We have grown accustomed to the posture of searching. We hunch over our devices, thumbs moving or entire hands stretched to reach for language. We want to know and we ask. We began with Google and evolved to lean on ChatGPT, Claude and whatever the next iteration of technologically produced answers will be. We are seeking, constantly seeking.
Or maybe not exactly seeking. “Seeking” implies patience, even endurance. Instead, we are searching in the modern sense of the word. We are efficient, immediate and transactional. We type a question. We expect an answer. We refine the question until the answer appears.
We do this for everything. Recipes, certainly. Gardening advice, yes. But also, for the things that once required silence, or time, or suffering. And especially for the things that required wisdom and guidance.
Why does this hurt?
What should I do about my marriage?
How do I fix what I’ve broken?
How do I become someone else?
We bring these questions, sensitive and personal though they are, into the same small box. We expect them to yield to the same logic and sure accuracy that tells us how long to roast a chicken or when to plant zinnias. We believe, perhaps without admitting it, that the right phrasing will unlock the right life.
And yet, the answers — at least the ones that matter most — refuse to behave.
They cannot be captured in neatly ranked bullet points. They come so close, but they don’t quite satisfy our want — our need —to truly know.
There is a quiet desperation beneath all this searching. It is not foolishness, shallowness, or failure to communicate well with human beings. It’s very human, indeed. We ache to know what to do with the weight of being alive.
For the biggest questions, the ones that matter most, the ones that press in and are never answered well by the machine, the answer is the Resurrection. And we miss it, or it never even occurs to us as a possibility, because it’s not an answer in the way we have come to expect answers. It does not present a system to master or a set of techniques to apply. It offers, instead, an event. It’s not advice.
It’s an unwavering profession of faith: Christ is risen.
It is almost an affront to the modern mind, this answer. There’s no algorithm associated with it. It does not immediately solve the problem you typed into the search bar. It does not explain why your suffering has unfolded as it has. It does not tell you what to say in the next difficult conversation or how to ensure a particular outcome. It doesn’t make life make sense. At least not at first glance.
It simply stands there, immovable: Christ is risen.
And yet, if it is true, it changes the nature of every question. If death itself is not final, then failure is not final. If the worst thing that can happen is not the last thing that happens, then despair is not a reliable narrator. If love has already passed through betrayal, abandonment, violence and the grave — and emerged alive — then no human story is beyond redemption, however obscured that redemption may be.
The Resurrection does not function as an answer in the sense of closing the case. It does not eliminate mystery. It does not remove suffering. In fact, it seems almost to intensify both, because it insists that what we see is not the whole of what is real.
It answers instead by reframing.
You ask, “What do I do with this broken relationship?”
The Resurrection does not hand you a script. It tells you that brokenness is not the end of the story, even if you cannot yet see the mending. It tells you that love, wounded and poured out, is not wasted. It tells you that mercy has the last word.
You ask, “Why does this hurt so much?”
The Resurrection does not anesthetize pain. It reveals that suffering is not meaningless because it has been entered into and transformed from within. Not avoided, not explained away, but inhabited.
You ask, “How do I fix my life?”
The Resurrection offers something both more unsettling and more hopeful. Perhaps your life is not something you fix so much as something you surrender, something that must, in some way, die to live.
This is not the kind of answer that satisfies the searching mind at first. It is slower than that. Stranger. It requires a different posture altogether. Not the quick keystroke, but the open, upturned hand. Not mastery, but receptivity. Not control, but trust. Not the instant dopamine hit of knowing that now we know, but the prompt that sends us to our knees in prayer.
And this may be why we keep returning to our devices, even after they have given us all they can give. Because we are practicing, repeatedly, a way of relating to the world that cannot bear the weight of our deepest questions. We are looking for something that can be delivered on demand, when what we are being offered is a person who must be encountered.
There is no tidy resolution to the question whose answer is the Resurrection. We don’t end up in the garden of tidy rows in a well-managed life. Instead, we awaken to that other garden, early in the morning, where a woman stands weeping because the world as she knew it has come undone. She is not searching for an answer. She is searching for a body.
And even then, when the answer stands before her, she does not recognize it at first.
It is only when she is called by name that she understands.
This might be the truest thing we can say. Truly, truly, the answer we are seeking is not a piece of information to be retrieved, but a voice to be heard, a presence to be recognized, a life to be entered into.
Not something we find.
Someone who finds us.
Foss, whose website is takeupandread.org, writes from Connecticut.
