further up

In the yard, the daffodils are blooming, and in the basket on top of the refrigerator, an onion reached up its own slender greenery.

I marvel at this universal urge to grow: how bulbs and seeds and roots gather and force themselves upward, compelled to fruitfulness by a command dating from the fifth day of history, a magic which all the scientific method in the world cannot explain away.

Science describes, to some degree, the how. But never the why.

Science gives us the chemical processes by which we change, the things that happen in our minds when we feel sudden fear or sorrow or gladness. But it cannot explain why creatures of chemistry should feel at all.

Yet we do feel, governed by the same magic that makes the onion sprout and coaxes the daffodils into blossom, we mourn and yearn and thrill with life. We’re more than any scientific analysis can describe, impelled toward a glory which the universe was made to shadow forth.

Finding in ourselves, as C. S. Lewis puts it “a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy,” we are drawn to posit that we were “made for another world.”

How lovely is your dwelling place,
O LORD of Hosts.
My soul longs, yes, faints,
for the courts of the LORD;
my heart and my flesh
sing for joy to the living God.

©2015 by Stacy Nott