There are scholars, great men of the present as well as the past, who believe that God created man because only through us could He celebrate the power of His vast creation. And thus it is both our pleasure and our duty to witness the wonder. You cannot hear it, can you? But even now as we stand here, under the earth a thousand bulbs and seeds and roots are budding and cracking and sprouting, an army of small tendrils and shoots rising up, moving through the earth toward the light, each one of them so tender that when you see them you will marvel at how they could have moved such a weight of soil above them to emerge. Imagine that, Faustina. Each year the repeating miracle of it.

The picture he painted was so strong, and he had such awe in his voice, that whenever she reads about or imagines the Second Coming, she sees graveyards like vast herb gardens, with bodies, as tender and young as those new shoots, pushing up against the rotten wood of their coffins and rising up toward the light of God to the sound of trumpets. Flesh incorruptible. She had told him of this vision once and he had smiled in that way parents do when their children are wiser or more charming than their years. But she could see that for him it was in some ways no more impressive than the more humble version of God’s glory that nature presented.