Thanks Rilke

This post was written during my senior year of college at Baylor University:

Packing books into boxes made me reflect on what I’ve learned in college. I packed wonderful books like Letters to a Young Poet, Night, A Lesson Before Dying, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Poisonwood Bible. Next to them, I packed a different type of classic literature- my favorite comic books: Daredevil: The Man Without Fear, The Adventures of Superman, and Calvin and Hobbes (to name a few). I’ve crammed a lot of knowledge into my brain over these four years.

“You’ve really received a good education here,” my mom said. “You’ve been exposed to many different kinds of books that I don’t think you would have seen anywhere else.” I have to agree.

I thought about some of the great things that I’ve learned from books that I’ve read. One thing stood out to me. As a young person who still has many questions about the world, I was comforted by the advice of Rainer Maria Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet. FYI: He is a famous German poet.
I need to thank Dr. Tatum and Dr. McGlashan for assigning Rilke in my BIC Capstone class.

Rilke wrote:

“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 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.”

Today I am striving to live the questions. What will I do after graduation? Why does God not make sense? Why do the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper? Why does this world seem so messed up? What can I do to make a difference? What is my highest obligation? Why do I always procrastinate? How many teeth does a goat have? Okay I’m not really asking that one. The point is I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I will bring them before God in prayer. By trying to live the questions, I hope to achieve some answers.

(Originally published on 4/24/2004)

(Minor edits on 5/20/2024)