“Go to the limits of your longing,” wrote the poet Rainer Maria Rilke in his Book of Hours. These, he says, are the words we dimly hear as we are made and sent out into the world. They are whispered by a God who can so often seem absent, but who in fact is just waiting for us to sense divine proximity. Rilke’s God wants to run through us like water through a pipe. It’s an encounter found only at the extremes of experience, in “beauty and terror,” in the practice of passion. “Flare up like a flame / and make big shadows I can move in,” we are told.
