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Artwork

 

KERRY JAMES MARSHALL, “Vignette 19,” 2014 

Reflection

As someone with a history of extensive trauma I live with a complex and disabling form of PTSD.  The main way I have walked through healing is through grief work, which at times has been terrifying and seemingly endless. Along the way of healing I discovered writers and poets, artists and others whose writing gave me hope. One of those writers
is Rainer Maria Rilke and his Letters to a Young Poet. Rilke had an extraordinarily difficult life burdened by psychological distress and physical illness and yet he rejoiced in Life itself and always drew others to its beauty and worth. 

Rilke’s advice about sadness speaks a deep hope to my heart. I remember reading these words when I felt overwhelmed and wondered if my life would ever bear fruit beyond trauma. It said to me that recovery from trauma is about a transformation from within, otherwise a recovered life would be strange and uncomfortable for me. 

As we near the end of Advent, I imagine many of us wondering how and when will the new life of the Kingdom of God manifest itself beyond the trauma of human experience. Maybe the new world is waiting for us to be ready, is waiting for us to work it out within ourselves, to nurture within us the kingdom we wish for in the world.  It seems this is the way it needs to be - to have our hearts and minds deeply challenged and changed by the world we have, so that when the Peaceable Kingdom manifests itself completely, it will not be strange to us, it will have been born from our experience and it will be our home. 


“And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: 
because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside. The more still, more patient and more open we are when we are sad, so much the deeper and so much the more unswervingly does the new go into us, so much the better do we make it ours, so much the more will it be our destiny, and when on some later day it “happens” (that is, steps forth out of us to others), we shall feel in our inmost selves akin and near to it. And that is  necessary. It is necessary – and toward this our development will move gradually – that nothing strange should befall us, but only that which has long belonged to us. We have already had to rethink so many of our concepts of motion, we
will also gradually learn to realize that that which we call destiny goes forth from within people, not from without into them.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, (Letter 8)

Scripture

Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honour. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers.

Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. 

Romans 12.9-15