Monday Morning Musing: Holy Week

For Christians, we ask that this week bear the weight of telling the story of salvation. Exactly how we are 'saved' by the death and resurrection of Jesus is something that gets fuzzier to me the older I get and the longer I think about it. Atonement theories abound, but I am drawn lately to thinking that we are in equal part saved by Jesus' life as we are by his death. That his teachings and his example and his love and his rhythms of prayer and solitude and intense extroverting out there in antiquity also saved us.

Preparations for the NINE liturgies that will begin tomorrow morning and end in a week have my brain feeling over-stimulated, much like my eleven month old grand girl when she wants to play with ALL OF THE THINGS at once.

It's a lot.

This week also reminds me of my own children when they were small - of Easter basket preparation and dying eggs and making jelly bean trails from their bedrooms to their baskets some years. Of my sons little suits and my daughter's dresses and bonnets. Nostalgia is a regular visitor in weeks like this one.

The weather returned to its PNW grey after last weekend's glory. Still, that sunshine and warmth was enough to nudge every cherry blossom to life and it looks pretty glorious in these parts. It does a heart good.

Rilke wrote a poem about sprint with an often quoted line that kicks it off. Here's a translation that's faithful to the original German:

Spring has come back again. The Earth is

like a child that’s got poems by heart;

so many poems, so many verses,

patient toil winning her prizes at last.

Strict, the old teacher. We loved the whiteness

in the old gentleman’s beard, its bright snow.

Now when we ask what the green, what the blue is,

Earth knows the answer, has learned it. She knows.

Earth, you’re on holiday, lucky one: play now!

Play with us children! We’ll try to catch you.

Glad, joyous Earth! The gladdest must win.

Every lesson the old teacher taught her,

all that is printed in roots and laborious

stems: now she sings it! Listen, Earth sings!

Rainer Maria Rilke; translated by Stephen Cohn

"The Earth is like a child who knows poems by heart" is one of the Rilke lines you'll see most often quoted on the web, but there's seldom any attribution, and I wonder how many English speakers have seen the whole poem. The line comes fromSonnets to Orpheus(Part One, XXI), which Rilke wrote in February 1922, completing all 55 poems of the cycle in about three weeks.