God in the Dark: Rilke's Prayers of a Young Poet

God in the Dark: Rilke's Prayers of a Young Poet

Chris Yokel

This sense of God as darkness and silence is also accompanied by a sense of yearning. From prayer #6:

You, neighbor God, when I sometimes
wake You with loud knocks in the long nights,
I do so because I rarely hear You breathing
and know You’re alone in the vast hall.
And when You need something, no one’s there
to offer a drink to Your outstretched hand.
I’m always listening. Give me a sign;
I’m very near.
Only a thin wall lies between us—
by chance; for it could be
that a cry from Your mouth or from mine—
and down it falls
without any noise or sound at all.
The wall is built up from Your paintings.
And they stand before You like names.
And when the light flames in me
and claims You in my deep,
it squanders itself as radiance upon their frames.
And my senses, which darken so soon,
are without a home and parted from You.

In saying, “The wall is built up from Your paintings” I believe Rilke is referencing the religious iconography he experienced while in Russia. Rilke seems to be suggesting that our very attempts to capture the divine can often be a stumbling block or a barrier to experiencing God. Translator Mark S. Burroghs suggests that the “prayers” reveal “[Rilke’s] desire to loose God from the conscious realm of the intellect, to seek the divine not through concepts or doctrines but rather in the experiences communicated in ‘the deep,’ by means of images and metaphors….We encounter this God in the ongoing experience of creation, and above all in the primal darkness that represents each new experience of beginning. ‘The dark of God’ is not sheer absence but is rather a gesture toward a presence we can ‘sense’ but cannot know: ‘Don’t let go of me with Your hands,’ he cries, ‘for I am night from Your night.’….Darkness allows for the emergence of this ‘second life’ in our experience; it is the place of every new beginning, according to Rilke.”

Looking back, I can see that this has been true in my life. Darkness led to the beginning of a renewal in my spiritual life that I now see was desperately needed. Old, bad ideas of God and myself had to be plunged into a dark abyss, in order for the Spirit to hover once again over chaos and wait for the quickening word.

Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower

Written by Rainer Maria Rilke

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29