Dear Friends ~ I have been living with Rainer Maria Rilke's poem "Gravity's Law," letting it percolate within me while the events of this past month weigh heavily upon me. How do we keep our inner hearts alive and well while this national heaviness and crisis grips and pushes each of us?
Merton speaks of "a point of nothingness at the center of our being," a point of absolute poverty, the small thing within us that Rilke says is being pulled by "gravity’s law" toward the heart of the world. When we surrender to gravity's law and befriend our own poverty of being, "we rise up rooted, like trees." The knots of our own making are untangled. Our struggle, our loneliness and confusion, our entanglements are held in place within the heart of the One who holds all things together.
Like children, we begin again to learn from the small things, which live in God's heart. Gravity's law teaches us to fall and to trust our heaviness. We see the beauty in our brokenness, the power of our poverty, the fuel in our falling, the holiness in our heaviness. Like a baby bird who has yet to fly, we are at the edge of the nest, and the mother bird pushes us out. We trust our own heaviness. And we start to fly. What is your heaviness teaching you? ~ Bob