Man has been growing old, but he has not been growing up. He is not becoming more innocent. He’s not becoming more insightful.

These words of Kahlil Gibran belong to the childhood of humanity. Because they said:

Go not yet away from us.

Now that we have recognized you, you are going. Don’t be so hard. Be compassionate. Now that we are ready to listen, you are leaving us. Go not yet away from us, because we are wandering in our darkness of jealousies, anger, fear, anguish – and you are going? This should be the moment of coming! Forgive us that we could not see you, although you spent twelve years amongst us.

A noontide have you been in our twilight.
And your youth has given us dreams to dream.
No stranger are you among us, nor a guest,
But our son and our dearly beloved.
Suffer not yet our eyes to hunger for your face.

Only now, for the first time, have we seen you. And we have seen you not just as one of the crowd; now your face has become to us the face of godliness. This will be unbearable, this departure. It would have been better if you had gone and we had not recognized you. But now that we have seen your face, your mystery, now that we have looked into your eyes and your radiance, now that we are touched by your presence, thousands of flowers have grown within our souls. Give it one chance more – now we will not be the same, because you are no longer the person we used to think you were: a little crazy, waiting for some unknown ship nobody has heard about, without any evidence, without even a letter from the other shore that the ship will be coming at a certain time, in a certain season.

But you were so innocent, you went on waiting – “The ship is coming.” Your waiting must have become heavy on the heart of God himself. In these long years of waiting you have become a magnet. This is not the time to leave us. We will hunger to see your face again. Where are we going to find you? Please, do not go away from us.

Such was the childhood of humanity, and such is childhood still. A child trusts, dreams of unknown lands, hopes, is never pessimistic. If it has not happened today, it is going to happen tomorrow – but it is going to happen.

My own motto in life has been: hope for the best and expect the worse. In either case, you are a victor. Either your hope is fulfilled or your expectation is fulfilled – but fulfillment is yours.

And the priests and the priestesses said unto him…