Brian’s Reflection: Tuesday, December 4, 2007
I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two
people: that each protects the solitude of the other.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, poet, born on this day, 1875
Most of us probably know Rilke’s most famous quote:
Live your questions now, and perhaps even
without knowing it, you will live along some
distant day into your answers.
The Answers are not the most important. The Questions are. Answers that come long before the “distant day” make for dull, boring, rigid people. Such people make for a dangerous world. “Fundamentalists” are Answer people. They “get” them - often from God, no less! - they write them in stone - and they use those stones to batter those they fear. I have long been a Question person. And even now, at 61, many of the Answers I thought I had are slipping away. I am not afraid. It reminds me that I haven’t died yet; I have Life to live and much to learn.
I have for many years now loved the presenting quote. Because it is true. The most destructive relationships, and especially marriages, I have seen are those which do not or cannot honour the solitude of the other. Relationships which seek to redefine the other, reshape the other, deny the other, are fatally flawed - because the perpetrator is an incomplete human being. One of the glories of the Christian understanding of God is that God honours our solitudes. And we love Her by honouring Hers. By not attempting to remake Him in our own image. At the meeting of those Two Solitudes is the heart of Love.
Rilke said:
For one human being to love another; that is perhaps
the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last
test and proof, the work for which all other work is but
preparation.
Yes. Because authentically to love another, we must be our own Self. And it takes courage and acceptance and surrender and the hard work of self-awareness to do that.
For many, it is too hard. Many cannot break out of old roles and stereotypes. The failure of relationships in our time is the sign. The Trinity, strange a concept as it is, is a good role model: three Divine Solitudes forming the one pure Divine Love.
Brian+
I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two
people: that each protects the solitude of the other.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, poet, born on this day, 1875
Most of us probably know Rilke’s most famous quote:
Live your questions now, and perhaps even
without knowing it, you will live along some
distant day into your answers.
The Answers are not the most important. The Questions are. Answers that come long before the “distant day” make for dull, boring, rigid people. Such people make for a dangerous world. “Fundamentalists” are Answer people. They “get” them - often from God, no less! - they write them in stone - and they use those stones to batter those they fear. I have long been a Question person. And even now, at 61, many of the Answers I thought I had are slipping away. I am not afraid. It reminds me that I haven’t died yet; I have Life to live and much to learn.
I have for many years now loved the presenting quote. Because it is true. The most destructive relationships, and especially marriages, I have seen are those which do not or cannot honour the solitude of the other. Relationships which seek to redefine the other, reshape the other, deny the other, are fatally flawed - because the perpetrator is an incomplete human being. One of the glories of the Christian understanding of God is that God honours our solitudes. And we love Her by honouring Hers. By not attempting to remake Him in our own image. At the meeting of those Two Solitudes is the heart of Love.
Rilke said:
For one human being to love another; that is perhaps
the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last
test and proof, the work for which all other work is but
preparation.
Yes. Because authentically to love another, we must be our own Self. And it takes courage and acceptance and surrender and the hard work of self-awareness to do that.
For many, it is too hard. Many cannot break out of old roles and stereotypes. The failure of relationships in our time is the sign. The Trinity, strange a concept as it is, is a good role model: three Divine Solitudes forming the one pure Divine Love.
Brian+
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