The Rest between Two Notes

Kay Einem, "Mary with Child"

Reader Sue Schmidt, who runs a wonderful blog called Let’s Choose Joy, is allowing me to run a post she wrote recently in which she applies a Rainer Maria Rilke poem to the Advent season.  Rilke is a perfect poet for Advent because his poetry invariably gives the sense that transcendence is imminent, even though out of reach, hovering just beyond our peripheral vision. He wrote a number of his poems when he was dying of leukemia–perhaps this was one of them–but rather than focusing on the death towards which he is “hurrying” down the “steeply sloping hour,” he writes of the song of life “trembling” in the “dark interval.” Although the note of death wants to “climb over” everything else–Sue points to danger of despair and depression–in “the rest between two notes” all is “reconciled.”

By Sue Schmidt

The First Sunday of Advent, a liturgical season celebrated in many congregations, was this past Sunday. During Advent, Christians anticipate the coming of Christ, not only remembering his birth in Bethlehem, but aware that one day He will come again as King to rule in peace and justice. But waiting characterizes much of the life of a Christian, for we find ourselves waiting each day for the signs of incarnation in us, for the quickening of the same spirit which overshadowed the young Jewess we know as Mary.

Waiting has its challenges. It is hard when you know what you are waiting for—a graduation, a wedding, a visit from friends or a long-expected vacation. But it is even more difficult when you don’t know exactly what is in the future, only that things aren’t now what they will be. For the past seven years, I’ve felt like that’s been my story, as I’ve entered this period of life, waiting for something to emerge, waiting to become someone whom I don’t yet know, and yet a person who will be more authentically me than I’ve ever been before.

In The Heart Aroused,” David Whyte quotes a poem by Rilke in which he describes his life as a rest between two notes. Here’s the poem, translated by Robert Bly:

I Am the Rest between Two Notes

My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.
Much stands behind me: I stand before it like a tree:
But I am only one of many mouths
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.
I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because death’s note wants to climb over –
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
They stay here trembling.

And the song goes on, beautiful.

Rilke sees the note before and the note to come as discordant, and in that uncomfortable clash exists a real danger that he will be overrun by death. Perhaps Rilke is not speaking so much of a physical death here as the despair or depression that comes when one feels “out of tune,” unaligned, fragmented. We feel that we have entered a dark night of the soul and don’t know what to do or how to bring our lives back into harmony.

The tension of these dark times can be frightening or paralyzing. But they offer us a challenge, an opportunity to go deeper, to reach a different level of integration. Donald Epstein has written on this in his book, The 12 Stages of Healing. In Stage 8 he describes coming to the place of emptiness:

Many people believe that emptiness is a lifeless void of nothingness that leads to emotional or mental paralysis. However, emptiness, when timed correctly in the healing process, leads to freedom…It serves as the space of transition…

The season of Advent is a season of waiting. It is a season of transition, of darkness, of longing for what is not yet here. But we need not be fearful. Instead we can learn how to breathe during these periods of our lives, to wait with patience and hope. As we approach these “advents” with expectancy, aware that something is forming deep in a mysterious womb, we can rest, knowing that, in the fullness of time, God’s handiwork will be revealed.

And the song will go on, beautiful.