Are you a fan of Surrealism?  I'd wager to say that more people are not than are.  Nonetheless, the Surrealists have something to tell us today.  I say this because a few weeks ago I took in an exhibit of the works of the Belgian artist Rene Magritte.  Like his fellow Surrealists, Magritte painted some rather bizarre and occasionally disturbing images.  His intent, as he often wrote, was to make everyday objects "shriek" with twists and terror.  And so he did.  Magritte also talked about the importance of dream, even noting at one point the "omnipotence" of dream.  Finally, he made mention of the enigma which every human being faces, the fact of existence, a certainty with which every human being should confront and deal, even if, as he further remarked, it was unknowable.
     And that's the point.  When we make the ordinary and commonplace "shriek," when we allow ourselves to fall into dream, when we confront the enigma of existence even when we may think we will never resolve it fully, we make ourselves as human as we can possibly be.  We step into our world with eyes open.  We admit to the extraordinary malleability of the objects before us, we acknowledge the hope and benefit of looking past the obvious, and we recognize that we cannot avoid wrestling with this curious, troubling, and marvelous thing we call life.  We take hold of what our reality, our present moment, most is.
     Moreover, if we understand that, as Magritte noted in one of his paintings, most of us try to understand with "limited means," we also understand that there's much more to existence than we can possibly divine on our own.  And we can, though Magritte didn't, as far as I know, do so, begin to consider the fact and power of transcendence.  We can open our minds to the possibility that we need more than ourselves to figure out who we are.  Although most of the Surrealists did not believe in God in a conventional Western (and, indeed, Eastern as well) sense, they, wittingly or not, encourage us to think about the possibility of him being there, inviting us to consider that reality is much more than a quick glance reveals it to be.  Inexhaustible possibility demands an inexhaustible universe, and an inexhaustible universe demands an inexhaustible God. Infinitude doesn't spring out of nothing.