"And if it frightens and torments you to think of childhood and of the simplicity and silence that accompanies it, because you can no longer believe in God, Who appears in it everywhere, then ask yourself... whether you have really lost God. Isn't it much truer to say that you have never yet possessed Him? For when could that have been? Do you think that a child could hold Him, Him whom grown men bear only with great effort and whose weight crushes the old? Do you suppose that someone who really has Him could lose Him like a little stone? Or don't you think someone who once had Him could only be lost by Him? --- But if you realize that He did not exist in your childhood, and did not exist previously... and if you feel terrified to feel that even now He does not exist, even at this moment when we are talking about Him --- what justifies you then, if He never existed, in missing Him like someone who has passed away and in searching for Him as though he were lost? Why don't you think of Him 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? ...Must not He be the last one, so that He can include everything in Himself, and what meaning would we have if He whom we are longing for has already existed?"
-R.M. Rilke
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