Yesterday, we talked about the Romantics and the resurrection.  Today, as I continue to contemplate how the idea of resurrection, whether we believe Jesus' resurrection happened or not, nonetheless ripples through our lives, I wonder, as I always do, why.  Why does the notion of resurrection so capture our senses, our hopes, our dreams?  Why do we so much long for a new beginning, a beginning that seems to rise, like a miracle, out of the old?  Why are we creatures who wish for another day?
     Of all the animals, we are the only ones who grasp the presence of mortality.  Of all the animals, we are the only ones who understand that life is more than life, that to live means also to die.  We understand the notion of nothingness.
     And nothingness is, as many existentialists have observed, a path to somethingness, a somethingness that bequeaths a powerful newness, a newnesss of deeper life and richer meaning.
     In the absolute nothingness of Jesus' death, the Son of God abandoned by his Father, the greatest of all somethingnesses arose, a somethingness that eclipses all others, a somethingness that changed history, bent space, and permanently altered all our notions of meaning and time:  the resurrection.
     The resurrection is nonsensical, radical, unbelievable, and unfathomable, but it solves humanity's greatest puzzle:  why does life have meaning?