Give Me Iris

A meditation on Christian eschatology, the audacity of resurrection, and the one thing I want to keep

There is a seed inside a mango that looks nothing like a mango.

I want you to sit with that for a moment before we go any further, because I think we have lived with mangoes long enough that we have stopped being scandalized by them. But try, for a moment, to be an alien. You have been dropped from the sky onto this planet and a human being, one of these strange soft creatures, places two things in your hands. In the left hand: a small, flat, fibrous pit, pale and unremarkable. In the right hand: a mango. Yellow-orange, heavy with juice, fragrant in a way that almost embarrasses you, shaped like a small miracle.

The human tells you these two things are the same thing at different stages of a process.

You would not believe them. You could not. There is no line you can draw from the seed to the fruit that does not require you to accept that something utterly transformative happened in the dark, underground, invisible, that the seed effectively died to become what it was always capable of becoming. The mango does not remember being the seed. The seed cannot conceive of being the mango. And yet here we are, holding both, and we call it ordinary.

Paul calls it resurrection.

In 1 Corinthians 15, the Apostle Paul is addressing people who found the resurrection of the body philosophically incoherent. The objection has not changed much in two thousand years: how does a body that decays, that returns to dust, that is scattered or burned or swallowed by the sea, reconstitute into anything? Paul’s answer is not a mechanism. He does not offer biology. He offers a category shift.

“What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare seed.”

Bare seed. That is what he calls this body. This body you have spent your whole life inhabiting, maintaining, adorning, and protecting. This body you have loved in and suffered in and wept through. Paul looks at it with the calm clarity of someone who has seen the other thing and says: bare seed.

And then he draws an analogy so carefully structured it reads like a legal argument. There are different kinds of flesh, he says. The flesh of men, of animals, of birds, of fish. There are celestial bodies and terrestrial bodies. The sun has one degree of glory, the moon another, the stars another, and even among the stars, one star differs from another in glory. God is, among other things, a calibrator of glory. He did not make everything shine at the same intensity. He looked at the moon and turned a dial. He looked at the stars and turned them differently. He looks at Sirius and Proxima Centauri and assigns each a different task.

This is the God, Paul says, who will look at your body, this bare seed, and turn the dial.

What emerges from the ground will be imperishable. Raised in glory. Raised in power. It will be a spiritual body, which does not mean a ghost, a translucent floating thing with no substance, but something as real as bone and flesh and more, something that has passed through the limitation of natural existence into a mode of being so structurally different from what we know that Paul essentially runs out of analogies and hands the reader the mango.

Figure it out. The seed cannot conceive the fruit.

I want to say something that will make some people uncomfortable, because I think it needs to be said clearly: no other major religious eschatology comes close to this.

I say this not as a tribal declaration but as someone who has sat with the alternatives long enough to find them genuinely wanting, and who thinks that intellectual honesty requires us to name the difference.

There is a prominent tradition that describes paradise as a place of beautiful companions, of wine that does not intoxicate, of rivers and gardens and pleasures without limit. I have read these descriptions carefully. I find them sincere. I do not find them transcendent. Because here is the problem: I can get wine here. The vineyards of Burgundy exist. The pleasures described are amplified versions of earthly pleasures, which means that eternity, under this framework, is essentially Earth with the volume turned up and the suffering removed.

That is not nothing. But it is not a category shift. It is a renovation, not a resurrection.

And when I try to think about it from the inside, practically, I run into walls. If I were a woman, what exactly is being offered to me in this vision? If my tastes do not align with what is provided, is there a negotiation process? Is the banquet tailored or standardized? These questions are not meant to mock. They are the questions you have to ask when eternity is described in the currency of earthly appetite, because earthly appetite is particular, is personal, is shaped by history and culture and preference, and any heaven built on its satisfaction becomes immediately complicated by the specificity of human desire.

The Christian resurrection does not amplify earthly pleasures. It does not give you a better version of what you already have. It changes the kind of thing you are.

That is the mango. You cannot describe it in the language of the seed.

But here is where I have to be honest with myself, because I am not just a theologian writing at a distance. I am a man. I am a husband. I am someone who is, against my better philosophical instincts, deeply and inconveniently in love with his wife.

I love Iris. I love that I need her. I love that she can make me furious and that a single hug dissolves it, that rage built over hours can be undone in seconds by her proximity. I love that she knows things about me I have not said aloud. I love that I reach for her in the dark without thinking, not as a choice but as a reflex, which means that somewhere in my nervous system, she has been registered as home.

This is not weakness, or rather, it is the only weakness I am proud of. I wear it.

And then Christian eschatology, the very eschatology I have just spent several paragraphs defending, turns and tells me that in the resurrection, I will want for nothing. Every need met. Every thirst quenched. Every hunger stilled. Full sufficiency. Perfect freedom.

Including, presumably, my need for her.

Lord. I want to talk about this.

Because I have read 1 Corinthians 15. I know that the seed does not mourn becoming the fruit. I know that the transformation is so complete that what I will be will regard what I am the way a mango regards a seed, which is to say, not at all, because the mango does not remember being the seed. I know that whatever I call love now is itself a seed, a partial thing, a flickering signal trying to communicate a frequency it does not yet have the equipment to transmit.

I know all of this.

And I still do not want to let her go.

There is a doctrine that has been sitting quietly at the back of my theology, waiting for this moment. It is the doctrine of the eternal, intra-Trinitarian love.

Before the world was made, before matter existed, before time had a direction, there was love. Not love as a response to something loveable, not love as a feeling produced by the presence of another, but love as the permanent condition of a God who exists as three persons in one being. The Father loving the Son. The Son loving the Father. The Spirit as the living movement of that love between them. This was not boredom that creation interrupted. This was a fullness so complete that it overflowed into making, which is the most generous account of why anything exists at all.

This love, the theologians tell us, is what we are moving toward. Not toward the removal of love but toward its source. Every love we have experienced on earth, including the fierce, complicated, hunger-laced love that makes marriage both beautiful and maddening, is a downstream signal. It is the moon. It is real light, it genuinely illuminates, but it is reflected, derived, reduced. In the resurrection, we move toward the sun.

What if what God wants to do is not take Iris from me but take the poverty out of my love for her? What if the need I am so attached to, this lovely, aching need, is actually the limitation, and what waits on the other side is something so expanded, so structurally different, that I will love her with a fullness that makes what I feel now look like the seed?

I can almost accept this.

Almost.

But just in case, Lord, I have a request.

Raise me. I am asking for all of it. Take the hunger. Take the thirst. Take the greed and the fear and the exhaustion of being a finite creature in a demanding world. Take the ceiling. Strip the seed and grow the fruit. I want the glory. I want the imperishable body, the power, the spiritual existence that Paul runs out of words to describe. I want to stand in the full light of what you have been preparing since before I was born.

But leave me one thing.

Leave me a single reflex, one pull, one direction I turn without thinking. Let me look across eternity and find her face and smile in a way I do not smile for anyone else in all of glory. Let me in a kingdom of perfect sufficiency, carry one beautiful, voluntary, chosen insufficiency. Not as a chain but as a gift. Not as a need born of poverty but as a preference born of abundance.

I have heard your argument, Paul. I have followed it carefully. The seed cannot conceive the fruit.

But even the fruit has sweetness concentrated in one place.

Let mine be her.

Happy birthday, Iris. Seventeen years from now I will still be trying to write something worthy of what you are to me. This is the closest I have gotten.