Singing Suddenly is my new blog about the life of the heart and the spirit. It’s about loving God and neighbor. It’s about looking for ways to express what proves, without translation and reworking, inexpressible. It is a humble effort to “eff the ineffable.” It’s about attending to things that prove both elusive and crucial to life, especially if we are to enjoy a life of love and resist the absurdity and callous indifference of power.
In a prose note, “Concerning the Poet,” Rainer Maria Rilke described an experience which captured for him the life and work of poets. He described the crew of a becalmed sailing vessel as they took up oars and struggled against the tide. Then he gave his attention to someone else. “Now,“ he wrote,
I cannot postpone any longer mention of the man sitting at the front on the right-hand side of the boat. I ended by believing that I could feel in advance when his song was about to begin, but I may have been mistaken. He sang suddenly, at quite irregular intervals, and by no means always when exhaustion increased; on the contrary, his song occurred more than once when all of the rowers were vigorous or even, but even then it was the right thing; even then it was appropriate. I do not know to what extent the mood of our crew communicated itself to him; they were all behind him, he rarely looked backwards, and was not affected when he did so. What did seem to influence him was the pure movement of his feeling when it met the open distance, in which he was absorbed in a manner half melancholy, half resolute. In him the forward thrust of our vessel and the force opposed to us were continually held in counterpoise—from time to time a surplus accumulated: then he sang. The boat overcame the opposition; but what could not be overcome (was not susceptible of being overcome) he, the magician, transmuted into a series of long floating sounds, detached with the most immediate actuality and the overcoming of it, his voice maintained contact with the farthest distance, linking us with it until we felt its power of attraction.
(Where Silence Reigns “Concerning the Poet,” Where Silence Reigns: Selected Prose by Rainer Maria Rilke, (New Directions Paperbook) Rainer Maria Rilke and G. Craig Houston) 66.
Perhaps Rilke’s insight about poets speaks as well for sojourners in the heart and spirit.
My name is John Griswold and for thirty-five years or so I have been a United Methodist pastor serving primarily in Florida. I look for simple words, ideas, and images to translate what we cannot translate, to point toward what we cannot see, to resound beyond our horizons. In spirit and heart, in God and neighbor, in love, I work toward counterpoise between hope and resistance.
I invite you to join me.