No more words

I come home from the 
soaring in which I lost myself.
I was song, and the refrain which is God 
is still roaring in my ears.

Now I am still 
and plain:
No more words.

— Rainer Marie Rilke (translated by Joanne Macy and Anita Barrows)



I've emerged from the roaring of the semester, stepped out of the torrents of song.  It might not be as mystical an experience as Rilke is evoking here, but like Karl Rahner, S.J. who writes (in Encounters with Silence)"if there is any path at all on which I can approach You, it must lead through the middle of my very ordinary daily life" the daily is all that I have — a pragmatic mysticism.

I am still and plain at the moment.  Hobbled by my injured ankle, I am stilled.  No mad last minute Christmas shopping dashes for me.  I am plain, dressed in what accommodates the orthopedic boot which cradles my left ankle.  And I have no words.  On Thursday night, my voice inexplicably and inexorably began to vanish.

It is making me think of those last stages of labor, when you can't speak through the contractions any longer. I think of Mary laboring to give birth, her verbal "fiat" now silenced, she has now surrendered utterly and wordlessly to the workings of God within her.

So I am silent for now.  To see what worlds are forming in my heart.

All creatures are doing their best
to help God in His birth
of Himself.

Enough talk for the night.
He is laboring in me;

I need to be silent
for a while,

worlds are forming
in my heart.

— Meister Eckhart in Expands his being (trans. by Daniel Landinsky in Love Poems from God)