How to Have a Soft Heart in a Hard World
In frightening times, when it’s difficult to look toward the future, I find consolation in turning to the past. Bombarded by bad news, I seek refuge in the lives and work of people who lived through terrible events long before me, and who found ways to cling to hope and spiritual grounding despite it all.
These people are my heroes. Rainer Maria Rilke is one of them.
A sensitive soul coming of age in 20th century Europe, Rilke felt accosted by the horrors of life.
Everything was too fast, too loud, too mechanized.
When he went to Paris to serve as secretary to the sculptor Rodin, he was overwhelmed by urban poverty and suffering.
When he was conscripted into military service, his pacifist heart was traumatized by the violence humans inflicted on each other.
At night he would read the 30th chapter of Job and feel an echo of his own sorrow; in Paris he would console himself with the poems of Charles Baudelaire, decrying the high human costs of industrialization.
Amidst the overwhelming events of his time, Rilke could simply have given in to despair. It’s a familiar temptation in this day and age, isn’t it?
And yet, in spite of and indeed, because of his great sensitivity, Rilke was able to build himself an inner sanctuary–a place of peace and rest amidst the great swells of suffering of the early twentieth century.
But most importantly, it was a sanctuary with open doors. It wasn’t a cavern that isolated him from the pain around him. It was a tabernacle that allowed him to be radically present to it.
How did he create such a sanctuary in the midst of so much pain?
Here are 4 ways Rilke embraced his sensitivity–and how we can find strength in it, even when the world feels overwhelming.
I’m making a note to gather them up every time I check the news!
1. Rilke was not afraid to feel everything, from sparks of joy to immense sorrow.
As a highly sensitive person, I sometimes wish I could just turn off my tenderness and get some relief from the pain it often brings my way. Maybe Rilke felt this way too.
But he also understood our deepest emotions as meeting places with God.
In one of his most famous poems, he urges us:
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Nearby is the land
they call Life.”
Rilke’s one mission was to help us live the hereness of our own lives. To embrace all of its contours, as you might embrace the curves of your Lover.
This passage from Maraget Wheatley expresses the heart of Rilke so well:
Opening to the world as it is opens us to very strong emotions: despair, sadness, doubt... Our hearts are being cut open by the world, and this is painful. But an open heart is a fully human heart, filled with compassion. Compassion has many ways of manifesting —we can be overwhelmed with empathy, undone by the magnitude of the sorrow we feel, nourished from feeling so connected, exhausted with trying to fix and put an end to the suffering, joyfully grateful that our hearts can open so wide.
As Pema Chödrön wonders: “How did I get so lucky to have my heart opened to others and their suffering?”
Rilke teaches us that in surrendering to the vastness of our emotions, we find the fullness of life itself.
2. Rilke understood the deep and rich value of solitude.
Solitude was the fuel that fired the engine of Rilke’s empathy for the world around him.
Rilke believed that solitude was the way to communion with the Divine and with the world within himself. And he knew that he desperately needed this resource to engage with the suffering that surrounded him.
The depths within were not a dark tomb, for Rilke, but a dark womb, from which all good things would come forth, in time. Patience was necessary, but solitude, he was sure, would bear fruit, in creative work, in spiritual sensitivity, and in meeting the historical moment with compassion and love.
“Love your solitude,” he wrote, “and bear with sweet-sounding lamentation the suffering it causes you.”
Solitude was, for Rilke, the most sacred of ground—the fertile soil from which his deepest creativity, empathy, and spiritual insight emerged. It was the essential space where his soul could breathe and respond with love to the world’s suffering.
3. Rilke came to know a vulnerable God, who shared in his emotions and existed out in the wild, far beyond the confines of traditional religion.
What kind of God could meet Rilke in his solitude and deep emotion? A wild one. A suffering one. One who was always in the process of becoming.
Rilke asked his friend who was expressing doubts about God, “Why do you not think of him as the coming one, imminent from all eternity, the future one, the final fruit of a tree whose leaves we are?”
He referred to this God as both “a howl in the storm” and as the “gentlest of Ways.”
This was not a God who lived somewhere too remote to hear our cries. Rilke felt that the wall was very thin between himself and the one he called “God who lives next door.”
Rilke introduces us to this a vulnerable, suffering God–a God who grows within us and alongside us, who desires our full hearts and being, a God with whom we are in constant creative and spiritual collaboration, a God whose boundless love not only fills our cups but overflows into care and tenderness for everyone around us.
This wild, unfinished God became the anchor for his sanctuary, where suffering could coexist with hope and compassion.
4. Rilke was committed to offering his love and guidance to others.
Once he had constructed his inner sanctuary, Rilke did something radical.
He opened the doors. He let others in.
Rilke spoke truthfully and honestly about his own pain. He shared sustenance from the table of his own vulnerability, in his poetry and prose, and in his friendships and relationships.
Rilke was able to channel his own loss and sorrow into something profoundly meaningful: a bridge connecting him to others.
In closing one of his letters to a friend, Rilke wrote:
“Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find these words.”
Rilke’s legacy is an essential guidebook for all of us who want to love well, even while it feels like the world is falling apart. We can build sanctuaries like his, out of sensitivity and vulnerability, out of deep emotion and a Mystery that’s deeper still. We can feel it all, and know that the God who carries us through it feels it all alongside us. Even though we dwell in solitude, we are not alone.
If you, like me, want to build a sanctuary that allows you to engage whole-heartedly with the world around you, we heartily invite you to the Rilke masterclass this weekend.
Join us on Saturday, April 5th, to dive deep into this poet’s inner world. Taught by expert storyteller and Anglican priest Patrick Woodhouse, this masterclass will give you the chance to surround yourself with other big hearts–and to ponder how, indeed, we came to be so lucky to have our hearts opened to others and their suffering.
Cameron Bellm is a Seattle-based spiritual writer, speaker, and retreat guide. After completing her PhD in Russian literature, she traded the academic life for the contemplative life, combining her love for language with a deeply-rooted spirituality. Her work can be found at the intersection of mysticism and activism, linking ancient spiritual practice with modern social engagement. Cameron's work has been featured in America Magazine, National Catholic Reporter, Jesuit Media Lab, and more. Her first book, The Sacrament of Paying Attention: How Writers, Artists, and Mystics can Lead Us into Sacred Human Communion, will be published in 2026. When her nose isn't in a book and her feet aren't softly padding through a library, you can find her marveling at the ferns, salmonberries, and spruce trees along a Seattle trail.