morning thoughs

i've been using a great blog site to get the readings from the Daily Office (dailyoffice.wordpress.com) each day and will include one of the readings here, along with a poem from another site (Panhala)

The Daily Office website had the following caption and photo on its page. Lent is a good time to ask ourselves what are the idols in our lives. They could be material or they could even be things like the prayer book or hymnal. We need to distinguish what we use as tools to help our experience of God from God. peace, Rev Deb

"Interior of Anglican church on Gangwha Island, South Korea—so that we don’t make an idol of our own familiar architecture and furnishings."

The poem is called The Apple Orchard. 

The Apple Orchard

 

Come let us watch the sun go down
and walk in twilight through the orchard's green.
Does it not seem as if we had for long
collected, saved and harbored within us
old memories? To find releases and seek
new hopes, remembering half-forgotten joys,
mingled with darkness coming from within,
as we randomly voice our thoughts aloud
wandering beneath these harvest-laden trees
reminiscent of Durer woodcuts, branches
which, bent under the fully ripened fruit,
wait patiently, trying to outlast, to
serve another season's hundred days of toil,
straining, uncomplaining, by not breaking
but succeeding, even though the burden
should at times seem almost past endurance.
Not to falter! Not to be found wanting!

 

Thus must it be, when willingly you strive
throughout a long and uncomplaining life,
committed to one goal: to give yourself!
And silently to grow and to bear fruit.

 

 

 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

 

 

(Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Poems, trans. by Albert Ernest Flemming)