Toward a Church That Stands Somewhere in the East

Untitled Poem

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And another man, who remains inside his own house,
dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
toward that same church, which he forgot.

I heard this poem at a retreat I recently attended called Life as Pilgrimage: Walking with Intention and Grace. Fr. Michael Fish, one of the retreat leaders, was sharing his experience of walking El Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Spain and reflecting on the spiritual journey as something we do "not just for ourselves but for the world." If we do not take this journey toward the "church somewhere in the East,"  the next generation suffers. Our children are left to wander in the emptiness and pain of their elders' unfulfilled yearnings. 

       I thought immediately of my father, who died at age 52 of lung cancer. He was a man of deep spiritual yearnings, but quashed them in pursuit of the American "Dream." One evening during the last year of his life, he told me that one of his deepest desires as a young man was to become a minister. (Dad had grown up Methodist and became a Catholic shortly before marrying my mother.) When I asked him why he never followed this call, he told me he couldn't imagine how to provide for a wife and family on what he assumed would be a pittance. He was, as many of us are, "seduced by safety," too afraid to risk "stepping beyond his field" onto the definite yet unfamiliar path God had laid down for him, a path he would only come to discern with each halting step. When he died, he was, for the most part, still inside the dishes and the glasses of his own house--though, unlike the man in the poem perhaps, I think he realized where he was and regretted never having stepped out. Perhaps his death was his first step toward that church that stands somewhere in the East: a place we know exists but have never seen and cannot describe . . .   

       After our father's death, my sister and I felt compelled to embark (without the other knowing) on urgent spiritual quests in search of the church our father forgot. My sister's pilgrimage led her to convert to Judaism and to obtain advanced degrees in Hebrew Studies and pastoral counseling. I went from pious Catholic teenager to confused college kid to increasingly confused young adult who returned to Catholicism by way of Buddhism. Now, many years later, I find myself working as a chaplain and ministering to cancer patients not unlike my father.

       I have often wondered if the path I am walking is really my father's and not my own. Am I fulfilling his dream of ministry? Am I completing his unfinished work? If he had found the church he had longed for (and forgot) in this life, would I still be walking toward this same church? Perhaps it doesn't matter. Life is as it is now. And I am walking this Life, less and less concerned with whose life it is. Perhaps it is God's Life walking in me.
       I sense that I am now in the vicinity of that church that stands somewhere in the East. When I began this journey, I had only myself and my own "salvation" in mind. But the further along I've come, the more I've discovered that I walk not just for myself but for my father and, as Fr. Michael said, the world. It is not a path of self-fulfillment, as I once thought, but a path of self-offering--self-gift. My life has become an oblation to God for others.