Free Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

there and claims to dwell in Christ there although there was no room in him, not even for his mother , and not for Mary Magdalene – as with anyone who points the way and is a gesture and not a place to stay. – And for this reason they do not dwell in Christ either, the stubborn at heart who are always re-creating him and live from setting crosses which are crooked or have been blown completely over upright again.They have this press of people on their conscience, this queuing up in an overcrowded place, they are to blame that the journey does not continue in the direction of the arms of the cross. They have made a
métier
of the Christian purpose, a bourgeois occupation,
sur place
, a pool that is alternately drained and then filled up again. Everything that they do themselves, according to their own insuppressible natures (so far as they are still living beings), stands in contradiction to this curious disposition of theirs, and so they cloud their own waters and continually have to refresh them. They are so zealous they cannot stop making the Here and Now , which we should take pleasure and have trust in, base and worthless – and so more and more they deliver the earth into the hands of those who are prepared to turn it, the failed, suspect earth which is good for nothing better, to temporal, quick profit. This increasing ransacking of life, is it not a consequence of the devaluation of the Here and Now which has been going on for centuries? What madness, to divert us towards a beyond when we are surrounded by tasks and expectations and futures here. What deceit, to divest us of images of earthly delight in order to sell them to heaven behind our backs! Oh, it is hightime the impoverished earth called in all the loans that have been made on her felicity to provide for a time that lies beyond the future. Does death really become more transparent by having these light-sources dragged behind it? And isn’t everything that is taken away, given that no void can sustain itself, replaced by deceit and deception – are our cities filled with so much ugly artificial light and noise because true illumination and song have been surrendered to a Jerusalem which will only be entered later? Christ was perhaps right when, in a time of stale and threadbare gods, he spoke ill of the earthly; though (I cannot imagine it otherwise) it amounts to an insult directed at God not to see in what is granted and conceded to us here – so long as we use it correctly – something that fills us with happiness, completely and right to the outer margins of our senses!
To make the proper use of things, that’s what it comes down to
. To take the Here and Now in one’s hand, lovingly, with the heart, full of wonder, as, provisionally, the one thing we have:
that
is at once, to put it rather casually, the gist of God’s great user’s guide,
this
is what Saint Francis of Assisi meant to record in his hymn to the sun which as he lay dying he thought more splendid than the cross,whose only purpose in standing there was to
point towards
the sun. But what goes by the name of the Church had by then swollen into such a clamour of voices that the song of the dying man, drowned out in all quarters, was only caught by a few simple monks and infinitely assented to by the landscape of his lovely valley. How many such attempts there have been to produce a reconciliation between Christian denial and the manifest friendliness and good spirits of the earth. But elsewhere too, at the heart of the Church, even at its actual summit, the Here and Now managed to gain its plenitude and its native abundance. Why is the Church not praised for having been sturdy enough not to collapse under the living weight of certain popes , whose thrones were weighed down with bastards, courtesans and corpses? Did they not have more Christianity in them than the dry renovators of the Gospels – that is, Christianity that is living, irrepressible, transformed? What I mean is that we