What is the "Great Beyond"?  About a year ago, I blogged about this phrase, prompted by my hearing REM's song of the same name.  After hearing the song again recently, I noticed some phrases that had not grabbed my attention before.  Although I know little about the songwriter's spiritual convictions, was struck by how he seemed to posit the quest for the "Great Beyond" as one born of immense effort and struggle, of pushing, as he put it, "an elephant up a hill."
     I think REM is onto something here, and it dovetails with my ruminations about faith that I posted yesterday:  embracing the real meaning of the metaphysical is exceedingly difficult.  We can't see it, we can't touch it, we can't hear it (though some insist they do). And it's hard to believe something that "presents" itself in these terms.
     Yet as British theologian John Milbank once observed, we live before a basic "presentability," what he calls our need to "say how things are in general before we can say anything at all."  Even if we deny the metaphysical, we stumble without it.  If we say that this universe is all that is, we are still left with explaining what "is" really means. Physicality cannot happen in a vacuum.
     Nonetheless, the challenge remains:  why should we believe?  To this, I say, why should we not believe?  As I blogged last year, we all seek purpose, we all seek point.  We cannot help but do so.  And it is a purpose greater than mere survival. We all strive to do more than simply exist.
     So it is not so much a question of the "Great Beyond" than a question about who we are, and why we are this way.  Although I do not deny that evolutionary processes, guided by a divine intelligence, may well have brought the world to its present state, I do wonder why, if the goal of evolution is to ensure survival and nothing more, people still seek meaning. Every other animal does not require meaning to survive.  But we do.
     Why?