Locked Rooms

This morning my sister Annie emailed me this picture that she took as the morning light flooded the lovely old Maine home wherein she and her husband live. It reminds me of those locked rooms that Rilke mentioned in Letters to a Young Poet when he advised his young friend to "be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is,to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you win then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

My novice mistress gave me this quote of Rilke when I was a first-year novice in 1967 and was discovering what a complicated person I was. I was rather vexed over my inability to understand myself, not to mention everyone else and the whole world besides. Living the questions gave me a different approach. I began to learn that I didn't have to know and understand everything then and there. I could be at peace in my desire and search for self-knowledge and self-understanding because faith told me that God would give me whatever answers He deemed best for me according to His plan. I didn't have to be anxious and impatient, only faithful to God and His will for me in the present moment. I only need do my part and rest assured that He will do His.

Now, 43 years later, I continue to come across locked rooms here and there. Some of them I may never be able to open while on this earth. At times I get a bit frustrated with it all, but now I can more easily calm my soul with a quiet murmur, "Be still, my child, be still...love the questions and have faith in God." I know the One in whom I've placed my trust -- and He is all goodness, all love.