Christian Counseling Service -- Devotions

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Tuesday, March 12, 2002

Ezekiel 47:1-12
The man brought me back to the entrance of the temple, and I saw water coming out from under the threshold of the temple toward the east (for the temple faced east). The water was coming down from under the south side of the temple, south of the altar. ...

Then he led me back to the bank of the river. When I arrived there, I saw a great number of trees on each side of the river. ...

The man told me, "Fruit trees of all kinds will grow on both banks of the river. Their leaves will not wither, nor will their fruit fail. Every month they will bear, because the water from the sanctuary flows to them. Their fruit will serve for food and their leaves for healing."

Yesterday in Isaiah, God said, "as the days of a tree, so will be the days of my people." Today in Ezekiel he likens us to fruit trees, nourished by living water, full of food for the hungry and healing for the sick.

Here is what Joyce Rupp writes about this passage:

We are the fruit trees, and God is the Great River, the source of all grace and growth, who provides for our spirit's maturation.

One of the ways the poet Rainer Maria Rilke pictured God was as a "hundred roots silently drinking." What a powerful image! Rilke also notes that these roots are in darkness, an image which assures us that even if we do not always sense God nourishing us, it is happening all the same.

The whole passage, from Rilke's Book of Hours, Love Poems to God reads:

...When I lean over the chasm of myself--
It seems my God is dark
And like a web: a hundred roots
Silently drinking.
This is the ferment I grow out of.
More I don't know, because my branches
Rest in deep silence, stirred only by the wind.

Rilke struggled to know God as he knew himself, and to talk to him:

I love you, gentlest of ways,
Who ripened us as we wrestled with you.
You, the great homesickness we could never shake off,
You the forest that always surrounds us,
You the song we sang in every silence,
You dark net threading through us...

But as he traveled throughout his Europe of the early 20th century, Rilke realized he knew less and less about either:

I live my life in ever widening circles
That reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
But I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tour.
I've been circling for thousands of years
And I still don't know: am I a falcon,
A storm, or a great song?

Rilke loved Italy. I imagine him standing in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel, staring at Michelangelo's vision of God reaching out for Adam's hand, hearing God's call, looking for words:

God speaks to each of us as God makes us,
Then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
"You, sent out beyond your recall,
Go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like flame
And make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand."

Lord, fill my hands full with your fruit, let me eat of it and pass it on.

Devotions Archive

Call to worship

Tuesday, March 12, 2002