Apr 25 2025
Rainer Maria Rilke – I am praying again, Awesome One
I am praying again, Awesome One
by Rainer Maria Rilke
English version by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
I am praying again, Awesome One.
You hear me again, as words
from the depths of me
rush toward you in the wind.
I’ve been scattered in pieces,
torn by conflict,
mocked by laughter,
washed down in drink.
In alleyways I sweep myself up
out of garbage and broken glass.
With my half-mouth I stammer you,
who are eternal in your symmetry.
I lift to you my half-hands
in wordless beseeching, that I may find again
the eyes with which I once beheld you.
I am a house gutted by fire
where only the guilty sometimes sleep
before the punishment that devours them
hounds them out into the open.
I am a city by the sea
sinking into a toxic tide
I am strange to myself, as though someone unknown
had poisoned my mother as she carried me.
It’s here in all the pieces of my shame
that now I find myself again.
I yearn to belong to something, to be contained
in an all-embracing mind that sees me
as a single thing.
I yearn to be held
in the great hands of your heart–
oh let them take me now.
Into them I place these fragments, my life,
and you, God — spend them however you want.
— from Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, by Rainer Maria Rilke / Translated by Joanna Macy
/ Image by Klara Kulikova /
I am praying again, Awesome One.
I like that opening line. Personal, honest, no pretense of formula.
I’ve been scattered in pieces…
Scattered, disjointed, plundered, befouled. Feeling this way, how does one ever feel whole again?
I yearn to belong to something, to be contained
in an all-embracing mind that sees me
as a single thing.
The first thing I would say is that the solution is not to return to a time when things were good or normal. Crises only arise when problems have been ignored. This is true on a personal, spiritual level, and it is true on the societal level.
So when we look back on a time in our lives when things felt more “right,” the first thing to do is to notice what we missed or ignored. Be willing to see what was not right about it. What were our secrets? What was our pain? Who suffered and was kept silent?
The first step is not to fix the brokenness. It is to feel the brokenness. It is to see it. As this poem does. If we are broken, let us see it and feel it. All of it.
Of course, to do so means the destruction of our cherished heroic self-story. But there is a strange magic that happens when we let that story fall apart and finally look into the shadows. Hidden in those hurt and hurtful corners is so much of ourselves. We can’t be complete without them. They may seem ugly or shameful. We may not know how to welcome them back into a healthy and functional sense of being. But it is all us.
All of those shadowy fragments, in ourselves, in society, they are the missing pieces that complete us. The failures we don’t want to admit in ourselves, they are the key to our success. The path to wholeness is through the brokenness, not away from it.
But how does one integrate it all? How does one atone for the hurts caused, heal the hurts received? No problem can ever be solved at the same level on which it was created. We need to step past the ego and the repeating justifications of the calculating mind in order to invite a higher level of intelligence. We might think of this as calling upon God or a Higher Power or simply a higher awareness within ourselves. We don’t have to know at the level of the intellect, but we have to be honest with ourselves, humble, courageous and open. Then watch what happens.
As the poet says with his own words of courage and humility:
Into them I place these fragments, my life,
and you, God — spend them however you want.
Recommended Books: Rainer Maria Rilke
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Rainer Maria Rilke
Germany (1875 – 1926) Timeline |
beautiful poem and commentary! I’m feeling much the same dealing with a long illness. Feel gutted, not myself, etc. Wonderful wisdom in your words… Thank you _/\_