I Live My Life in Widening Circles

In what is perhaps Rainer Maria Rilke's most famous poem he writes:

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not ever complete the last one,
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, that primordial tower.
I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don't know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
_

Rilke poses the question of ultimate identity and relationship to sacred mystery.
Who does not ask these questions? Here then is my response, lived in widening circles:

I enter the first circle and answer:
I am a son of nature's Eros and ancestral desire,
my mother's and father's child, the prodigy of their loins.
But that is not all I am, for this scarcely names what I have become.

I enter the second circle and answer:
I am the first-born son of a Southern California working class family,
raised in a crazy cacophony: Pentecostal, Atheistic, New Thought, Disneyland.
And I grew up as the child of divorce, with a mother suffering from mental illness.
While left unstated, my parents' cultural icons were Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra.

I enter the third circle and answer:
I am a child of devoted school teachers, of gifted women who loved students and learning.
I remember two special teachers who first saw something in me they loved and believed in.
First they and then others opened my world to the wonders of discovery and the joys of reading.

I enter the fourth circle and answer:
I am a child of evangelical Christians who reached out to me in high school with love and zeal.
In today's secular culture these folks have fallen out of favor, but their God gave new life to me.
Through the Hollywood Presbyterian Church and the ministry of The Salt Company, a Christian coffeehouse of the 60s, I came to link Christ and culture, faith and art, compassion and learning.

I enter the fifth circle and answer:
I am a child of "man's search for meaning" among all the world's spiritual wisdom traditions.
It is "Christ" that brought me to the dance, and I do believe in dancing with the One who brought you, but I have also learned that God, the Primordial Tower, is known and loved by many names. Sages, saints, prophets and mystics, all have become my teachers. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Animists and Humanists, all have become my friends and comrades.

I enter the sixth circle and answer:
I am a child of religious and secular modernity, of a story that encompasses the legacy of the Humanist Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the radical Anabaptist movement, the Age of Reason and Science, the Romantic and Transcendentalist Counter-Movements, the Existentialist Revolt and Pragmatist Approach of practical necessity and living the questions. And I am a child of the post-modern age of global eclecticism and double irony, as well as the trans-modern vision of pluralistic integration and mystical union.

I enter the seventh circle and answer:
I am a child of western civilization, of a story that reaches back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, to poets and philosophers, Homer and Plato, Cicero and Epicurus. I am a child of Abraham and Sarah, of the ancient Hebrews and Christians, of prophets and evangelists, theologians and mystics. I am a child of the middle ages, a debtor to the monks and desert fathers who instilled in me an appreciation for solitude, communion and hospitality, and more than this, an ear that listens for echos of Eternity and a soul that longs for Beauty's embrace.

I enter the eighth circle and answer:
I am a child of the earth and of aboriginal man, a primordial journey that was millions of years in the making. And I am Darwin's child, distantly related to every living organism and to the evolutionary ascent of all animal species. Sometimes I am as much Cat and Dog, Lamb and Lion as Man. With Walt Whitman I contain multitudes. All that is masculine and feminine, solar and lunar, rational and passionate, Apollonian and Dionysian dwells in me.

I enter the ninth circle and answer:
I am a child not only of the earth but of the sun and moon and solar system, of the Milky Way galaxy with its billions of stars. I am a child of the universe, a dance of light, a flash of golden dust, a meteor that blazes across the midnight sky. I am the stuff of which stars are made.

I enter the tenth circle and answer:
I am a child of God, an echo of Eternity, a dream of Time, a spark of Divinity. I am that which has no name and which answers to every name. I am the Song that was present at creation. I am the Voice that answers the Beloved. I am the Heart of Sacred Longing. I am the Eyes that know as I am known. I am the Face of Satisfied Desire.

Rich