Oh, eternity, the more we open up, the more distant you get. It takes time to learn: what lasts forever communicates by distance alone. Oh, eternity, you are no bloated presence! Here and now cannot hold you - oh, incomparable wave, you break over every shore, swallowing it to spit up yet another to be born again down upon.
In the meantime, the temptation is always to let this suffice: a more immediately inaccessible God. A relative wonder to subject oneself to - made wonderful mostly by an unwillingness to grasp it, which disguises itself as an inability to do so. Oh, to keep the sacred distantly visible, what a modern adaptation! We creators of workaday deities - workarounds to the magnitude of the universe and of our infinitely questionable existence - find ourselves too frequently stalled at cobbled altars.
Should you find yourself asking (as I myself have done so many times): Why am I stuck at this point in my life? Many times the answer lies in the fact that you are hot on the trail of an unworthy god. And the fast approach seems to indicate that you have given out your worship too easily. Still, intuitively, you’re afraid of the personal atheism you know likely to result at the moment of overtaking your designated deity - giving you a chance to inspect this god for yourself and note its cracks. For to place your hands on a sacred object, to corner a sacred idea with irrefutable proofs - is about the definition of sacrilege. Like butterflies, touch condemns our highest ideals to the depths of flightlessness. So instead of keeping that good pace you had going - you slow your approach. So that what you’ve marked as holy may remain so.
Beware of living for ideals that you can easily overtake. But even more so, beware of making a god of some goal that you really can and should grow beyond. If you do, you will be tempted to always approach it but never pass - and that which should be overcome easily has the tendency to stay out ahead, just out of reach. Better if your gods can repeat themselves, can somehow be overtaken in an act of communion rather than in one-time only dismissals so that, as if by Sisyphean magic, they, in short order, appear ahead of you once again - egging you on for another intrinsically meaningful chase. When they speak of false deities, this I believe is the heart of the warning: that the greatest danger is chasing that which keeps a slow pace. If your God be a runner in the best celestial shape, friend, you may just have found something worth pursuing.
The great beyond is never won by lapping the mysteries of the universe. No, let me race eternity with all my might but yet (and necessarily) keep falling further and further behind - so that a great expanse capable of containing a larger view begins to open up. It is here and only here where the ultimate grandeur of existence begins to become visible - that is if you’d wipe the sweat from your eyes and only look.
The second to the last sentence says it all, and is my favorite.