By  Rachel Revelle

Only in our doing can we grasp you.

Only with our hands can we illumine you.

The mind is but a visitor:

It thinks us out of our world.

 

Each mind fabricates itself.

We sense its limits, for we have made them.

And just when we would flee them, you come

And make of yourself an offering.

 

I don’t want to think a place for you.

Speak to me from everywhere.

Your Gospel can be comprehended

Without looking for its source.

 

When I go toward you

It is with my whole life.

 

In the past year, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Love Poems to God have greatly enriched my own spiritual practice, and this is one of my favorites. In the hospital, I experience many ways in which the mind is but a visitor and thinks us out of our world. Minds are rushed, racing, scrambling in the midst of a crisis. Or they are slowed, dulled, continually replaying thought processes through the ongoing hours of the day.

In a recent visit with a patient I gently nudged her during a pause in conversation by saying, “it seems like there’s something else on your mind…” She responded quickly and honestly with, “well there’s lots of different things on my mind; which shall we start with?!” Point taken.

The thoughts we then combed through entailed a painful confrontation with long-held Christian beliefs, familiar claims that many of us have learned and accepted from our traditions. The hospital is often the place where such confrontation has to happen, ready or not. Is my suffering part of God’s grand plan for the world? Does heaven or eternity mean what I thought it meant, now that I’m faced with giving up my husband to whatever it might be? Do I even know what I thought it meant?

God makes an offering

I am thankful for the frameworks of my tradition, as I think this patient was. But more and more I sense my mind’s limits. The fluster of irreconcilable questions. The exhaustion of trying to think a place for God. I understand the urge to flee. And yet, just when we would flee, says Rilke, God makes an offering. For me, I think that offering comes through the impulse to move from the frenzied headspace, down into heart and body space. To notice not what I think, but what I feel. To listen to God speaking to me from everywhere, including my own deepest emotions.

I’ve been reading a great book by Francis Spufford, Unapologetic, which interprets Christianity in the modern world based on the landscape of human emotional experience. We don’t have to—we can’t—prove emotions. “But,” he says, “emotions are also our indispensable tool for navigating, for feeling our way through, the much larger domain of stuff that isn’t susceptible to proof or disproof, that isn’t checkable against the physical universe.”

Can we hear it?

And so, to that timeless and yet always particular question of suffering, maybe we don’t ask God to explain Godself, or twist our minds out of the reality of this world trying to do that explaining ourselves. Spufford says maybe “We don’t ask for a creator who can explain Himself,” but rather, “We ask for a friend in time of grief, a true judge in time of perplexity, a wider hope than we can manage in time of despair.” He goes on: “the only comfort that can do anything—and probably the most it can do is help you to endure, or if you cannot endure to fail and fold without wholly hating yourself—is the comfort of feeling yourself loved.

Given the cruel world, it’s the love song we need, to help us bear what we must; and, if we can, to go on loving.” When we’ve reached the limits of our minds, God’s offering is a love song. Can we hear it? Can we hear and feel and, yes, know that we are loved, that we are love?

I used to think of poetry as limiting, because I could not understand it. Through gradual immersion I have come to see that its disregard for a rational standard is in fact its spacious gift. Amidst the pain and suffering of this place, poetry infuses me with love, motivates me to go on loving. So, then, I close with another love song, this one by Hafiz:

 

Forget every idea of right and wrong

Any classroom ever taught you

 

Because an empty heart, a tormented mind,

Unkindness, jealousy and fear

Are always the testimony

You have been completely fooled!

 

Turn your back on those

Who would imprison your wondrous spirit

With deceit and lies.

 

Come, join the honest company

Of the King’s beggars—

Those gamblers, scoundrels and divine clowns

And those astonishing fair courtesans

Who need Divine Love every night.

 

Come, join the courageous

Who have no choice

But to bet their entire world

That indeed,

Indeed, God is Real

 

I will lead you into the Circle

Of the Beloved’s cunning thieves,

Those playful royal rogues—

The ones you can trust for true guidance—

Who can aid you

In this Blessed Calamity of life.

 

Lover,

Look at the Perfect One

At the Circle’s Center:

 

He Spins and Whirls like a

Golden Compass,

Beyond all that is Rational,

 

To show this dear world

 

That Everything,

Everything in Existence

Does point to God.

 

Rachel Revelle served as a chaplain intern for FaithHealth this summer. She is a rising third year student at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity and a member at Knollwood Baptist Church. Rachel is interested in the role of faith in the public sphere and how communities can collaborate to promote the flourishing of all people.