"To say that a person is a thing is a logical contradiction.  Yet what is impossible in logic becomes true in life and the contradiction lodged in the soul tears it to shreds.  This thing is constantly aspiring to be a man or a woman and never achieving it--here, surely, is death but death strung out over a whole lifetime; here surely is life, but life that death congeals before abolishing.

    "Affliction is different from suffering, for it mutilates a person's whole being.  In affliction, a kind of horror submerges the whole soul."

    So remarked twentieth century mystic Simone Weil.  Setting aside the puzzles of logic that this observation may generate, Weil's point remains:  if a person is not allowed to be all whom she is destined to be, she indeed becomes a thing, a thing that dies even as it lives.  Such is not, as Weil saw it, God's intention for humanity.  We are made as human beings, she noted, and we therefore live to realize the fullness of what this means.

    Otherwise, we're stepping into precisely the opposite of the essence of resurrection, that is, rather than living as we die, we are dying as we live.

    There must be a larger fullness to justify existence.