A few weeks ago, my wife and I participated in an annual event in our community called the Crop Walk for Hunger.  People who walk raise or give money to combat hunger around the world.  We love doing it.
     I hate to see anyone go hungry.  Unfortunately, as I write these words any number of people die from hunger.  Even sadder, most of these are children.  It's heartbreaking.
     Most of us are well fed.  Most of us live in reasonable shelter.  Most of us do not need to worry about where our next meal will come from.  Moreover, most of us take these things for granted.
     A book I've been reading (The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh) makes an interesting point in this regard.  Ghosh suggests that we do not so much use reason to order our lives as we walk in habitual motion.  We do not think about what we are doing or why we are doing it.  We just go through the motions.
     So it is with global hunger.  So busy are we going through our motions, trying to stay afloat of our many existential priorities, that we forget the bigger picture.
     Tragically, yet remarkably, the bigger picture is much bigger than we think.  We walk in the umbra of something far more weighty than we can presently imagine.  In this presence, this living God, all things, including global hunger, find conclusion and meaning. 
     One of my Jewish friends has often told me that, "We work with God to help the world" (tikkun olam).  Indeed, we do.  We go through our motions, yes, but God does, too.  Together, if we listen to each other, we can move the world forward, forward to its wonderful destiny.
     But we need to listen.

     Are we wondrous?  Walt Whitman certainly thought so.  In his famous "Song of Myself," Whitman writes with passion and eloquence about what he considered to be the magnificence of the human being.  He was, he said, celebrating himself and all humankind.  He was celebrating vocation and creation; father and son; mother and daughter; worker and employer; citizen and country.  Whitman wanted the world to know how remarkable the human being is.
     Some people thought Whitman was idolatrous or egomanical.  They miss his point.  Whitman well understood that he was not perfect.  He was quite aware of his faults and flaws.  But Whitman grasped one of the most essential facts about the human being:  the capacity to choose.  Conscious in ways that no other animals are, humans are blessed with an extraordinary ability to ponder, dream, and envision and, significantly, the means to choose and execute these dreams.  We can manipulate our lives and those of the world in ways no other species can.
     And in this is our glory as well as our tragedy.  But would we want it any other way?  It's impossible to be free without experiencing both.
     Though Whitman didn't believe, it seems, in the conventional Christian notion of God, he understood very well the import of the idea of God for the human being.  Not only are we free, we know we are free.
     In a random world, we would know neither.

     "Who knows that the breath of humans ascends upwards, and the breath of other animals descends downwards?"  In this verse from Ecclesiastes, we see the essence of faith.  As we continue to recoil from the horrific mass shooting at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, we weep.  We weep deeply for those who are lost, for those who must put their lives back together in the wake of loss.  It's unbearably tragic.
     Yet as many of the survivors said, "We have faith that they are in heaven.  And we will see them soon."  They believe that the "breath of humans ascends upward."  They believe that their loved ones are living, again, this time for eternity.
     It all comes down to faith.  In Jesus' resurrection, we have the evidence.  And in our hearts, we have the response.
     Ah, faith.  So simple, yet so unspeakably complex.

     “I guess you have your choice of trying to make money or getting involved with adventure.  Most people get married, and by the time they’re 30 they’ve got a couple of kids, and then they’re strapped down. Then they have to work.”
     So said Fred Beckey, renowned American mountaineer who died last week at the age of 94.  Beckey took up climbing at a very early age and never stopped.  He climbed well into his nineties.  Although some of his fellow mountaineers found Beckey to be cantankerous and difficult at times, they uniformly lauded his exploits on the peaks.  Beckey probably put up more first ascents than any other mountaineer in history.  He seemed unstoppable.
     As it turned out, only death could stop him.  All of us have a choice in how we live our lives.  Though we are born into different situations and circumstances, some to lives of honor and privilege, others to lives of ignominy and poverty, we all, in the end, must decide, for ourselves, how we will live the life we have been given.  For Beckey, it was adventure.
     What is it for you?  If you dig deep enough, you will see, in a manner of speaking, that eternity, the vast and unremitting presence that surrounds this finite world, hinges on what you decide.  Beckey created a life of meaning.  So can you.  Yet neither you nor he could do unless there is a God.
     Otherwise, our lives have no real reason to be. 
  

     We all have a birthday, and tomorrow is mine.  But what's a birthday?  Birthdays are the stuff of existence.  When I think about my earliest years, years when I wondered why I was here, why I was doing what I was doing, why I was being told to believe the things I was told to believe, I often wonder: how did I get to where I am today?  I have no idea. Yes, I planned, and yes, I tried to execute intentions, and yes, I went here and there, and yes, things happened, but in the end I have no clear idea of how I landed on today.  Who does?  We're all living in a universe we did not make, a universe over which we ultimately have very little control.
     All we know is that life is a promise and expectation, an inkling and anticipation, a river and ocean coming constantly together in a creation we do not really make, a creation that, whether we know it or not, is made meaningful by God.  We are poems with a point, poems with a destiny, poems with a conclusion.  We are poems of eternity. 
     Otherwise, it's futility.

     "Faith," Augustine once observed, "seeks understanding."  It seems counterintuitive, does it not?  Isn't it better that we seek first to understand and, subsequently, if we still do not understand everything, turn to faith, of some kind, to keep going?

     In most areas of life, this is undoubtedly true.  Modern science is built upon the premise that we ought to seek understanding in all arenas of human existence.  And we should.
     Yet as Martin Luther pointed out in contending that we ultimately find God by faith, so did Augustine rightly note that although we will understand many things through observing the world, we will not understand God until we admit that, on the basis of the material world--absent revelation--only, we cannot.
     In all material affairs, yes, seek to understand.  In matters of the spirit, however, understand that you must believe first.
     And God will open himself to you.  To believe is to understand.  Everything.
     

      As we consider the fact of All Souls Day, the day after Halloween, we remember.  We remember our loved ones who are gone, we remember what has gone well, we remember what has not.  We remember existence, we remember life itself.  We ponder the import of memory.
     We also ask, how do we explain what has happened, what has been?  How do we measure the span of our existence?  How do we measure the value of our days?

   In ourselves, though we may take pride in reflecting on a life we believe to be well lived, a life that has made its mark, how do we really know?  We have only ourselves and our fellow human beings.  We measure by what we know.  And what we know is frightfully little.  Rarely do we ever see the big picture.  Rarely do we grasp the full meaning of our years.  We're finite creatures living in a finite world, a world that, one day, according to all cosmological predictions, will be burned up by an expanding sun, gone forever, never to be seen again.  It's over.
     God indeed said to Adam that, "From dust you have come, and to dust you shall return."  Dust only has value if it has a reason to be, that is, if someone thought of and remembered it, someone who enabled the processes that birth it into reality.  Absent this, though dust could well be, we have, absent anything in us, no reason to believe it should.  It all just happened.
     Sure, things happen all the time.  But why?  The rhythms of the world demand it, the patterns of the cosmos enable it.  Yet where did these come from?
     As we remember our loved ones, as we remember what has been, as we look forward, as poet Robert Browning wrote so eloquently, to what is to come, we also remember this: if nothing, broadly speaking, was meant to be, then there is no reason for anything to be.
     Enjoy the ride, delight in God:  revel in the fact of personal creation.