The Wheel That Revolves Us Nearer to the Center

This poem from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours, with its own wonderfully strange images of God, is reminiscent of Yehuda Amichai’s and other poets like Yona Wallach’s focus on coming and going, opening and closing when the subject is God.  Why, I wonder, do so many poets find themselves at this image of continual movement when struggling to point to this reality?  Thomas Mann gives a clue in Joseph and His Brothers, when he speaks of the God of Joseph as the “God of becoming.”  Martin Buber gives another when he translates the name of God revealed to Moshe at the burning bush,  Ehyeh asher Ehyeh, I Am that I Am, this way:  I Will Be who I Will Be. 

This is one of the challenges of relating to the One: that we are not responding to a static order or reality, one that we can finally grasp or contain; we are responding to a dynamic, living reality, one that is continuously creating, ordering, healing, limiting, opening doors and slamming them shut, disappearing from the familiar places and reappearing in strange ways and places.

All intimate relationships require us to seek the depths of constancy and faithfulness in the midst of continual change, the hub that anchors the spokes.  When we can’t find those depths, our spirits suffer.  When we do, everything we do widens from “turn to turn.”  Our relationship with the Ever Alive, as I refer to God these days,  is no different.      

You come and go.  The doors swing closed
ever more gently; almost without a shudder.
Of all who move through the quiet houses,
you are the quietest.

We become so accustomed to you,
we no longer look up
when your shadow falls over the book we are reading
and makes it glow.  For all things
sing you:  at times
we just hear them more clearly.

Often when I imagine you
your wholeness cascades into many shapes.
You run like a herd of luminous deer
and I am dark, I am forest.

You are a wheel at which I stand,
whose dark spokes sometimes catch me up,
revolve me nearer to the center.
Then all the work I put my hand to
widens from turn to turn.

(I: 45, tr. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, 81)