“Prayers for a Dark God: Rainer Maria Rilke among the Mystics”
Mark Burrows, Professor of the History of Christianity, Andover Newton Theological School
“My God is dark and like a clump of a hundred roots which drink silently…”
What are we to make of a poet who addresses God as “you darkness,” and proclaims his belief in nights? In an early collection first entitled Book of Prayers and later published asThe Book-of-Hours (1905), Rilke addresses himself to the elusive “God” largely unspoken in confident pulpit-talk. These poem-prayers voice a reticence often unheard in the formal discourse of theology, then as now. Here, the poet addresses this “neighbor God” as a dark “you,” without falling back on the exhausted certainties of creedal faith. Is this a voicing of the ancient mystical tradition expressed at the boundary of language and silence? Is it an invitation to courage for those overcome by the gnawing sense of God’s absence? Or is it what prayer has always been, a yearning at the place of emptiness and a wondering in which lament and hope are finally one?