“Is there anything that can take from you the hope of being someday in the God you are helping to create in each attentive act of love?
Please celebrate this Christmas with the earnest faith that He may need this very anguish of yours in order to begin. These very days that are such a trial for you may well be the time when everything in you is working at Him, as once you so urgently did as a child. Be patient and without resentment, and know that the least we can do is make His Becoming no more difficult than Earth makes it for spring when it wants to arrive. Be comforted and be glad.”
From Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, Rome, 23 December 1903
King Edward Street Chapel 