A Conversation with Rainer Rilke, James Baldwin, and Vincent Harding

Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem has been following me lately. I’ve found myself revisiting the verses over and over again. This is in part a result of my own wrestling with despair and the discernment of how to respond to heartache and grief for a world in turmoil. Taking account of the ground lost in the long fight towards human rights, democracy, the respect for human dignity, the toll is gut-wrenching. The headlines overwhelm me, and there is a sense of powerlessness in the increasingly desperate search for good news, light in the darkness. 

This poem has visited me before in moments of deep spiritual crisis. It came to my attention first when I heard Kista Tippett’s interview with Joanna Macey and I discovered the beautiful translation she and Anita Barrows did of Rilke’s “Book of Hours.” I turned to it often during the COVID Pandemic. I think it’s resurfacing in my consciousness now, amid my despairing of the global political crisis, to remind me of the good that lies in the darkness. Instead of wishing away a darkness that frightens me, I feel Rilke saying that I should open my eyes to the insights that lurk in the corners of this moment. 

Few people have faced the darkness of what our world can be more than James Baldwin. Or at least there are few whose lives have felt so resonant with my own. Earlier this year, the distinguished Princeton Professor, Eddie Glaude Jr. and I had a conversation about his 2020 book, “Begin Again,” a reflection of Baldwin’s sitting with the darkness of the United States. Glaude reminds us that Baldwin survived the assassinations of his friends Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X. He witnessed the continued betrayal of the country as it turned its back on the Civil Rights movement with the elections of Nixon and Ronald Reagon. I have felt the depth of loss in those times through my relationships with other survivors of the assault on the Black led freedom struggle of the 1960’s. I’ve sat at the feet of those who grieved the death of their brothers Martin and Malcom, of John and Robert Kennedy and others. Those who endured the manipulative campaigns of COINTELPRO, and the character assassinations embedded in the campaigns of Nixon, the revisionist history of Reagon. They watched it all be attacked, the forward momentum halted, and the gains be all but undone. 

What do you do? How do you go on in such times? For those of us who marched in the Movement for Black Lives, for those of us who were in Ferguson or the streets of hundreds of American cities pleading for change, the election of Donald Trump echoes those times. Glaude calls us forward by pointing to Baldwin’s ever poignant words “Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.” 

I am trying not to abdicate responsibility in this moment, a lot of us are trying not to, and it’s hard. For those of us not abdicating, not embracing nihilism, not pulling the blanket over our eyes for fear of the darkness, we’re required to do the hard inner work of confronting the truth. This work is internal to oneself and it’s the work that we have to do with each other in the United States and elsewhere.

For many Americans, as we consider the 250^th year of the country’s beginnings, the lies that we’ve told ourselves have been exposed in tragic and spectacular form. We just can’t go on as things were. There is nothing for us to “go back to.” We must emerge from this latest manifestation of our crisis transformed. We must grieve the myths that we held on to, but which have been proven false. The myth of ourselves as the perpetual heroes in the world after we’ve begun yet another war, myths of ourselves as inherently good amidst a government pursuing such abject cruelty. These are myths that are embedded in our origin story, myths many of us chose to believe, myths some of us needed to believe, and hoped would eventually become true. Langston Hughes echoes in our subconscious “….America was never America to me…” 

To let these myths go is likely to provoke an existential crisis which is in part what’s playing out in our body politic right now. For me, the political is also very personal. To live as much of one’s life outside one’s country as I have, is to learn how much you are shaped by the narratives that surround you. I am deeply aware of how much my own sense of self has been shaped by conversations raging in the United States. That my sense of self was shaped pushing against narratives hostile to my life and flourishing, as black and gay, did not stop me from becoming American. My world view was still shaped by the myths of our exceptionalism.  The way I speak, and the very way I move my body, did not escape the cultural influence of the country, me and my community’s dissent notwithstanding. Sometimes even as we dissent from one lie, we succumb to another.  As I grieve the death of certain myths I once thought I needed, there’s a kind of transformation that takes place as I metabolize the truth and its implications for who I am. It is a process of discovering my humanity, and my belonging to humanity. 

This is a process through which one becomes a citizen of the world, and one recognizes a broader set of allegiances to humankind and the planet which sustains us. But how do we get from that individual experience of transformation into something shared? Will the United States become a part of the world, will we collectively understand our belonging at a level of transformation that belies our current state? 

This is a question of spiritual transformation. Alongside Rilke and Baldwin, I turn to the wisdom of the late veteran of hope, Vincent Gordon Harding, who like his ‘brother Jimmy’ as he called him, also survived the assassinations of the 60’s. Whenever we were in rooms together, I was always struck by one consistent interaction he would have with young people, often in their late teens and early 20s. To every question he was asked that presented to him some version of the unprecedented nature of the crisis we are in, he would often respond by pointing to the unprecedented nature of the opportunity before us. The interaction would often go something like this: “Dr. Harding, don’t you get angry that we’re still fighting for rights today? Don’t you feel any disappointment about what was left undone by your generation?”  To which Dr. Harding would reply “Whatever we did or didn’t do, what I’m most grateful for, is that you are here, and there has never been a “you” before now, but now, praise God, that there is, we have a new set of possibilities to discover.”  

Rilke references “a dream once lost to sorrows and songs,” Vincent Harding was a companion to dreams now enshrined in our collective memory….”that one day, black men and white men, protestants and Catholics…” – Martin Luther King Jr.

 In his essay “Is America Possible?” Harding writes: 

“Indeed, it is precisely in a period of great spiritual and societal hunger like our own that we most need to open minds, hearts, and memories to those times when women and men actually dreamed of new possibilities for our nation, for our world, and for their own lives. It is now that we may be able to convey the stunning idea that dreams, imagination, vision, and hope are actually powerful mechanisms in the creation of new realities — especially when the dreams go beyond speeches and songs to become embodied; to take on flesh, in real, hard places.”

“I love the dark hours of my being…”

“Not all is lost…”,

 I will not abdicate; there’s never been an us before…