If you like Rainer Maria Rilke, you may already know Joanna Macy's name and a bit of her work. She and Anita Barrows have given us wonderful English translations of his poetry. For instance...
Go to the Limits of Your Longing
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
---
As we grow and move through the years, that line "Don't let yourself lose me" is such wonderful advice. God is never just who we think God is. Standing fixed in even our dearest and best ideas of God we lose God.
I get lost all the time in the confusion of what to do about the steady destruction of this world God has given us. Painfully lost. Full of guilt and despair--finding refuge mainly in my private self and relatively safe life.
To grow is to move, to move is to be, for a time, lost. To be lost is to be confounded and yet potentially to have fresh energy to seek.
If we listen carefully for God, even from our fixed places, we will always hear something like, "Don't let yourself lose me--give me your hand."
