Do you like haystacks?  I say this somewhat tongue in cheek to make a larger point:  today is the birthday of French painter Claude Monet.  One of the most famous of the nineteenth century impressionists who transformed the nature of art, Monet achieved perhaps his greatest fame for his series of haystack paintings.  He depicted haystacks in the spring, summer, autumn, and winter, using subtle shifts of color to portray the fact of permanence in the face of change.


     Consider one of Monet's most well known theses:  "I wish to render what is."  In Monet's work we see an effort to take what "is" and make it as we feel it might otherwise be.  Not what we think it should be, but what we feel it should be.  We turn rationality on its head; we elevate emotion over all.
     In so doing, we capture the heart of who, and the world, most are.  Like our creator, we are deeply personal beings, beings whom although we like to think we are rational (which we indubitably are), we are, in our deepest essence, creatures of passion.  Beings of viscerality and pathos.  So do we embrace the world, so do we embrace the transcendence out of which it comes.
     We thank Monet for his insight, that amidst our dogged attempts to understand life rationally, perhaps we do better to grasp it as it most fully is:  the work and expression of a profoundly passionate creator. 

    

     As the Western world continues to remember the one hundredth anniversary of the armistice that ended the first World War, we hear much talk about nationalism.  Some argue that it was nationalism that provoked the War, while others argue that nationalism is a natural and necessary element of how a nation sees and comports itself on the global stage.
     Be it nationalism, patriotism, jingoism, or something else, it seems that when we elevate the welfare of our country above the welfare of all other countries, we are implicitly claiming that we are inherently better than anyone else in the world.
     And if I read the New Testament correctly, that decidedly does not align with the love of God for all people.
     Have a good day.

      Yesterday, November 11, you may know, was Veterans Day in the U.S.  As most history students know, November 11, 1918, marks the day that the armistice of World War I took effect (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month).
     I am not a warmonger.  All things considered, I would rather the nations of the world never fight again.  I do not live to engage in war and combat, and I do not favor using war to resolve international differences.  Broadly speaking, I do not believe that God does, either.

     Yet wars happen, and many people feel called to or are conscripted to fight in them. Unfortunately, while some survive, far too many do not.  And this doesn't count the untold numbers of civilians who perish, too.  War's tragedy is immense.  So when I think about Veterans Day, I think most about the horror of war.  I also think about the sense of duty many people feel to their country. In addition, I think about the sin of the world, the fact of human compassion, and the beauty of peace.  And I think about God's willingness, in Jesus Christ, to die for us--and the world--so as to set all things right.  And I try to put all of these together.
     It's not easy.  It's not easy to know what, amid the thicket of competing loyalties, God thinks.  It's not easy to know what eternity, the lens by which all things will be assessed, envisioned, and judged, means.  But it's easy to know that God is present, in peace as well as war, his love for us ever unchanged.
     And maybe, in all of our human stumblings and beautiful yet flawed rationality, that's what we most need to know.

     Today is a big day.  It is a holiday sacred to over a billion people around the world:  the Hindu festival of Diwali.  A joyous occasion, Diwali is known as the festival of lights, full of decoration, celebration, and rejoicing over the fact of life and the gods who give it.
     And what could be wrong with this?  Life, however we might like to think about it, can be nothing more--and nothing less--than a gift from God.  Otherwise, it is little more than a random occasion, a capricious occurrence, something in which we have found ourselves, raw and unknown, and told we must live it.  As the late evolutionary biologist William Provine acknowledged, if life is random, we are no more than plops, born only to die.  There is no meaning.
     Enjoy life, enjoy its lights.  Be happy for your gift.  Along the way, as Ecclesiastes 12 exhorts us, "Remember your creator," the one from whom, as the old hymn goes, "All things come."
     Including you.

     I've written before about rock climber Alex Honnold.  As you may remember, Honnold specializes in climbing the most massive rock faces in the world, without using any ropes.  He enjoys risks, he says, and he loves climbing.  And he's still alive.

     A few weeks ago, I took in a movie made about Honnold.  It's called "Free Solo," so named because it is built around Honnold's recent free solo scaling of Yosemite's El Capitan, a three thousand foot high glacially sculpted slab of granite.  He is the first person to climb El Capitan solo and without ropes.

     El Capitan is probably the most famous rock face on the planet.  Thousands of climbers come from every corner of the globe to scale it.  And they all use ropes to do it.  Most live to tell the story, a few die.  Most require several days to climb it.  Honnold free soloed the face in slightly under four hours.  His climbing powers are unfathomable.  And he seems to have conquered any sense of fear while he climbs.
     
     Although Honnold has made clear elsewhere that he does not believe in God, and that he therefore, by logical extension, does not believe in life after death, that's not the point.  The point is that if life is that precious, our individual wishes and whims seem inadequate in the face of the greater good.  If there is no God, and if there is no afterlife, we really are in this adventure together.  We can't leave anyone out.  Even those in whom we may not believe.
     Climb on, Alex.  But be careful.

     We all have a birthday, and yesterday was mine.  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 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 cannot make, a creation that, whether we know it or not, is made meaningful, yes, by us, but ultimately only by God.  We are poems with lingering and permanent point, poems with a destiny, poems with a conclusion.  We are poems of eternity. 
     Otherwise, it's futility.

     We err when we suppose that, "Science is not just omnicomptetent but unchallenged, the sole form of rational thinking."  Mary Midgley, a British moral philosopher who died a couple of weeks ago, appreciated science.  As should we all.  But Midgley understood science's limitations very well.  She knew that when a society elevates science, a discipline that does not seek to know what is moral or what the world means, but simply how the world works, to a position of unquestioned rational and moral authority, it loses its sense of what is possible.  It loses its sense of what is possible for beings like us who are moral and believing animals to learn in a vast and and often bewildering world.  It misses the larger point, the point that unless the world is regarded as something more than "what is," we have no basis to know what it means.
     There is rationality, and there is morality.  And neither can be understood without the other.