Who are we?
We are God’s beloved.
Where are we going?
To lunch, to the park, to our homes, to work and to school: out into God’s world.
With what do we venture forth?
With the illumination of hope, with the strength of community, with the love of Christ.
With whom will we share it?
With one another, with the homeless woman on the corner,
With the downtrodden teenager, the bullied and the bully,
With the tender parts of our own hearts and the tender parts of our world.
Go in peace.
Inspired by words of Rainer Maria Rilke in a 1903 letter to a 19-year-old protégé.
I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903
Photo: Painted glass by Thomas Traherne, 1660, at Hereford Cathedral, taken by Ana Gobledale
