Visited By A Mystical Writer

Long before I was born, Rene Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke was born (1875).  Can you imagine having a name like that?  He is better known as Rainer Maria Rilke.  I first became familiar with Rilke back in seminary days (1968).  Though Rilke died in 1926, his poems and a collection of his letters, published after his death as Letters to a Young Poet, live on.  He is still one of the more popular and best-selling poets in the U.S. today.

Rilke is considered a “mystical” writer.  A mystical writer is an explorer,  one who takes and uses words “to uncover hidden worlds and uncharted lands.”  When you read Rilke’s words, you tend to feel that you’ve experienced precisely what he is writing about.  Sometimes you feel as though somewhere in another time you’ve read these words before.

That’s the feeling I had this morning as I read the following passage from Letters to a Young Poet.  I have read these words of Rilke before, but somehow I sense the words this time around to be part of me, to be my experience, to be a part of “hidden worlds and uncharted lands” that lie within me.

“How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.  Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do.  You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.  Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions?  For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.’