The Goldfinch

If you want to know what transubstantiation, what a piece of bread, a man hanging on a cross means, then read Donna Tartt's "The Goldfinch."  It is almost as long as the bible, at 771 pages in my copy.  I believe she captures a meaning.  For many of us, we remain at the station of philosophy, theology, or dogma.  That station won't change your life, but will give you information or admiration.  But we are made for more.  The painter can capture something in a work of art that gives us a glimpse of more than the mundane God we hold in a place in our heads, a mere thought, walled in by the limitations of the intellect or the imagination.  There are "between places" in each of us, God-made, between places.  They are never at any station or platform.  Believers want solid ground, and in that, they miss, Life...life at it's deepest.