Book Review: Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

Trust the mystery without clinging to the pattern.

Culturally, we have an assortment of “rites of passage” that encourage and stimulate our mental, spiritual and emotional development. Different from tribal celebrations, we honor and value receiving a driver’s license, graduating from high school and college, developing personal and intimate relationships filled with respect and love. We savor the waves of joy and enshroud our being during bouts of pain. In our “rites of passage” we encounter ourselves and others in moments of intense vulnerability and receive the grace of illumined being. We come to know the pain, suffering and unknowing that is wrapped up in moving through life with intentionality.

In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke taps our spirit with a piercing tenacity for illustrating depth with the written word. Rilke’s brilliant articulation of welcoming and wrestling with desolation and consolation parts the sea of gloom and illumines clarity. His lucidity is not one of explicit answers rather an invitation to become acquainted with unknowing. In befriending the unknown there is a space for curiosity to clear a path for authentic living. Turning the pages of this text is a plunging of mind, body and spirit into the potential for becoming more expansive in thought and action. The richness of this book is countered with the reality that there may not be tangible knowledge gained from reading these pages but there is a cultivation of trust in the tedious process of growing into ones self fully. This book is like the wisdom of a wise-seasoned-friend who knows that the truth of the seeker resides within the individual, and their role is to mirror back the depth, which is currently unable to be seen.

Each and every human person knows the fragility of faith and belief in God. Honoring the space of doubt, skepticism, fear and unknowing in an act of accessing the “heart of the matter” has revelatory impact on the possibility of growing into faith that can doubt and trust at the very same moment. In honest relationships with others we move toward the facilitation of personal illumination in areas that have been previously shaded or blocked from intimate knowing.

Poetic and wise, Rilke offers his thoughts on moving with the experience of feeling darkness. To his friend he writes:

Why do you want to shut out of your life any agitation, any pain, any melancholy, since you do not know what these states are working upon you?
...just remember that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself of foreign matter, so one must just help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness…

Why should we attempt to avoid the feeling of darkness simply because it is uncomfortable. Rilke emphasizes patience with one’s self, with others, with the Divine. In these moments of patience—patience laced with the sometimes-excruciating pain of despair—we rise to newness otherwise unknown in our being. It can be humbling to look back upon our lives and realize that the moments of greatest trial have often served as catalysts for significant life change. Hopefully, the gentle nudges of Rilke can instill an appreciation for the blessings residing in the shadow of pain. May we come to a space of trusting and loving that which, at this moment, is unknown, for we know that a deeper truth is desperately trying to emerge.

Katie Cranor
Bernardin Scholar ’07-‘08