Two Questions from Rilke on Our Work

The poet Rilke asks the question “When can we be real?” I propose that we are on the way to being real when we pay attention to non-action, that is to the via positiva (awe, wonder and gratitude) and the via negativa (silence, darkness and loss) in our lives. These constitute our “inner work.”

But we don’t actually become real until we abandon ourselves to creativity, until the Spirit that made the heavens and the Earth can flow through us and effect its New Creation through us. We become real when our work joins the Great Work. We become real when our inner work becomes work in the world; when our creativity, born of deep attention to both enchantment and nothingness, serves the cause of transformation, healing, and celebrating.

In other words, we become real when our work becomes compassion expressed in creative ways that surprise and that effect change. This happens to the extent that we act out of non-action, when our outer work is born of our inner work.

Rilke poses a second question, “When does God pour the earth, the stars, into us?”  This is a striking way of putting the issue of work and creativity and our becoming real. When our creativity has an opportunity to manifest itself in our work we do indeed become real. And our work becomes real.

Rilke notes that our becoming real is tantamount to our undergoing the holy experience of the earth and stars “poured into us.” Our work is cosmic because the cosmos has been feeding us all along—indeed long before we arrived on the scene.  This is precisely what happens in creativity. The birthing energy of a compactly birthing cosmos, the fire energy of the original fireball, the sun energy of the process of photosynthesis, the expansion energy of our expanding universe all work in us when we too give birth.

There is a natural progression from the via positiva and the via negativa to the via creativa in our work. Our inner work of enchantment awakens our passion and energy for work, for response, for saying yes. Our inner work of nothingness and grief awakens our awareness of how much work needs to be done, of how many beings are suffering because we are not working wisely. When these two experiences come together in our work of creativity, we are led into the Great Work, our work of the via transformativa.

Creativity is the bridge between our inner work and outer work that society requires of us. Creativity is the threshold through which our non-action leads to actions of beautification, celebration, and healing in the world. Creativity is both an inner work and an outer work.

Thus our “becoming real” and “God pouring the earth and stars into us” accompany our work wherever we go in life.

Adapted from Matthew Fox, The Reinvention of Work, pp. 113f.

Banner Image: Woodworker creating a piece. Photo by Benjamin Thomas on Unsplash.

Queries for Contemplation

Consider these two questions posed above by poet Rainer Rilke about becoming real and about the stars and earth being poured into us. 

Do you also find the answers in your work and the ongoing Great Work of the universe?

Recommended Reading

Natural Grace: Dialogues on Creation, Darkness, and the Soul in Spirituality and Science 
by Matthew Fox and Rupert Sheldrake

Natural Grace, a 208 page inspired dialogue between theologian Matthew Fox and scientist Rupert Sheldrake, unites wisdom and knowledge from unconventional angles. Considering themselves heretics in their own fields, Matthew and Rupert engage the conversation from postmodern and post-postmodern perspectives, deconstructing both religion and science—while setting the foundation for a new emerging worldview. Having outgrown the paradigms in which they were raised, both Fox and Sheldrake see it as part of their life missions to share the natural synthesis of spirituality and science rooted in a paradigm of evolutionary cosmology.