To make the proper use of things, that's what it comes down to. To take the Here and Now in one's hand, lovingly, with the heart, full of wonder, as, provisionally, the one thing we have: that is at once, to put it rather casually, the gist of God's great user's guide, this is what Saint Francis of Assisi meant to record in his hymn to the sun which as he lay dying he thought more splendid than the cross, whose only purpose in standing there was to point towards the sun.

What I mean is that we cannot know what will come of the great teachings, we just have to let them flow unabated and not take fright if they suddenly rush into the natural ravines of life and vanish underground and race along unknowable channels.

From Rilke's The Letter From the Young Worker