Rilke

Rilke’s words on religion resonate in me more than any others at this point in my life, and they also inspired the title of this blog. From the “Letters”

- 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? Don’t you see how everything that happens is again and again a beginning, and couldn’t it be His beginning, since, in itself, starting is always so beautiful?

I enjoy this lovely twist on pantheism. I always wonder why people think they have so much knowledge of what god is. Or, do atheists know what it is they’re not believing in? Yes, they do, they know that they don’t believe in the utterly facile, narrow conception of god espoused by most religious people. That straw man god certainly doesn’t exist. But god is just a word, and it connects with something, some possibilities of existence that I think we are better off not divorcing ourselves from. That is, I think, what Rilke has captured here.