If hours and hours of research sometimes brings me to tears, it is usually because of the ordinary pressures of being a doctoral student. But every once in awhile I am seized by unlooked-for tears of a different, but more welcome sort.
I’ve been researching the poetics of dreams in Dante and George MacDonald, and I stumbled across this exchange from MacDonald’s novel Seaboard Parish:
“Do you think, then, said Connie, in an almost despairing tone…that we shall never, never, see him?”
“That is quite another thing, my Connie. That is the heart of my hopes by day and my dreams by night. To behold the face of Jesus seems to me the one thing to be desired.”
It reminded me of a favorite quote from Lewis, from Pilgrim’s Regress:
“For this end I made your senses and for this end your imagination, that you might see my face and live.”
Here’s to remembering what all of this study – indeed all of life – is for. As Augustine put it, to see God in all things, and all things in God.