In one of the many tributes to the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who passed away last week at the age of 74, a writer quotes from one of the poet's observations about his way of writing that it is "a journey where each point of arrival" has "turned out to be a steppingstone rather than a destination."  A new insight does not mark finality, but foundation and ground for one more.  Nothing is ever resolved fully, nothing is ever the ultimate word.  It is a journey without end, yet a journey in which fresh wonder surfaces with every new moment of putting thought and pen to paper.  Life is an endlessly open book.
     It's a glorious way to look at existence, isn't it?  We never arrive, nor do we want to; we are always exploring, learning, and growing to the fullest extent that our capacities allow, confident that with each new dawn day we will find something else that speaks to us.  To use an oft quoted phrase from the religions of the East, it is the journey that is important, not the destination.
     But why is this?  If God, the divine presence that is presiding, in various and mysterious ways, throughout and everywhere in the cosmos, is eternal, which he must be if this world is to be a credible experience at all, then all things in this creation will function as such.  That is, we can experience them in a potentially inexhaustible way.  Life does indeed become a journey without end.  Until it ends, that is.  For it is then that we must ask:  what is next?  If there is nothing, then the world, journey or not, meant absolutely nothing at all.  It has been a line with no form or point.
     The journey only happens when the universe is on a journey of its own.