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<\/span><\/p>\nBut for this very reason Advent is a needed countercultural force, calling us to risk turning aside from this hurried pace in anticipation of the mystery that waits to find us. Of course, we know that this is rarely easy, even when we know it is the truth we most need to follow. Perhaps we\u2019ve even heard someone quote the line from one of Rilke\u2019s poems, \u201cYou must change your life,\u201d but we sense how hard this is to do and how unlikely, given the stress in our lives. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n May this call of \u201cthe slowing\u201d guide us in this Advent, helping us create space in our lives to live more patiently, more generously, more attentively. To wait in the dark we face until a \u201cnew clarity\u201d is born in our lives. <\/span><\/p>\n Poems of this sort remind us to seek to center ourselves, refusing to be \u201cconsumed\u201d by the hurry of these weeks. They remind us, as Rilke went on to write in this letter to \u201ca young poet,\u201d to \u2018let [our] judgments follow their quiet, undisturbed evolution, for this, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressured or hurried in any way.\u201d Advent is a time for just this kind of slowing; of attending to what matters most; and, yes, of turning from our hurry and relinquishing our worry, at least a little, as we live into the mystery of mercy.<\/span><\/p>\n Mark S. Burrows<\/span><\/p>\n <\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cMy life is not this steep hour in which You see me hurrying so.\u201d Many of us know could claim these lines, taken from one of Rainer Maria Rilke\u2019s poems, as a true confession, particularly in Advent. \u00a0For while we … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.paracletepress.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/Rilke_in_Moscow_by_L.Pasternak_1928.jpg\")
Rilke has become, for me, one of the trustworthy guides into what the late Gerald May simply called \u201cthe Slowing,\u201d a theme that is at the heart of Advent. For we need to slow down to savor what this season is about, opening ourselves to the lure of its mystery. In one of Rilke\u2019s letters, he suggests what this might entail in our lives: \u201cTo let every impression and every seed of a feeling realize itself on its own, in the dark, in the unconveyable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of your understanding, and to await with deep humility and patience the hour when a new clarity is born: \u00a0this alone is to live artistically, in understanding as in creation.\u201d This is what we are made for, as the themes of Advent remind us.<\/span><\/p>\n\n