“It was the stone rejected by the builders that became the keystone.” What does that teach us?
What about this: “The Word became flesh and lived among us; He came into his own and his own did not accept him.”
Words and stones: what do we build with them but lives? Lives and poems.
Words, stones, lives, poems: each has a gravity we do well to respect. Here’s Rainer-Maria Rilke:
How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.Each thing—
each stone, blossom, child—
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.