Make big shadows I can move in

I'm reading new book. I've had it for months and am just now getting to it. "Speaking of Faith" by Krista Tippet who had these conversations about faith on the radio and compiled them into a book.
In the beginning of the book is a poem:

"God Speaks to each of us as he makes us,
Then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond out recall,
Go to the limits of your longing
Embody me.
Flare up like flame
And make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand"
-Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours:Love Poems to God, Translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

I love that, it speaks to me in a way that I can't communicate easily.

"Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror"
That especially strikes a chord. I so often hide from experiences that may possibly be uncomfortable. I withdraw in a way that doesn't allow for the chance of risk, rejection, or judgement. But it also doesn't allow for the love that I'm searching for the enter into my life. I heard somewhere, I can't remember if someone said it or if I read it.....but it said something about seeing the light because of the dark. Like sometimes you can't see how good things are until you see how bad they could be. You can't appreciate beauty until it is shadowed by uglyness.

There was another quote in the book:
"In the vast middle, faith is as much about questioning as it is about certainties. It is possible to be a believer and a listener at the same time, to be both fervent and searching, to nurture a vital identity and to wonder at the identities of others"

I have quite a few conversations with people about the certainty factor when it comes to beliefs. Like, in order to believe in and worship God I have to be able to articulate and define why it is that I believe in him. That makes no more sense to me then the fact that you can't be in love with someone until you can articulate and define why it is that you love them. I can articulate some things, but other things, it just resonates in me like music.
That used to drive me crazy before I was a believer. This idea that I would ask them to tell me why they believed in God and they couldn't tell me. It infuriated me! Now I find myself doing the exact same thing. Irony anyone?

Along these same sort of lines:
"We can construct factual accounts and systems from DNA, gross national product, legal code-but they don't begin to tell us how to order our astonishments, what matters in a life, what matters in a death, how to love, how we can be of service to one another"
"There are places in human experience that politics cannot analyze or address, and they are among our raw, essential, heartbreaking, and life-giving realities"

This constant drive to need to define and label why and what we believe. When people look at you do they see your beliefs or some cog to a machine that you don't really buy into? When people hear you talk what do they hear? Do they hear you saying things that are positive and uplifiting? Do they hear you cursing (hello, I know I'm guilty so put the fingers down please) and tearing others, especially your closest most cherished loved one, down?
No one tries to explain what it feels like on a summer day when you are sitting outside in the breeze. No one demands that for that day to actually exist you must articulate and label the way the sun felt, the way the breeze lifted the hair off the back of your neck and cooled you.
But we humans must always be trying to define and box up God, when shouldn't we just be trying our best to emulate him, to bring his glory to everything we do?

I think the book's going to be pretty good. I'm not even through the first chapter yet!