Is God incomprehensible?  It's an age old question, one that has occupied many, many books.  The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, long known for his deeply measured thoughts about God, asked this question constantly.  Buried at the heart of his inquiring was his notion that life itself was incomprehensible.  If we can't comprehend God, how can we expect to understand the life he has bequeathed us?  So, he asked, how do we live?

     Rilke's answer was to embrace, in living our lives, all that is beyond our control, particularly death.  To fully understand life, he suggested, we must wrap it in what we do not know about it, that is, the specter of death.  To ignore death is to ignore the fullness of life.
     

    Though Rilke's position may sound rather morbid, it is, on the other hand, decidedly cognizant of the framework of our mortal existence.  We all will die.  If we believe there is no afterlife, however, then we may conclude that death, though it be inevitable, may not so much affirm the fullness of life as it will underscore its futility.  What has it been for?  But for Rilke, to embrace death is to embrace the incomprehensible, that is, God.  In this is the fullness of life, to know that from which it has ultimately come.  Life has meaning beyond itself.

     We may agree that God is incomprehensible, but if we believe that life is incomprehensible, too, we have missed the point.  If we reject the idea of God, we are still faced with the grim reality that life is incomprehensible.  And what will we then do?