For well over seven years, I wrote a spiritual column for the Danville News. The process of writing and sharing of new ideas and receiving feedback certainly helped grow my soul, and hopefully aided others in making meaning out of the many seasons and experiences of life. As a way of kicking off a new offering of spiritual columns, I am sharing a portion of a column I wrote almost twenty-four years ago with the Danville, Pennsylvania community and beyond. So, here is the a piece of the column, dated Friday, April 5, 2002.
“Poetry is the language of the soul. We find poetry in the Bible, we find poetry on crumpled pieces of forgotten paper, we find poetry in the natural world and we find poetry most definitely in the heart. Poetry is the songs of Easter, the inward cry of grief and the outward cry of hope. Poetry is the emotional fabric which holds us together when our yesterdays have been tragic and our tomorrows are expected to be worse. When we are at both our worst and best places in life, words flow out of the soul like a river that has been waiting and waiting to run its course.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke reminds us of the power of words in the poem, Autumn. In coming to terms with humanity’s struggles with illness and mortality, he wrote: “The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up, as if orchards were dying high in space. Each leaf falls as if it were mentioning “no.” And tonight the heavy earth is falling away from all others in loneliness. We’re all falling. this hand here is falling. And look at the other one….it’s in them all. And yet there is Someone, whose hands are infinitely calm, who holds up all this falling.
Living in this twenty-first century is frightening. Continued violence in the Middle East, terrorism, the threat of biological and nuclear warfare surround us so much that our senses become dulled. It is if everything is falling down. We are tempted to numb ourselves with work, our apathy, and our drugs of choice so that we do not have to face our awareness of the pain, suffering and violence in the world. Yet it is by embracing the darkness that we discover the light. It is only by confronting the reality of evil that we discover the beauty of goodness. It is only by accepting the harsh reality of life that we can find transcendence, a moving over and beyond those things that keep us awake at night.
As the poet reminds us, there is Someone who holds us up in this world and the next. This Someone will never let us go. This Someone does not faint or grow weary. This Someone will never stop loving us. This Someone will not abandon us when we are struggling with cancer, joblessness, depression, loneliness or whatever situations in life hurt us. It is the Someone who gives us meaning and provides us with the language of the soul and the courage to live in these troubling and disturbing times.”
In reflecting on this column, I am reminded more than ever that I need “courage to live in these troubled times,” and that I need to embrace “the language of the soul,” the Universal Spirit of goodness, hope and joy, that releases me from the shackles of fear and injustice so that I can “do justice, love kindness and walk humbly” in this unsteady world.
