JK: I need to dig a little deeper there. If I am understanding you correctly, intransience means being removed from the temporal stream of transience. In some sense, we cannot think of it any other way, being bodily creatures. It is obvious that the body changes even during our lifetime. But I am thinking of our form—we are always form and thus recognizable. If I am lucky enough, Brother David, I would like to meet you again in heaven at the “honeycomb”—and be able to recognize you.
DSR: Even now, it is the case that after twenty years, we have no difficulty in recognizing old acquaintances, and yet no cell in their body remains the same. What we recognize is the form. And “form of the body” is the definition of the soul.
JK: Anima forma corporis est, as scholastic theologians have said. “Soul is the form of the body.”14
DSR: Soul means “that which makes this body this body”—and not just the body, but what makes this person this unique person.
JK: The soul is our unique aliveness.
DSR: Because we live in the double realm, we all have double citizenship, as it were: I am alive in time and space, but also in a greater Self beyond time and space.
JK: Brother David, I cannot help noticing how intensely your life’s path is accompanied by art: its beginnings in visual arts, but also by music and especially by literature and poetry. Clearly, you admire Rilke, Eichendorff, Morgenstern, Trakl, Celan, Stifter. In Germany, the North American poets—David White, T. S. Eliot, e.e. cummings—are less well known. The last of these has a special significance for you.15
DSR: Cummings’s poetry has grown very dear to me: it is very close to my heart. The quote of his that is most important to me is “i am through you so i.” It is the climactic last line of a love poem that simultaneously has overtones of a prayer, just like Rilke’s “Extinguish My Eyes” was a love poem and was then inserted into the Book of Hours as a prayer.16 Our deepest personal encounters in life always resonate with the Great Mystery. I could not express my own lifelong relationship with the Divine Mystery any more fittingly than in the sentence “i am through you so i.” What makes us persons is the richness and depth of our relationships. One’s being a person deepens and matures through each new encounter. In every deep human encounter, we can say: you make me be what I am. But in our encounter with the Great Mystery, we realize an even deeper truth: that we can say “I” only because we stand face to face with a primordial You.
Ferdinand Ebner and Martin Buber each in their own way demonstrated what “i am through you so i” means: beyond each human You, we are in relation to a mysterious You, mysterious in the sense that the Mystery, itself, is our ultimate You.
I remember how in my early years as a monk, I would wander over the hills around the monastery, simply praying the word You, over and over. The same is told of a great Hasidic master; he prayed, “You, you, you!” Is that not prayer enough?
JK: It reminds one of the Prayer of the Heart.
DSR: Yes, indeed. The Prayer of the Heart is also a prayer to the You, in the end. The older I become, the more important this “i am through you so i” becomes for me. When our I passes out of space and time, our relationship with the primeval You remains. That was and is the fundamental First from which everything comes, and it will be the Last that remains. And for me, this sentence of “i am through you so i” belongs in a context with Rilke’s stanza:
When I go toward you
it is with my whole life.
[For who am I and who are you
if we do not understand each other?]17
Taken together, these two poetic insights give me more orientation and direction in life than any philosophical and theological discourses.
JK: Because they come closest to the essence of the phenomenon, one could say?
DSR: Yes, one can put it like that. Poetry goes to the heart of the matter.
JK: Brother David, I have no idea yet what it feels like to be ninety years old. I’m sure I’ll have to face things that I can’t even imagine yet, when I myself get there. But I am not the only one who admires how awake, curious, alive you still are at your age.
DSR: What helped me most in this respect was my contact with young people. Especially my travels with Anthony Chavez kept me—to use your terms—awake, curious, and alive.
