Last weekend, I went camping.  The weather was typical October in the Midwest: crisp, windy, spotty rain, afternoon and morning sun.  The leaves were turning, the squirrels busy hunting, the clouds looking like mountains when the sun rose over them.  As I walked through the forest and gazed at the rock formations rising over them, or as I looked at the evening's stars, I thought often of the terrible complexity of believing in God in such a wonderful world.
     Genesis tells us that after he created it, God called the world good.  He called Adam and Eve good, too.  Many years later, however, he came to regret placing humanity in this world.  Noah knew this well.  Yet many, many more years after the Flood, God set himself into the world, subjecting himself to the full gamut of its vagaries and machinations.  In Jesus, he became a human being.
     In the present moment, however, we do not see God, physically, in the creation.  We do not see God, physically, in the wonder and beauty, and we do not see God, physically, in the turmoil and pain that unfortunately run through it.  We gasp at the joy life brings, we weep over the suffering it engenders.  And we do not see God, physically, in either one.
     But we believe.  Believing is a terrible complexity because it is a complexity that frightens as well as comforts, undermines as much as it upholds, a faith in, as Hebrews 11:1 puts it, the hoped for and unseen.  It sets tension at the heart of existence.  Faith is complicated.  Life is complicated, too.  And so is God.  That is why we keep going, whether we believe or not:  we know that what we see, physically, is more than what we think, materially, it is.
     As Island of Knowledge:  The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning, a recently published book by an astronomer who teaches at Dartmouth College, remarks, there are things that even the best science will never fully see.  We walk in a shadow, a terribly complex shadow woven with knowledge and belief, belief that frightens, belief that overwhelms, yet belief that opens the door of what we do not--and cannot--know.

     Perhaps you've read about the Climate March that took place in New York City a couple of weeks ago.  Over 400,000 people marched through the streets of New York City to advocate for increased political and economic attention to addressing the impact of climate change.  Whether you believe in climate change (known previously as global warming) or not, I do not believe you can dismiss that we are obligated to care for the planet.  It's God's gift to us, and we ought to treat it with care.
     On this note, it's difficult to reject, for instance, that continued use of highly polluting sources of power will not eventually impact humanity negatively.  One look at downtown Beijing should convince anyone of this.  Nor is it difficult to ignore that the number of intense and unusual weather events has increased steadily in the last decade, or that many forests of the world are dying early deaths due to the proliferation of insect pests emboldened by warming temperatures across the planet.  Things do seem to be changing, often in very dramatic ways.
     The larger issue, however, is a moral one.  Why do we wish to preserve the planet?  It is of course our only home, and it is of course all that we materially know, at least at the moment.  But the planet is also, as I said earlier, God's gift to us.  Unfortunately, traditional interpretations of God's mandate ("rule and subdue") to Adam and Eve in Genesis have encouraged human depredation of the world, the abuse of the gift.  Yet the mandate is actually to rule with benevolence and care.  We are called to tend the world, to steward it for the future.
     God is asking us to watch over what we've been given.  He made it; we only occupy it for, in the big picture, a very short season.  As Psalm 24 notes, "The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it."  And what a grand world it is.

     Late last week, the world received word that Jean-Claude Duvalier, otherwise known as "Baby Doc," the one-time ruler of Haiti, had died, victim of a heart attack, at the age of 63.  Few people outside of Duvalier's family, I suspect, will mourn his passing.  All evidence indicates that his was a brutal reign, a time of unchecked secret police activity, unrelenting torture of those whom Duvalier disliked, and widespread governmental graft and corruption.  When he voluntarily stepped down from his dictatorship in 1986, Duvalier reportedly held hundreds of millions in foreign bank accounts, stolen from his native land, and went on to live a "good" life in southern France.
     In recent years, however, Duvalier returned to Haiti, saying that he wanted to help the country rebuild in the wake of hurricane damage and a national ennui.  Although not many Haitians believed him, he stayed.  As I pondered Duvalier's passing, I thought frequently of a verse from the fourth chapter of Ecclesiastes.  It reads, "There is no end to all the people, to all who were before them, and even the ones who will come later will not be happy with him [a ruler], for this too is vanity [futility] and striving after wind."
     Thrust into Haiti's spotlight at the age of 19, when his father, "Papa Doc," died, Duvalier lived a life, though it was marked with influence, wealth, and power, was ultimately a life spent in futility.  The tragedy is enormous.  Duvalier could have done a great deal for his native land; instead, he did a great deal for himself.  Now, neither he nor Haiti are better off for it.
     As the old hymn goes, "Be Thou my vision, Lord, be Thou my vision." 

     I've been amazed at the interest in Apple's new I Phone 6.  You have doubtless seen or heard some of the news reports about it, the thousands of people lined up at Apple stores around the world; the millions upon millions of product that Apple has shipped in a little less than a month; and, perhaps most significantly, the furor erupting over the phone's capacity to encrypt itself against even the most sophisticated governmental scrutiny of its contents.
    This leaves us with an intriguing dichotomy.  On the one hand, we have, in the I Phone 6, the continuing and unrequited promise of technology's ability to bring us ever increasing communicative facility and access to information.  Most of us appreciate this. On the other hand, we have the specter of this ability generating new waves of, alternately, governmental skepticism or governmental embrace.  Governments enjoy informational access as much as anyone, and yet governments, just as many people do, also enjoy, if they need to, abusing such access.  It cuts both ways.
     Therein is the problem.  In a world in which morality is largely construed in relative terms, finding the real good becomes highly difficult.  What is good often becomes what works best for the most people.  It's utilitarian.  But this fails to tell us what real good is. Most of us would agree that, on balance, technology, including the I Phone 6, has been tremendously beneficial.  And most of us would agree that, on balance, governments have some degree of responsibility to maintain order in a given country.  Yet this still doesn't tell us what the greatest good really is.  Technology isn't an absolute, nor is the way we use it, either.
     As we continue to enjoy technology, we need to remind ourselves that the good we see in it is almost always relative to our station in life. When it's all about us, it's rarely the final good.  More than anything else, we need a transcendent lens, a lens in which everything can be set, a lens in which morality is more than the sum of our felt destiny and purpose:  a lens invested in the metaphysical.

