Tag: Livethequestionsnow

Rilke

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher | Leave a Comment on Rilke

A couple of years ago, I retranslated for my own personal meditation, some of Rilke’s letters to Franz Xaver Kappus. As I was revising my talk for an upcoming Center for Action and Contemplation gathering, I realized that I’d like to share from these on my blog here. You may enjoy to meditate on them too, in a bilingual way.

Living the questions now has been since my twenties a large part of my imaginal world. I have been meditating my whole life, with increasing frequency and intentionality. Isn’t that simply what it means to be human? In my experience, living the questions now and pray without ceasing can be synonymous. And we see below that Rilke also says we may gradually, eventually live the answer, or embody love. Which reminds me that Anonymous writes in the Cloud of Unknowing that contemplation is love and is healing myself and others and also stirs my heart to love myself and others.

May our pausing to be still and to taste the peace we already are in our hearts bring you and me to compassionate living in our chaotic and hurting world.

You are so young, your life just beginning. I wish to ask you, best I can, dear friend, have patience with everything unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a very strange language.

Don’t search for the answers now. They can’t be given to you, because you wouldn’t be able to live them. And living everything is the point. Live the questions now. Perhaps gradually, without knowing it, some day in the future you’ll live the answer. Perhaps you have the power within you to see and shape a very sacred and simple way of life.

Study and train for that. But whatever comes, accept it with great confidence, and if it comes from your own True Self, from some need of your inner being, accept it as who you are. And hate nothing.

Sie sind so jung, so vor allem Anfang, und ich möchte Sie, so gut ich es kann, bitten, lieber Herr, Geduld zu haben gegen alles Ungelöste in Ihrem Herzen und zu versuchen, die Fragen selbst liebzuhaben wie verschlossene Stuben und wie Bücher, die in einer sehr fremden Sprache geschrieben sind.

Forschen Sie jetzt nicht nach den Antworten, die Ihnen nicht gegeben werden können, weil Sie sie nicht leben könnten. Und es handelt sich darum alles zu leben. Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen. Vielleicht leben Sie dann allmählich, ohne es zu merken, eines fernen Tages in die Antwort hinein. Vielleicht tragen Sie ja in sich die Möglichkeit zu bilden und zu formen, als eine besonders selige und reine Art des Lebens[.]

[E]rziehen Sie sich dazu, – aber nehmen Sie das was kommt in großem Vertrauen hin und wenn es nur aus Ihrem Willen kommt, aus irgendeiner Not Ihres Innern, so nehmen Sie es auf sich und hassen Sie nichts.

Translated by Carmen Acevedo Butcher, from Rainer Maria Rilke. Briefe an einen Jungen Dichter: Mit den Briefen von Franz Xaver Kappus, Wallstein Verlag, 2021, p. 32. Hg. und mit Kommentar und Nachwort von Erich Unglaub.

Sophie

Posted on | by Carmen Butcher

When I studied for a year in Heidelberg at Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, it wasn’t my teachers who taught me to speak German, it was the children in my life and also a septuagenarian. The teachers scared me. Combine dyslexia with I-can-write-and-read-German-but-I-can’t-speak-it-or-understand-it, and I was a mess in class. Walking down Plöckgasse to the main library to review, I studied the cobblestones and feared the next class session when I’d be called on to speak haltingly.

Meanwhile, the Buschbeck family took me in. Sophie Buschbeck was 79 to my 22. She was a widow. She lived on Mozartstrasse and loved music. She took me with her to the blind Gemüsefrau to buy vegetables, she took me on walks up and along scenic and historic Philosophenweg, she took me to church, she took me to visit shut-ins, including one famous former concert pianist who’d only play for Sophie, she took me to art museums, she invited me to a Christmas with a real tree and beeswax candles burning on it, and she had me clean her rugs and her toilet and wash her steps. And she cooked a roast chicken for me every Friday since “Americans like roast chicken.”

She went from Frau Buschbeck and the formal “Sie,” to asking me to call her Mutti and use the intimate “Du.” And her grandchildren said things to me like (except, in German): “You speak as if you have a hot potato in your mouth!” Which is apparently how my Southern accent elongated the crisp German syllables to their ears. And “We don’t say it like that!” Meanwhile, their parents kept telling me my German was “hervorragend!” “terrific!” When it wasn’t.

Her husband was a Lutheran minister in World War II and was five years in a Russian prison camp. She said that every day she asked God to send her “Mann”—her husband home, and one day she looked out from her balcony and saw an unrecognizable figure but with a gait she knew, a way of walking she went to embrace. Haggard, underweight, his face disheveled and marked with suffering.

“And,” she told me (also in German), “for every time I asked God to send him home to me, I now try to thank God as many times. Which is what you must do, Carmen. You must thank as often as you ask for something.”

So when I use German, after all those asks to “Please help me speak and hear/understand it,” I am thankful, every single time I use German in any way, I feel gratitude to Mutti Buschbeck and her family.

[I]ch möchte Sie, so gut ich es kann, bitten, lieber Herr, Geduld zu haben gegen alles Ungelöste in Ihrem Herzen und zu versuchen, die Fragen selbst liebzuhaben wie verschlossene Stuben und wie Bücher, die in einer sehr fremden Sprache geschrieben sind. . . .

Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen.

From Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe an Einen Jungen Dichter

I wish to ask you, as gently as I can, dear friend, please have patience with everything unresolved in your heart. And try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, and like books written in a very unknown language. . . .

Live the questions now.
From Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Translated by Carmen Acevedo Butcher