Before Anthony joined me, I used to travel from one speaking engagement straight to the next. But with Anthony, we squeezed in little side trips, just for fun. Anthony got smarter and smarter at making cheap travel arrangements so we could afford little detours. He took me to places I had missed in all these years, although I had been near them: Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, and Uluru, the sacred Rock in the heart of Australia. We attended a performance of Swan Lake in St. Petersburg, explored Kangaroo Island together, and celebrated Anthony’s birthday on the Great Wall of China. One special pleasure was reading books together—Pushkin on a river cruise in Russia, Adam Smith in his hometown, while waiting my turn for a TED talk at Edinburgh.
JK: You said it was fun. It must have also been broadening for Anthony’s horizon.
DSR: Especially through meeting teachers whom I admire and to whom I was able to introduce him; Fritjof Capra, Ramon Panikkar, Matthieu Ricard, and Tania Singer come to mind. Yes, and Eckhart Tolle, Lynne Twist, Chade-Meng Tan, David Whyte, and Ken Wilber—it would be a long list. Anthony’s keen mind made the most of these encounters. He learned to memorize names and soon became my walking who’s who for our connections. He knew when to hand me my glasses, even before I noticed that I needed them. He wrote down in big letters on our iPad key words from audience questions I could not clearly hear, and discreetly showed them to me. He came to know my material so well that he’d produce poems or book excerpts at just the right moment without prompting. Anthony also showed that rare ability to come up with his own original ideas so that later we started presenting workshops together. Our favorite title was “Gratefulness at Over Eighty and Under Thirty.” One aspect of gratefulness that we often explored together—living in the Now—has become my central concern.
JK: Is this what occupies, drives, moves you today in this possibly last full decade of your life?
DSR: Yes, more and more clearly, I see this as my great task: to live in the Now and to continue practicing being present in the Now. This has been my main task and simultaneously a great gift, being able to practice that for so many long decades. Perhaps our life is only prolonged because we have not yet learned to fully live in the Now.
JK: What gives you joy today—what still fills you with wonder and opens wide your heart?
DSR: To answer that question, I would need to list everything I encounter over the course of a day. Everything fills me with wonder, more so than ever. It starts when I open my eyes in the morning; the fact that I am given one more day, is that not a joyous surprise?
JK: I am still here…
DSR: Ah! I am still around! Everything, everything becomes worthy of wonder.
JK: Increasingly worthy of wonder, the older you become—how? After all, you could also say, “I am inured, I’ve seen this before.”
DSR: On the last page of the last book of the Bible, the seer on the island of Patmos hears God say, “See, I am making all things new” (Rev 21:5). I think this promise refers not only to a great renewal at the end of history, but, above all, to life in the Now. We can learn to look at any humble thing and—overwhelmed by surprise—see it burst into being, at this very moment, in the morning freshness of a new beginning.
JK: Brother David, thank you for speaking with me.
DSR: I thank you for your questions.
Notes
The title of this book, i am through you so i, is the last line of poem no. 49 in 50 Poems, by e.e. cummings, which is both a love poem and a prayer. Cummings (1894–1962) spelled everything without capitals.
1. Becoming Human
1. I started walking at nine months, so I may have been three years old at the time of this memory.
2. My father had inherite
d the Café Siller in the Schönbrunner Allee from his uncle Franz Siller. The “Maria Theresa Palace” (Maria Theresien Schlössl) of the Café Meierei Siller, also called the “Marienvilla,” was a handsome building with plasterwork ceilings, baroque fireplaces, and parquet flooring in star patterns.
3. Hans, born December 14, 1928, and Max, born thirteen months later on January 17, 1930.
4. Supposedly, detta is a Czech term of endearment meaning “auntie”—but in our case, it came from our early attempts to say Schwester, the German short form of “children’s nurse.” We loved our Detta—Elfriede Gödel. She came when I was approximately three years old and stayed with us over more than twenty years, far into our adulthood.
5. IMI was a brand of detergent introduced by the Henkel company in 1929.
6. This dream became fundamental in that the image of merging with Christ fits as well with all subsequent phases of my becoming fully human. The dream did not, however, produce in me any feelings of awe or reverence. In fact, it was not emotional at all. Instead, I would say that it sparked an insight in me that was far beyond my comprehension at the time but stayed in my memory as significant for perhaps that very reason.
