Quotes About Spirituality

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.

Ah, not to be cut off, not through the slightest partition shut out from the law of the stars. The inner -- what is it? if not the intensified sky, hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.

Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence. I know that my trunk rose from his warmth, but that's all, because my branches hardly move at all near the ground, and just wave a little in the wind.

I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of. Everything passes into it now. I don't know what happens there.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither the childhood nor future/ grows any smaller...Superabundant being/ wells up in my heart.

I would like to step out of my heart And go walking beneath the enormous sky.

Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walk only on feelings. That faces upward and in its mirror receives heavenly roads, which travel along themselves. That has learned to walk upon water when it scoops, that walks upon wells, transfiguring every path. That steps into other hands, changes those that are like it into a landscape: wanders and arrives within them, fills them with arrival.

We ignore the gods and fill our minds with trash.

Ask no one to speak of you, not even contemptuously. And when time passes and you notice how your name is spreading around among people, don't take it more seriously than any of the other things you find on their lips. Think: your name has turned bad, and get rid of it. Take on another, any other, so that God can call you in the night. And conceal it from everyone.

But when I lean over the chasm of myself— it seems my God is dark and like a web: a hundred roots silently drinking. This is the ferment I grow out of. More I don't know, because my branches rest in deep silence, stirred only by the wind.

My God, I thought with sudden vehemence, so you really are. There are proofs of your existence. I have forgotten them all and never even wanted any, for what a huge obligation would lie in the certainty of you.

when you go to bed, don't leave bread or milk on the table: it attracts the dead. [sonnet 6]

The inner, what is it: if not intensified sky hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.

I live my life in growing orbits which move out over the things of the world. Perhaps I can never achieve the last, but that will be my attempt. I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.

That's when I want you— you knower of my emptiness, you unspeaking partner to my sorrow— that's when I need you, — Rainer Maria Rilke, from "Ich bin derselbe noch, der kniete," Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God , trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (Riverhead Books, 1996)

What would you do, God, if I died?

Sin is the most wonderfully roundabout path to God

No waiting the beyond, no peering toward it, but longing to degrade not even death; we shall learn earthliness, and serve its ends, to feel its hands about us like a friend's.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?

Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love. Death stands before eternity and says YES.

My God, if any of it could be shared! But would it be then, would it be? No, it is only at the price of solitude.

Piously we produce our images of you till they stand around you like a thousand walls. And when our hearts would simply open, our fervent hands hide you.

Vielleicht sind gewisse meiner neulich ausgesprochenen Bedenken sehr übertrieben; so viel, wie ich mich kenne, scheint mir sicher, daß, wenn man mir meine Teufel austriebe, auch meinen Engeln ein kleinen, ein ganz kleiner (sagen wir) Schrecken geschähe, - und - fühlen Sie - gerade darauf darf ich es auf keinen Preis ankommen lassen.

But this press of time—take it as a little thing next to what endures. All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy.