My husband and I are on vacation experiencing wine tasting in Avignon.
Mistral winds blow cold and fallout from the actions of seemingly heartless leaders across the world swirl around us and within us. What counsel will help us now?
Rilke, one of the greatest poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, wrote:
…Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me…
These lines are from the poem, ‘God speaks to each of us as he makes us,’ in Rilke’s Book Of Hours: Love Poems to God. This is Rilke’s take on what God is sharing with him as counsel. This translation from the German is by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. I particularly like, ‘Don’t let yourself lose me.’
A little more than twenty years ago, my friend, American nun, Sister Mary Luke Tobin, the only woman invited to Vatican II and close friend to Thomas Merton, wrote to me as she retired to the Mother House of The Sisters of Loretto in Kentucky. About the same time, I and my husband returned to live in Canada after nearly a decade of living in the southwest of the U.S. The character-building advice Mary Luke gave me was this:
Just give yourself away in everything you do.
In 1961, Dag Hammarskjold the second Secretary General of the United Nations, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He was honoured this way because, despite many setbacks, he always worked towards peace. The peace he worked towards included integrity and justice.
Here is a prayer by Dag Hammarskjold which for decades has deeply influenced people learning to be peacemakers. They are from his book, Markings: Spiritual Poems and Meditations:
Give us pure hearts that we may see thee,
a humble heart that we may hear thee,
a heart of love that we may serve thee,
a heart of faith that we may live thee.
Today, on a white board in a room which holds slightly vanilla scented oak barrels containing the finest aging red wine at the Chateauneuf du Pape winery in Avignon, I read these words. They were printed in French blue block letters and are indelibly in my consciousness:
Rien ne se perd
Tout se transforme.
(This translates into English as ‘Nothing is lost.
Everything is transformed.’)
We will receive counsel in these fraught times and always. We will likely give some counsel, whether we are conscious of it or not, to others who will remember what we say. My hope is that we and others will set our intentions that we act from loving hearts.
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