“Why don’t you think of God as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity, the one who will someday arrive, the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are?
What keeps you from projecting his birth into the ages that are coming into existence, and living your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy?
Don’t you see how everything that happens is again and again a beginning, and couldn’t it be God’s beginning, since, in itself, starting is always so beautiful? If God is the most perfect one, must not what is less perfect precede it, so that it can choose itself out of fullness and superabundance?
Must God not be the last one, so that it can include everything in itself, and what meaning would we have if that whom we are longing for has already existed?
As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build God…”
Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
*I’ve done Rilke a favor and de-gendered the concept of God, by editing every mention of Him, he, his, himself etc…