Journal of Sacred Work

5 responses to “Days 177-179 – Open Forum”

1. 

   Karen York

   June 26, 2009

   I have been studying this poem of Rilke lately:
   I come home from the soaring
   in which I lost myself.
   I was song, and the refrain which is God
   is still roaring in my ears.
   Now I am still
   and plain:
   no more words.
   To the others I was like a wind:
   I made them shake.
   I’d gone very far, as far as the angels,
   and high, where light thins into nothing.
   But deep in the darkness is God…

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2. 

   ~liz Wessel

   June 26, 2009

   Beautiful Karen, thank you!

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3. 

   ~liz Wessel

   June 26, 2009

   When one suffers we all suffer for ours is a shared humanity.
   The following except is from an extraordinary essay by Xavier Le Pichon called, Ecce Homo (“Behold Humanity”)
   “Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark.” mentioned Francis Bacon. In a beautiful book on palliative care, Michael Kearney writes that “we all share that primal and instinctive fear of the dark which Bacon speaks of and I believe that it is this existential and primal fear of the unknown that can generate that particular form of human suffering I call “soul pain”. He adds: “The prime mover is … the ego which is happiest when in control of a familiar and predictable world…, but which is profoundly threatened by the approach of death which it sees as utter chaos and the ultimate unknown.”
   “The effort accomplished by humans to escape the chaos that he believes to be present beyond death is the backdrop of the process of humanization.
   The radical novelty of the pole of fragility and vulnerability
   I wish now to explore further the radical novelty of this pole of fragility and vulnerability within human societies. Why did we humans have to “invent” our humanity as we discovered that we were fragile and vulnerable? Why does human society take into account sick, aged, handicapped persons? Why does it try at all to integrate them, even if it is often in an imperfect way? By not excluding them, or letting them disappear, humans give up at least partially the law of survival through efficiency that prevails in the world governed by the harsh laws of evolution. Is not the fact that a sacred character, whether positive or negative, has often been attributed to mentally handicapped or psychologically disturbed persons the indication of this attitude of questioning, deference and fear of humans when confronted with the mystery of psychic suffering?
   Not only do humans care for those who do not have any direct biological utility, but they care for those who have disappeared and want to keep their memory, as demonstrated by our Neanderthal ancestors of the Shanidar cave one hundred thousand years ago. They may actually spend an incredible energy to keep the memory of the dead. The construction of dolmens and pyramids must have mobilized whole populations during tens of years. Was not art in its infancy an attempt to alleviate the two major concerns of humans, fecundity and death? To overcome death through this double strategy: have descendants and keep the memory of deceased was an explicit preoccupation of humans since their origin.
   Thus human societies have reorganized themselves about a new pole governed by the presence of suffering and death, which is related to the realization of the fragility and vulnerability of its members. Actually, we tend to judge the degree of humanity of a society through the way in which it takes into account in its organization the presence of suffering and death.”

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4. 

   Victoria Facey

   June 26, 2009

   Beautiful poem, especially the verse where the light shines through.

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5. 

   ~liz Wessel

   June 27, 2009

   I regret posting yesterday as I did not mean to crowd Rilke’s exquisite poem.
   In the spirit of Karen’s beautiful offering I return to Rilke once more.
   My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
   in which you see me hurrying.
   Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a
   tree;
   I am only one of many mouths
   and at that, the one that will be the soonest.
   I am the rest between two notes,
   Which are somehow always in discord
   because death’s note want to climb over-
   but in the dark interval, reconciled,
   they stay there trembling.
   And the song goes on beautiful.
   ~Rilke
   Translated by Robert Bly

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