Do you like the rain?  In the writings of the ancient near east, people certainly did.  In fact, they expected it:  once in the spring, again in the autumn.  They used the spring rains to plant their crops, and the autumn rains to prepare the soil for planting in the coming spring.  It was a rhythm woven deeply into their lives.


     Today, many Indians expect the monsoons to come with startling regularity, and are often able to predict the precise day they will begin.  Far, far above India's teeming cities, Himalayan mountaineers work within a carefully calibrated window of opportunity framed by the monsoon season:  they know that they must seize the time to climb.

     Although climate change has altered the rhythms of weather patterns all over the world, in some cases overturning them completely, it has not yet succeeded in jettisoning them altogether.  Maybe one day it will; maybe not.  Will the earth survive the human species?  I cannot say.  What I can say, however, is that, despite how human machinations and folly have undercut the predictability of earthly pattern, they will probably not end the life of the planet.

     Life, like the God who established it, is more than who we are.

     Have you heard of the punk rock group Green Day?  If you do, you know that Green Day has been rocking the music world for over twenty years, turning out one hit album after another, doing wildly successful concert tours around the planet, and stirring up substantial media notice with some of its members' issues with drugs.

     It has produced several DVDs about its concerts, too.  A number of years ago, I had occasion to watch one:  "Bullet in a Bible."  I've watched it many times since, and never tire of how it presents one of the band's most famous songs, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams."  Why?  Even as the camera shows a perspiring Billie Joe Armstrong belting out the lyrics, it pans the audience, mostly millennials, mostly people who know the words by heart, and mostly people who, for any number of reasons, seem to connect, in an almost visceral way, with them.


     Armstrong sings of wandering amidst broken dreams, hoping that someone "up there" would find him, but concluding that in the end he will "walk alone," his shadow his only companion.  Powerful words, yet words which fit, I daresay, how many of us view the larger issues of our existence.  Most of us hope that, somehow, someway, there is a bigger picture to our lives, that there is a larger reason why we are here, that we do not live and die without any reason.  Most of us do not wish to live alone, be it alone among our fellow human beings, or the vast maw of the universe.  We want to feel connected to something more than us.
     After all, we're only--and only--human.  Happily, God was once, too.

      "Now is the wind-time, the scattering clattering song-on-the-lawn time early eves and gray days clouds shrouding the traveled ways trees spare and cracked bare slim fingers in the air dry grass in the wind-lash waving waving as the birds pass the sky turns, the wind gusts winter sweeps in it must it must."  (Debra Reinstra, "Autumn")

     It's happened:  the autumnal equinox. It's a good day, a fun time.  Turning leaves and brilliant colors; cool, crisp nights and rich blue skies; the rising of Orion, his three star belt shining resplendently; and light and dark woven with liminality and change:  life displays itself once more.

     In the ancient near east, the land of Egypt, Assyria, Sumer, and Babylon, autumn was a significant moment.  It marked the time of harvest and thanksgiving, a season of expectation--the life giving autumn rains were imminent--and days of ingathering and contemplation.

     So it can be for us.  Amidst our technology and worldly disenchantment, we can learn from our long ago brethren, our many ancestors who placed such tremendous faith in the certainty of the seasons, ordained, as they saw it, by the gods.  It's good to reach ends, and it's equally good to meditate on beginnings; it's good to remember the ceaselessness of the rhythms that ripple through the cosmos.  It's good to ponder the certitude still embedded in a mercurial and capricious world.
     
     In autumn's transforming predictability, we also catch a deeper vision of the creator God.  In a finite and often fractured world, change is inevitable.  Amidst all of our seasons of malleability and change, however, God's love, guidance, and presence remain firm.  Take heart in autumn's changes, and realize, once more, the fact and necessity of an eternal God.

     Holiness?  I thought about holiness the other day as I listened to Australian born singer Megan Washington do her song "Holy Moses."  She is afraid of Moses, she says, afraid of his aura, his aura of holiness, fearful of what it might mean.

    Washington's song underscores our innate human propensity to wonder about what moral perfection really looks like.  Because we are aware that we will never achieve moral perfection, we tend to regard those whom we believe have it with a measure of respect and trepidation, even dread and fear.  Early in the last century, Rudolph Otto, in an influential book, The Idea of the Holy, argued that although we may cower before what we consider to be absolute holiness, we at the same time are drawn to it.  It is a dread of fascination, a dread of compulsion and interest that engenders a quest to know even more.  Like watching a horror movie.