     Most of us have heard about the awful inroads that the Ebola virus is making in the people groups of western Africa.  It seems unstoppable.  The latest estimates are that it will kill over a million people by the end of the year.  We have all seen photographs of dead bodies being carried out of homes by workers, and we have probably all heard about the many health care workers who have succumbed to the disease while treating others for it.  And this, most people fear, are only the beginning.

     How do we deal with such horror?  How do we deal with the sight of a father thrashing and coughing up blood as his family watches him die?  How do we deal with the sight of a young man weeping as workers take away the body of his mother?  How do we deal with the dread, the raw, unvarnished dread that is sweeping through village after village?
     (And now, it seems, even in the affluent West.)
     We send money, we support the workers, we pray.  Yet as in the case of the father who, I mentioned last week, in a fit of rage, killed his six grandchildren, his daughter, and himself, we often feel helpless, utterly hopeless, in the face of such unspeakable horror. I'm reminded of the recollections of an Iraqi who was tortured by former leader Saddam Hussein's secret police, strapped to a table deep underground, screaming and screaming and, he said, "No one could hear me."
     Is anyone listening?  Is anyone hearing the cries of the oppressed, the wails of despair that ravage the world?  Such thoughts make positing intimations of God exceedingly difficult.  Is he really out there?
     He is.  But we won't know it until we ask.  And we won't ask until we realize and decide that we can.  And we indeed can.  Jesus didn't die and rise for naught:  in his life, and death, God felt--and feels--our pain.

      "Sickness will take the mind where the mind doesn't usually go."  So sang the Who on their classic rock album "Tommy," released in 1969.  When I hear these words, which I did recently, I think of the American novelist Flannery O'Connor.  O'Connor, who died of lupus at the age of 41, suffered terribly from various ailments, including lupus, for most of her adult life.  And her novels reflected this.  In story after story, O'Connor depicted people on the margins of society, people whose appearance most found repulsive, people whose lives seemed marked by exceptional chaos and pain, people who lived lives that, as the existentialist Jean Paul Sartre might have put it, were abjectly cruel and lonely.  With these motifs as backdrop, O'Connor was able to explore the meaning of pain, a fact of life with which she constantly had to deal.  Tellingly, however, she painted pictures of lives in which pain, although it crumpled many a person, proved, in the end, to be redemptive.  It bequeathed a greater sense of meaning.
     Almost any religion (O'Connor was a deeply devout Catholic) will agree that this is true.  Be it the effects of karma, the virtues of asceticism, the self-abnegation of piety and sacrifice or, to paraphrase Jesus as Luke's gospel records him, letting go of everything for God, religion affirms the redemptive nature of pain.
     We can divide pain into roughly two categories.  One, pain that we invite.  This could include the pain involved in achieving athletic prowess, scholarly acumen, vocational success, or familial comity. Two, pain that we do not invite but which comes anyway, such as O'Connor's lupus or any other debilitating disease.  Either way, we learn from it. We may not always like it, we may not always appreciate it, but in an almost perverted way (given our fallen world) pain opens up our minds to things of which we have not previously thought.  It's almost cleansing.
     Looking at this from another angle, if we hold the world to be a broken but still viable medium of existence, a medium in which pain is inevitable, pain, it seems, may be the only way out of it.  O'Connor recognized that although pain is a terrible thing to endure, the greater pain is that it took God's pain, to wit, watching his only Son die on a cross, to definitively overcome it.  As a holy God well knew, human brokenness--spiritual fracture in particular--cannot heal itself.

     If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that we do not always do the right thing. No one among us eludes our own fallenness.  We all, as many religions, put it, sin.  We all do not always do what pleases or sustains the divine fabric of the universe.
     Few religious groups understand this as well as the Jews.  This week, Jews around the world celebrate Yom Kippur, or the "Day of Atonement."  On this day, Jews acknowledge their sinfulness before God.  They admit their wrongdoing, own up to their prevarications.  And they repent.  They tell God they are sorry for disobeying and violating his commandments and laws.  Then they announce their intention to begin anew to live lives that please their creator.
     So the Jews have done for many centuries, and so they will do for many centuries more.  Their faith remains.
     Although we may not agree with the specifics of the Jewish approach, and though we may not see wrongdoing in quite the same way, we must all admit that, to repeat, we do not always do the right thing.  Every one of us is (or ought to be) aware that, at times, he or she upsets the delicate balance of freedom and order that governs the cosmos.
     If this balance is to be more than relative, there must be a God.  The Jews recognize this clearly.  So do Christians, and so do Muslims.  And so do adherents of countless other religions.  Absolute and therefore genuinely meaningful morality is impossible without God.  Otherwise, repentance is no more than shouting in a relativistic dark, the darkness of an accidental, and therefore, as scientist Steven Weinberg observes, pointless universe.