kid. His father was a railroad official who had once been a cadet and who spent much of his adult life mourning the loss of his military career. His mother had previously lost a baby girl, and never got over that loss. She dressed him as a girl until he was six years old. She continually played with him by changing his clothes. Increasingly unhappy in her marriage, she spent more an more time taking him to churches to pray. In a misguided attempt at piety, she required that the young boy kiss the wounds in the hands and feet of the statues of Jesus. It is a wonder that the boy had any religious sentiment left in him after the way he grew up. At age 10 he was sent off to military school. Nothing in his early years prepared him for this. He was lonely. He felt out of place. He started writing poetry.

The poetry became his lifelong quest, his refuge, his way of interpreting the world, and his way of sorting out his own beliefs. And it became his gift to generations.

Rilke studies in Linz and Prauge and Munich. He wrote his poetry in German. My classmates who studied German all came into contact with Rilke’s poems and some of them were touched and deeply moved by his words. But German is not a language that I can read and so my contact with Rilke was limited to the snippets that were translated and quoted in the books of others. But in 1996, Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy undertook an English Translation of Rilke’s Book of Hours. It is masterful. I have a copy of the 2005 edition containing expanded prefaces and a brief biography of Rilke.

Rilke does what I cannot do. He uses very few words to express complex ideas and notions. I write a thousand words a day in my blog. Rilke uses less than a hundred to say far more.

Because once someone daredto want you,I know that we, too, may want you.When gold is in the mountainand we’ve ravaged the depthstill we’ve given up digging,it will be brought forth into dayby the river that mines the silences of stone.Even when we don’t desire it,God is ripening.

I, 16

I could write pages about how the quest for God is never a one-way street. We desire to know God, but we don’t so much seek God as we are found by God. There is something in our very nature that makes us want to come into relationship with God, but there is only so much that we can do and our efforts always fall short. But there is nothing quite as exquisite as being found by God.

Having said that, Rilke said it better. “Even when we don’t desire it, God is ripening.”

The poems deserve to be read out loud and savored. And they tend to linger in my mind. I am reading them slowly, now, never more than one or two per day, so that I can savor the power of their language.

My friend and mentor, Ross Snyder, said that each of us an ecology of spirit. A human being is a web of interconnected relationships. Our beliefs and thoughts and ideas, our passions and desires – all of these are shaped by multiple relationships. I know that I have been formed by teachers that I met face to face and whose classrooms I frequented and by teachers that I have only known through the reading of their words. My library is filled with books that have become my friends. The way that I see the world is so influenced by others that I no longer know what ideas are mine and what ideas I appropriated from others. Perhaps I do not really have any independent thoughts. Perhaps no one can have any independent thoughts. From our earliest years we are shaped by our relationships with others.

Last night we took the youth from our church to a nearby ranch and into a now un-used barn. The floors were covered with hay and the place was dusty. I led them up a steep ladder into the loft where the rancher used to store baled hay. There in that dimly lit, chilly place we once again told the story of the birth of Jesus. I spoke the words of the Gospel of Luke that I have memorized. If I repeated that action each year for the rest of my life, it would not lose its power. There is nothing obviously powerful about the setting. But to me it holds powerful memories of the rancher who so recently died and who had been such a good friend. There is nothing new about the words. Even the youth have heard them over and over again. But the process is nonetheless powerful because it is the passing of ancient texts forward into a new generation.

The story did not begin with me. It does not end with me. I belong to something far bigger than myself.

When I look at the world, there are so many things that I want to change. There is suffering that is unnecessary. There are injustices that need to be righted. There are hungry people that need to be fed. There are children and youth whose lives lack connection to the heritage and stories of our people. But time rushes quickly. I am but one voice and my voice is small – even insignificant – in the vastness of the universe. I realize that my impact on the vast problems of this world will be tiny.

But it is just that the moment when I realize how small I am that I begin to sense that the real transformation doesn’t come from my effort, but that I am called to witness what God is doing.

How rich to be reminded once again that I am not alone.

Copyright © 2012 by Ted Huffman. I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.