7. Molybdomancy became a common New Year tradition in the Nordic countries and Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Classically, tin is melted on a stove and poured into a bucket of cold water. The resulting shape is either directly interpreted as an omen for the future, or it is rotated in candlelight to create shadows, whose shapes are then interpreted.
8. Plato, Theaetetus, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Teddington: Echo Library, 2006), 155d: “This feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy.”
9. Theodor Haecker (1879–1945) was a German writer, cultural critic, and translator. He was among Catholic existentialism’s most eloquent defenders and one of the most radical cultural critics of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.
10. Pius Parsch (1884–1954) was an Austrian Catholic priest whose writings contributed significantly to the liturgical movement. He was also highly interested in reevaluating the Bible with an eye to liturgical practice. As military curate on the Easter Front of the First World War, he encountered the liturgy of Orthodox Christian churches and decided to make the Bible a book for the people and liturgy comprehensible to all. After his return to Klosterneuburg Abbey, he held Scripture courses for the novices. From 1922 onward, he celebrated community masses in which large parts of the Mass would be sung in German (the local language; these masses are commonly known as the Betsingmesse, or Deutsche Singmesse)—with the goal of encouraging more active participation by those hearing the Mass, as well as a return to early Christian service practices. His services are considered the origins of the liturgical movement in Austria.
2. Becoming a Christian
1. The Catholic youth movement Bund Neuland (Newland Union) was founded in 1921 as an offshoot of the Christlichdeutscher Studentenbund, or “Christian German Student Union.” After the annexation of Austria in 1938, the Bund dissolved itself, but was reestablished in 1948. In 1927, Anna Ehm and a group of young teachers from the Bund Neuland founded the Neulandschule (Newland School) in Grinzing, which was reopened in 1946; a new Neulandschule on the Laaer Berg followed in 1947. The pedagogical concept of the schools was based on holistic education in teaching and recreation, unhurried communication of knowledge, encouragement of community life, purposeful awakening of creative capacities, and Christian values as an orientation in life.
2. From Werner Bergengruen’s Poeta creator: “Everything I created with you in mind, For your wellbeing; Then willingly accept the world, and with wakeful courage. Since as love created it even unto the poorest seedling—There is nothing that may frighten you, And you are at home.”
3. The text of the song translates to “Thoughts are free / who may guess what they are? / They fly past / like shadows in the night. / No person can know them, / no hunter can shoot them. / The fact remains: / thoughts are free.”
4. Ps 51:12: Redde mihi laetitiam salutaris tui, et spiritum principali confirma me (“Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit”).
5. Ferdinand Ebner (1882–1931) was an elementary school teacher in Gablitz near Vienna and a personal-dialogical philosopher who, together with Martin Buber, is considered one of the most significant dialogical thinkers. His most important work is The Word and Its Spiritual Realities: Pneumatological Fragments (1921).
6. Gröfaz was a nickname mockingly given to Adolf Hitler after the defeat of the German troops at Stalingrad in 1943. It is the abbreviation of the (ironic) German words for “greatest commander of all time,” größter Feldherr aller Zeiten.
7. Reinhold Schneider (1903–58) was a German writer. His last book was Winter in Vienna (1957/58).
8. Friedrich Heer (1916–83) was a cultural historian, writer, and editor. The most thematically relevant of his many works is perhaps Der Glaube des Adolf Hitler: Anatomie einer politischen Religiosität (The Faith of Adolf Hitler: Anatomy of a Political Religiousness) (Vienna, 1968).
9. Adolf Hitler, My Struggle, trans. unknown (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1938).
10. Eric Voegelin (1901–85) was a German-American political scientist and philosopher. The fifth volume of his Collected Works (St. Louis: University of Missouri Press, 1999) contains The Political Religions as well as The New Science of Politics and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism.
