While traveling last week, I found time to read George Elliot's Middlemarch.  It reminded me of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, as well as the currently popular PBS series, Downton Abbey.  All three of these works portray worlds that at first glance seem very far removed from our own, but if we examine them more closely, we see that they are in fact not significantly different.  They present people who, like all of us, are simply trying to make sense of and deal with the realities they face each day.  They give us telling and realistic pictures of the human condition.
     So much of life is indeed rather ordinary and bland, a series of routines and commitments, seemingly endless rivers of challenge and responsibility.  We often search long and hard for a higher plane of experience, a break from the normal, an inroad into the distinctive and unique.  The people of Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, and Downtoon Abbey were doing the same.  We all look for a greater meaning.
     Extraordinary meaning, meaning that rocks our world, however, rarely emerges from ordinary circumstances.  Extraordinary meaning demands extraordinary origins, origins that are not dependent on ordinary circumstances.  It bursts boundaries, shatters categories.  It takes life apart.
     This is a crucial point.  As the characters of Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, and Downton Abbey learned, however much life takes itself apart, it still remains life.  Only when life is taken apart will it genuinely change.
     So did Jesus say to Nicodemus when the inquisitive Pharisee asked Jesus how he could experience God more fully:  "You must be born again."
     Put another way, you must believe in the one who can see everything if you wish to see--really see--anything.