STEPHANIE DOWRICK and RAINER MARIE RILKE

Of the 3 events I chaired on Saturday at WRITERS AT THE CONVENT, the session with Stephanie was no doubt the most intensive. Stephanie and I agreed the best format for the session was an "in conversation" style, and so we sat down together in front of a large crowd and we talked. Well, mostly I prompted with questions and ideas, but I was warmly invited by Stephanie to be an equal up there with her on the stage, to include my thoughts and to be part of her presenting experience. It was very well received and flowed with ease and grace. I recommend IN THE COMPANY OF RILKE. Regardless of your previous exposure to either Rilke or Stephanie, you will fall in love with both of them after engaging with this work. You can see a previe here:

http://www.allenandunwin.com/bookpreview/default.aspx?isbn=9781742371801

Here is my introduction to our session on Saturday.

For as long as I can remember I have been on a search. The search has taken many forms, but very rarely have I known how to articulate that which I was seeking, although I have given it countless names. For me, the searching or seeking or even yearning was not secondary to worldly human pursuits. In fact, it was the only thing that I imagined, and dared hope would make the ordinary things manageable. It was, as Dowrick and Rilke both attest, a kind of homesickness that pushed me out on my quest. I wanted and still desire to live a life imbued at all times with the sacred. What I have found thus far that goes some way towards this search, is writing and its intimate partner, reading. At sometime in my early twenties I read Rilke. A little later, as the scars of lovers lost began to take their toll, I found Dowrick. Both writers have been a balm to me, and a testament to my experience that it is in language we may find a bridge between the outer and the inner place, as well as the means by which to attend to both. As Stephanie herself says in In the Company of Rilke, ‘literature has always been concerned with questions of meaning’, and when we stop to ask ourselves the questions of what are we? It is literature that may heed that call.


Reverend Dr Stephanie Dowrick is widely known as the author of a number

of books in the areas of personal, social and ethical development. These

include Intimacy and Solitude, Forgiveness and Other Acts of Love,

The Universal Heart and Choosing Happiness: Life & Soul Essentials. Her

latest book, that which brings us here today, is In the Company of Rilke: why a 20th century visionary poet speaks so eloquently to 21st century readers yearning for inwardness, beauty and spiritual connection.
Stephanie Dowrick has in many ways specialized in her writing life in how we may live the paradox of the mundane and the divine. In Rilke, experienced through Dowrick, we have the possibility of making friends with this paradox. It is indeed ‘reading’ the sacred into everyday life which offers us the power of the transformative. In Rilke, the door is opened to transformation and, at least in my experience, although I am sure I am not alone, the transformations are actual.
In the Company of Rilke is as much a meditation on reading poetry, as it is on the poet in question, although Rilke perhaps, strikes the note with greatest clarity of any poet who has engaged with the question of being. ‘Poetry cannot save the world’ Dowrick says, ‘What it can do is arouse the essential mystery within the world’ This book is also undoubtedly a map offering us, the yearning reader, the bridge between the outer and inner worlds of our own nature, which Rilke attests, are one and the same. As Dowrick surmises ‘it is indeed, in this life, that the sacred is to be found in Rilke’s work’.

The words that have meant the most to me on my questing have been the ones that have articulated the presence of the divine in every moment. On reading Rilke in preparation for today, another poet came to mind, and a poem that stopped me in my tracks when I first encountered it, and from which I have never fully recovered.

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.
My pursuit goes on for words that may eventually fit around the experience of being. It is my great hope that Stephanie’s pursuit likewise is one that is never over.