I want to share with you one of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems from Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, in which he writes of a longing to know God as fully as possible. To do this would be to become fully awake, and for one of those magical moments to glimpse the wonder of God.

If only for once it were still.
If the not quite right and the why this
could be muted, and the neighbor’s laughter,
and the static my senses make-
if all of it didn’t keep me from coming awake-

Then in one vast thousandfold thought
I could think you up to where thinking ends.

I could possess you,
even for the brevity of a smile,
to offer you
to all that lives,
in gladness.

At the end, he writes about possessing God, but it is not a selfish possession, like an acquisition. The purpose of fully knowing God is for us to offer God to others, to all that lives, with an ease and gladness. And there is also the awareness that we cannot fully know God, but we can know God to the fullness of our own finite limits of understanding. We can think God up to where our own thinking ends, and still, God will be more.