Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking
because of a church
that stands somewhere in the East.
And his children say blessings on him
as if he were dead.
And another man,
who remains inside his own house,
dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children
have to go far out into the world
toward that same church
which he forgot.
Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Robert Bly)
Sometime in the 1980's, someone gave me a collection of Rilke translated by Robert Bly, and I have carried it with me for all these years. I find Bly is still my favorite translator of the German mystical poet. In graduate school I did a performance with synthesizer based on this beautiful poem, and a series I called "Landscapes from Rilke".
Yesterday the poem popped into my head. I had been thinking, while driving around on seemingly endless errands, that I have become too resigned, I have perhaps traded too much "mature realism" for the spiritual quest that used to animate my art and life. In my previous post I have been thinking about Pilgrimage, which can be a metaphor a well as a physical movement.
Rilke's poem is about the call that can come to seek a deeper life. To become a "source - eror". Not all people are called, but for some of those who do hear the sound of distant bells, the "church that lies somewhere in the east" may be a monastery, for others, a studio, or an orphanage, or a university, a ticket to a distant land, or a trail that leads into the silent cathedral of a canyon or a forest. Sometimes the seemingly unmarked trail to that church can feel like delusion, or great loss........there are not always "road signs" or certainties along the way. Usually there are not, and always the unexpected occurs when we enter that liminal zone of Pilgrimage.
What I love about this poem is the profound connectivity Rilke implies. The man or woman who "keeps on walking" is one who heeds the call of that spiritual calling because he feels he no longer has any other choice. He realizes that nothing else will matter if he remains.
He is willing to abandon the life he has been leading, but not himself. Such was the legendary beginning of Siddartha's quest to become the Buddha, leaving behind his responsibilities as a prince, father and husband, the quest that led to the birth of Buddhism. Was it wrong to leave behind those responsibilities and the loved ones who depended upon him? Yes. Was it right to leave those responsibilities and the loved ones who depended upon him to pursue what became the birth of Buddhism? Yes. Morality is layered, and sometimes the answer in both cases is yes, and yes.
The one who remains in Rilke's poem, "in the dishes and the glasses", who does not leave when called, is neither right or wrong. He has chosen to remain, to find meaning in the love and duties of family and social responsibility. His labors (and domestic pleasures) have resulted in the lives and sustenance of his children. But his choice to not take the spiritual journey to that "church somewhere in the east" at some point in his life, to forget, to close the door, leaves a residue that ghosts within the house of his life. Thus, his children, or perhaps his grand children, are left with a hidden destiny, which is to fulfill the quest that he did not.
