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Keywords: Rilke

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    When poems are like prayers, speaking to us

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 04 October 2023
    2 Comments

    Some people pray in church, some pray alone, some share their prayer through song, and others use poems as prayer. Each carries its own line of faith that they believe unites them with something outside themselves. This union is reached through words written and words said.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The theatre of distance

    • John Allison
    • 25 November 2019
    2 Comments

    I dreamed Thoreau told me that whenever I was lost, if only I'd remember that it was not I but simply those familiar places of the world that were lost then I would realise at last the trick of standing upright here ... Everywhere, departure opens wide its gates into the nothing that awaits us in the dusk

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    After Rilke: Visitation of the Virgin

    • Wally Swist
    • 01 July 2019
    4 Comments

    Windswept Judean hills. Not by the sheer vista below could her abundance ever be measured; striding, with each step she believed no one could transcend the largesse she carried.

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  • RELIGION

    Can the Church survive its terminal self harm?

    • Stephanie Dowrick
    • 06 March 2019
    85 Comments

    My relationship to Catholicism can be summed up as: I am on the outskirts, yet close and invested enough to care how the Church evolves. Because, it seems to me, how it evolves and the speed at which those urgent and essential changes take place will significantly determine whether it will survive — and whether it deserves to survive.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Solitaire and Some souls

    • Margaret Quigley and Edith Speers
    • 15 August 2017

    Were I to call Were I to stumble  Or even fall  Would you hear me?  Would the constant babble  Of texts and tweets and twitters  Silence my helpless cry

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Finding my grandfather

    • Wally Swist
    • 29 May 2017
    2 Comments

    There is the photograph of my father's father in military uniform, an Austrian, serving in the Polish cavalry in WWI, standing ramrod straight. It is he whom I think of when I find myself dowsing my genome for answers regarding my origin, the deep pull that draws me to the late symphonies of Mozart, Rilke's angelic mysticism, and, as a child, to Krapfen and Apfelstrudel ... That grandfather died shortly after returning to his farm from the results of having been a victim of a mustard gas attack in the war.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Best of 2013: On Seamus Heaney's turf

    • Peter Gebhardt
    • 10 January 2014
    1 Comment

    Ten years ago, my wife and I went to Dublin. Upon our arrival at the hotel there were three notes waiting from Seamus; the first suggested a meeting, the second drinks, the third 'Heigho, we'll have some scrags'. He picked us up in a Mercedes Benz. I said something about a poet and such a car, 'Never mind it's got a broken window'.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    On Seamus Heaney's turf

    • Peter Gebhardt
    • 05 September 2013
    8 Comments

    Ten years ago, my wife and I went to Dublin. Upon our arrival at the hotel there were three notes waiting from Seamus; the first suggested a meeting, the second drinks, the third 'Heigho, we'll have some scrags'. He picked us up in a Mercedes Benz. I said something about a poet and such a car, 'Never mind it's got a broken window'.

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  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Interfaith pioneer's search for the sacred

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 30 November 2012
    1 Comment

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  • EUREKA STREET TV

    Interfaith pioneer's search for the sacred

    • Peter Kirkwood
    • 30 November 2012

    Stephanie Dowrick is a prolific, best-selling author, a qualified psychotherapist, and in-demand speaker. She leads spiritual tours and retreats, and is a pioneer among the handful of interfaith ministers in Australia. Born in New Zealand, her mother died when she was eight. This was a pivotal event in her life.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Prodigal son's shoeless stroll

    • Mark Austin
    • 20 March 2012
    2 Comments

    A drink from the sole is more refreshing than any bottled river. I felt the cushion of grass. It did not exclude, but wrapped its spines around me, tickled my dying ankles to rattle, greasing the bearings of my toes.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    New ways of talking about God

    • Philip Harvey
    • 19 March 2010
    2 Comments

    The poet Rainer Maria Rilke's 'God', writes Stephanie Dowrick, 'is a vulnerable neighbour one moment, like a clump of a hundred roots the next; an ancient work of art, then a much-needed hand, a cathedral, a dreamer. Absent here, breath-close there; as often in darkness as in light.'

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