I Met Rilke's God in the Nettle Patch
longing, rage, and retreat: a meditation
Welcome Back to The Wildroot Parables
Thank you for joining us!
I just returned from a much-needed weekend out of town, a true unexpected blessing.
The time spent away from home, away from the normal routines that can dull our senses, brought up quite a lot of feelings and realizations, some of which I’m still digesting. But there were a few things that I felt I could write about here in the hopes that by sharing, others might relate and be encouraged. I present them here in a multi-part meditation, a patchwork of thoughts.
I hope and pray that the words I share today find you well.
And if you are not well, I pray that God meets you even in the midst of that pain, confusion, grief, and anxiety. I pray for peace to soothe all of our longings.
Blessings to all.
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And now, on to the meditation…
At Home With Strangers
On the final morning of the women’s retreat, I hiked up the muddy hill and filled the plastic clamshell box that had once held a dozen poppyseed muffins with a healthy harvest of stinging nettles.
After all, there are some medicines I simply can’t grow at home.
I was a guest at this retreat, and it was my first trip like this in a very, very long time. The event was hosted by my best friend’s church, and she generously invited me to tag along. Most of these women were complete strangers to me. Even so, the whole group—around twenty-five women of various ages—were completely welcoming and kind. I felt at home right away. We filled every nook and cranny of the large, rural Airbnb house that the church had rented for the occasion; every bed and even some of the couches were occupied. We took turns setting up meals and cleaning up after them. We sat for formal worship sessions and prayer, yet had lots of free time to wander the beautiful property, play games, laugh, eat snacks, and daydream.
The theme of the weekend’s formal meetups was longing. We took a little trip through time back to Hannah’s tale in the beginning of Samuel’s first book, to the famous story of her longings as a barren woman, a wife who could not give her husband a child in a culture that saw barrenness as a curse from God. We meditated on the finer details of this story, each with our own unique understanding of this grief that will not rest and the second wife who taunts us with our own inadequacies. We all have a longing like Hannah’s, a soul-deep wound, even if it’s not specifically for a child.
We also made a side trip to talk about Jonah, the prophet who was given a command by the God he knew intimately…and chose to run in the opposite direction. But instead of talking about the ship and the storm and the whale and the desperate third-day prayer of repentance, we talked about feeling angry enough to die, about the vine that grew overnight and the worm that ate it away, about weeping when God removes the little things from us that we cling to, to distract ourselves from how deeply bitter and resentful we are when God doesn’t give us the right kind of justice. When we long for Him to act or move in a way that He will not.
The psalms made an appearance, too, of course. And throughout the weekend, in my free time, I immersed myself in the poetry of Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. It felt appropriate: Rilke’s frank conversational style with God feels more like psalmistry than literary flair.
As it is in the psalms, longing is a deep undercurrent in Rilke’s more spiritual verses.
Poetry And The Pond
Late on Saturday afternoon I took a solo walk up the grassy hill to a pond that was rumored to exist but couldn’t be seen from the house.
On the way up, I looked down along the path and saw a familiar friend: stinging nettles, growing in a dense patch, that signature deep and dusky green shot through with sun-burned purple. One of my very favorite plants to find, harvest, and consume. They are hearty and healthful, making a nourishing tea on their own or a fortifying, mineral-rich addition to soups and stews, their sting deadened by cooking. I have often fantasized about planting a patch of nettles in a hidden corner of our yard, but ultimately I always shy away from it. They are infamously invasive, and one small patch doesn’t stay small for long. Instead, I harvest them when and where I can.
I made note of their location and kept walking. At the top of the hill, sure enough, was the pond. A sizeable one, too, ringed around with cattails and reeds alive with the calls of redwing blackbirds. Some geese floated at the far end and eyed me warily; I assured them I wasn’t interested in swimming.
Instead, I sat on the rickety old dock and pulled out Rilke’s Book of Hours. And in that place, in the hesitant April sunshine, I rediscovered this gem:
God talks to each of us as he creates us, then walks with us silently out of night. But the words, spoken to us before we start, those cloudy words, are these: Sent forth by your senses, go to the very edge of your desire; invest me. Back behind the things grow as fire, so that their shadows, lengthened, will always and completely cover me. Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Only press on: no feeling is final. Don't let yourself be cut off from me. Nearby is that country known as Life. You will recognize it by its seriousness. Give me your hand.
(Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Edward Snow)
Rilke is not as ubiquitous a poet as, say, an Emily Dickinson or a Robert Frost. But this particular poem of his is relatively well known, mainly for those two lines: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. / Only press on: no feeling is final.” I see this section quoted out of context quite a bit. It makes for a nice little platitude about the maelstrom of life, the ups and downs. Keep going, the lines seem to say. Don’t give up. Muster your strength. You got this; it gets better!
But I do feel that those lines are entirely hollow without the one that follows, which is meant to be from God’s own lips:
“Don’t let yourself be cut off from me.”
These words ring like a bell through the poem. More than an encouragement, they are a pleading request from a God whose longing is us. All He wants is for us to draw near and stay there with Him, remembering. Seeing past the long shadows of our pain and knowing that He’s there, always.
But we don’t. I certainly know I haven’t.
The Sting In The Medicine
There are so many things that I am grateful for in my life. It was one of the exercises we practiced on the first night of the retreat: to record all of the ways we could think of where God already led us through a longing and accomplished things for us we could never do for ourselves.
But in the last six months or so—after a long, slow buildup, like sludge in a faucet—I have also found myself growing deeply angry. Raging. Dwelling on a lot of unfairness, regret, and shame about the twists and turns my life has taken, the things I wish I had done differently, the things I wish I could change now. And since expressive anger is an unfamiliar emotion for me as a world-class bottler of feelings it has often frightened me to feel this way. To feel genuine rage.
Hannah and Jonah handled their longings very differently, but in one respect they were the same: they knew their God, they loved and respected their God, and they were not afraid to let Him see the ugliest side of their distress. The weeping, the anger, the resentment. They were frank and honest before their Lord, and He did not see it as disrespect. Far from it.
“Say it however you need to say it,” He seems to whisper, over and over in the face of human pain in the Scripture. “Rage and scream and cry and beg and curse. Just do not let yourself be cut off from me.”
It is true intimacy to be vulnerable in front of someone else, and despite its volume and ferocity, anger is paradoxically one of the most vulnerable emotions we have. Because anger almost always is a cue for something else: loneliness, fear, shame, grief, bitterness, insecurity, or a heart’s-cry expression of unfairness or injustice. And we cannot heal those feelings without giving them proper breath, even if that breath is an unkempt and disorderly shriek of frustration.
Some things sting, you see, but still contain medicine.
Souvenir: To Remember
I didn’t take any photos on the retreat. It was tempting; the location was very beautiful, sitting up on hilly farmland looking out toward the hidden sea, open sky, the snow-covered Olympic mountains at our backs.
But I was enjoying the feeling of being outside of cell range, of being blissfully unreachable. Even picking up my phone to use the camera felt like a step too far, like I would break a necessary spell.
So instead, as a sort of souvenir of the time spent, I commandeered an empty plastic clamshell box leftover from the breakfast muffins and a pair of scissors from the well-stocked Airbnb kitchen and I hiked up the hill on Sunday morning, mud squelching under my boots, to harvest some nettles. To bring back a little taste of the place.
There are some medicines we simply can’t grow at home, you see. We have to let ourselves wander elsewhere to find them. We have to leave the well-worn paths, the ruts, the contexts we know too well, and approach life from another angle. Our routines may help us survive the day, but they can dull our senses, too. They can veil the face of mystery, make it harder to see the unexpected.
That said, our longings are not solved by a weekend away, either. Mine certainly weren’t. But what we find when we look is nourishment for the waiting, even if it stings a little.
In the poem, Rilke’s God understands that the things we long for—the things we desire, regret, fear, and rail against—grow, the way fire grows. They cast heavy shadows and cover His face. It is part of being human.
But His invisibility is an illusion. He’s there; we’ve been holding His hand all along.
All that is required of us is to choose never to let go.
In our country as it currently stands, I don't think I'd trust anyone who *doesn't* feel some rage. Sending hugs.
And for you or anyone else reading this: know that any changes you need to make to live fully and wholly as yourself—changes that might be scary and tumultuous in the short term but are wonderful and freeing in the long term—I am cheering you on. Take the steps, one day at a time.
I am sending you a link to my sister’s daughter-in-law’s substack. She appears to be cultivating the same “garden” as you. She is married to my sister’s son, who is at the University of Iowa, certifying as an ophthalmologist. She is new to Substack (December 2024). I believe that like you, she is a good writer and a good person.
Mackenzie https://mckenziehunt.substack.com/p/all-he-wanted-after-all-was-me/comments?utm_source=substack%2Csubstack&publication_id=3397759&post_id=160808115&utm_medium=email%2Cemail&isFreemail=true&comments=true&utm_campaign=email-half-magic-comments&action=post-comment