It has sometimes been said that with the second coming of Jesus, we will be restored to what we once were, before the fall.

I’m not sure, but I don’t think it’s possible for a people who have eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to be restored to what they once were. Jesus is our archetype, and in His body He still bears the scars. I wonder whether we will be the same, the scars of what we once were to remind us and give us wisdom.

An analogy in The Silmarillion – the Song of the Ainur – speaks to me. I would say the song that we now sing isn’t the original song, but one “deep and wide and beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow, from which its beauty chiefly came”.