Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

Then there was the final group of mice, the ones who never stopped. Day after day, shock after shock, they pressed the lever.

When the answer to this question is “Because God deemed it so,” we might feel comforted. But what if the answer to this question is “I don’t know,” or worse still, “Nothing”?

We read the Bible how we want to read it. It doesn’t change, but we do.

The brain and its activities make it possible for us—not for it—to perceive and think, to feel emotions, and to form and pursue projects.

“There is no living thing on God’s Earth that doesn’t come to know pain sometime.”

All you have to do is watch a child ride her bike directly into a brick wall or jump from the tallest branch of a sycamore tree to know that we humans are reckless with our bodies, reckless with our lives, for no other reason than that we want to know what would happen, what it might feel like to brush up against death, to run right up to the edge of our lives, which is, in some ways, to live fully.

But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.