11. sub specie boni (Lat.): under the sight of the good, that is, from the point of view of goodness.
12. Vienna’s tramline 38 ends at Am Schottenring station (informally known as “JonasReindl”) near the University of Vienna.
13. Bruno Brehm (1892–1974), who wrote under the pen name of Bruno Clemens, was an Austrian author. He was a member of the National Socialist Bamberg Poets’ Circle and publisher of the periodical Der getreue Eckart from 1938 to 1942.
14. In “Mankind” (Menschheit, trans. James Reidel, Mudlark 53 [2014]), Austrian poet Georg Trakl (1887–1914) writes,
Mankind marched up before fiery jaws,
A drumroll, the gloomy soldiers’ foreheads,
Footsteps through a bloody fog; black iron rings,
Desperation, night in sorrowful minds:
Here Eve’s shadow, a manhunt and red coin.
Clouds, the light is breaking through, the Last Supper.
A gentle silence dwells in bread and wine.
And those gathered here are twelve in number.
Nights they moan asleep beneath olive boughs;
Saint Thomas dips his hand in the wound’s mark.
15. Ernst Wiechert (1887–1950) was among the most widely read German writers of the “Inner Emigration” under National Socialism.
16. Georg Thurmair (1909–84) was a German writer, poet, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He authored approximately three hundred German-language hymns.
17. Theodor Innitzer (1875–1955) was the archbishop of Vienna, as well as a professor of New Testament studies and sometime social minister under Engelbert Dollfuß’s Austrofascist government.
3. Decision
1. Father Heinrich Maier (1908–45) was an Austrian Roman Catholic priest, pedagogue, and philosopher. He fought in the resistance against Hitler.
2. 1 Kgs 3:16–28: “Later, two women who were prostitutes came to the king and stood before him. The one woman said, ‘Please, my lord, this woman and I live in the same house; and I gave birth while she was in the house. Then on the third day after I gave birth, this woman also gave birth. We were together; there was no one else with us in the house, only the two of us were in the house. Then this woman’s son died in the night, because she lay on him. She got up in the middle of the night and took my son from beside me while your servant slept. She laid him at her breast, and laid her dead son at my breast. When I rose in the morning to nurse my son, I saw that he was dead; but when I looked at him closely in the morning, clearly it was not the son I had born
e.’ But the other woman said, ‘No, the living son is mine, and the dead son is yours.’ The first said, ‘No, the dead son is yours, and the living son is mine.’ So they argued before the king.
Then the king said, ‘The one says, “This is my son that is alive, and your son is dead”; while the other says, “Not so! Your son is dead, and my son is the living one.”’ So the king said, ‘Bring me a sword,’ and they brought a sword before the king. The king said, ‘Divide the living boy in two; then give half to the one, and half to the other.’ But the woman whose son was alive said to the king—because compassion for her son burned within her—‘Please, my lord, give her the living boy; certainly do not kill him!’ The other said, ‘It shall be neither mine nor yours; divide it.’ Then the king responded: ‘Give the first woman the living boy; do not kill him. She is his mother.’ All Israel heard of the judgment that the king had rendered; and they stood in awe of the king, because they perceived that the wisdom of God was in him, to execute justice.”
3. Der goldene Wagen (The Golden Wagon) (1947–49). The first issue of the first volume was published Easter 1947. Characterized by attractive design and pictures, the periodical continued to appear monthly, in DIN A4 format, until the third volume, which was somewhat larger.
4. Sterz refers to a way of preparing simple dishes with small chunks of buckwheat flour (Heidensterz), cornmeal (Türkensterz), rye flour (Brennsterz), semolina (Grießsterz), potatoes (Erdäpfelsterz), or beans (Bohnensterz). Sterz was a typical “poor people’s food,” and today, farmers and field workers in Carinthia (Kärnten) and Styria (Steiermark) still frequently eat Sterz with bacon fat and cracklings as a hearty breakfast.
I Am Through You So I Page 19