“…grow through your development quietly and seriously; you can interrupt it in no more violent manner than by looking outwards, and expecting answer from outside to questions which perhaps only your innermost feelings in your most silent hour can answer.”
Today is Good Friday, and if ever there is a day where the (Christian) expectation is to be in the most silent hour, this is the one. I for one, will be singing today. Stabat Mater by Jens Eriksson, our choir director and composer of this marvellous piece of music, which we performed for the first time exactly a year ago. This piece does invite contemplation, some of the parts are so beautiful, it makes me tear up when I am performing it (or listening to it, which I do, a lot!).
Reverting to Rilke though, the notion that looking for answers from outside is a violent interuption of personal development, and the futility of believing that that is where they reside, the answers. Outside of ourselves, the place many look, similar to the old man who lost his house keys and was found looking for them underneath the lamp post on the street. Kindhearted folks came to help him, and asked where he lost the keys, and the man answered how he lost them “over there” – pointing in another direction – but as there was no lamp post there, he wouldn’t be able to find the keys in the dark, so he was searching here in the light.
Hands up anyone who’s ever searched outside of yourself for an answer, which you perhaps knows can only be found within, but you simply cannot make yourself go there… but why? What is it we so fear within ourselves? Is it the dark, the shame, the weakness, the failures and all that we wish we were not? Or is it the light, that Marianne Williamsson so eloquently refers to?
#Blogg100 challenge in 2017 – post number 45 of 100.
The book “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke.
English posts here, Swedish at herothecoach.com.