     For this reason, Otto contended, although we may reject the idea of a holiness, particularly in a God, when push comes to shove, we have difficulty escaping it altogether.  Like it or not, it circumscribes who we are:  beings who seek holiness, in some form, yet beings who know that, all things being equal, we will never find it unless we acknowledge our dependence something greater than who and what we are.  We know that we cannot have it both ways.

     As I put it in a chapter on holiness in a book (Thinking about God) I wrote a number of years ago, "Forget about holiness, and you'll be running the rest of your life."

     "Though the mind of a person plans his way," notes the writer of Proverbs 16:9, "the Lord directs his steps."  On the one hand, this seems to put us into a trap:  what happens to our capacity for choice?  On the other hand, it may be a comfort:  someone wiser than we helps us find the better way.  Which should--or can--it be?

     Think about a bird winging its way south for the winter.  Does anyone tell it to go?  Does anyone tell it when to go?  Many decades ago, I was backpacking through the remote Brooks Range of northern Alaska when I chanced upon a duck tending to its affairs in a tiny pond.  I did not expect to see this duck; given the relatively late date (August in the Arctic), I had assumed it and its companions would have been long gone by now.  The next morning, however, it was gone. 
     Somehow, it knew.  And it knew at just the right time.


     As do we.  We know when we are supposed to do things, we know when we are supposed to be a certain way.  Unlike the duck, however, we can choose not to be or do them.  We are more than instinct.  We have a choice.

     Consider the universe.  It steadily spins itself out under the umbra of its creator, gyrating, expanding, turning in on itself as it deepens the abundance of its form and ambiguity.  We little know where it will end up. We only know that it is going.

     As we do for our lives.  We only know that they are going, going somewhere, and going, in an odd way, everywhere, everywhere the universe can be, the universe of our spatiality, the universe of our hearts.

     So, yes, God directs our steps.  But he does so as an infinite God in an infinitely transforming universe.

     The possibilities are endless.

     One of the books I read in the course of my mountain sojourns was Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame.  Although I had read bits and pieces of it in previous years, along with his more famous Les Miserables, this was the first time I had read it all the way through.  I found it to be even more remarkable than I had imagined.
     
     In addition to providing an insightful look at the history and structure of the famous cathedral, Hunchback also presents, in the manner of Beauty and the Beast, a compelling tale of redemption.  Poor Quasimodo, so named because he was considered to only be part human, struggling with identity, meaning and, most significantly, love:  what would his destiny be?  Somehow, he had to set himself free.

     
     Yet as Beauty and the Beast demonstrates, genuine redemption is not necessarily something we create or plan.  It is rather something that comes upon as we live to love.  When the Beast loved, he experienced love in return.  So did Quasimodo, when, in his fractured way--like the Beast--loved, he found love in return.  Not until, however, he died.

     In this, however, is the deepest shape of freedom:  only as we love to our death, the death of what we know, the death of what we think, the death of all to which we cling, will we be genuinely free.  We must let go of our present freedom to find the freedom which we can never lose, be it now or at our earthly passing.

     Perhaps you've heard of The North Face, a leading purveyor of outdoor clothing and equipment that began in the mid-Sixties in Berkeley, California.  Once small, it is now massive, a corporation with thousands of employees around the globe.  Its products are first rate and technically astute:  if you can afford them, buy them.  Everything comes with a lifetime guarantee.
     I've written here before about Doug Tompkins, the entrepreneur who established The North Face and who, tragically, perished in a kayaking accident at the age of seventy-two in 2015.  Before he died, Tompkins and his wife, Kristen, had begun to arrange to donate millions of acres of wilderness in the spectacular Patagonia region of Chile for a series of unforgettably beautiful national parks.
     Recently, Kristen completed the donation process, creating one of the most magnificent stretches of protected wilderness areas on the planet.  Prior to his death, Tompkins was not always understood by the locals; not everyone grasped the importance of what he was doing.  In light of his remarkable donation and how it stirred fresh memories of his passing, however, people have begun to appreciate his vision.  They have come to see his wisdom.

     
Too often wisdom is cast aside in the interests of profit.  In addition, too often wisdom is framed and interpreted through the lens of our own wants and needs.  Rarely do we know whether we can properly call our visions wise.  Who can know?
    Maybe that's why Paul, writing to the church in Corinth, reminded his readers that although we revere much of what we corporately determine is wise, we cannot necessarily insist that it is true, much less truth.  Again, how do we know?
     We don't.  All we know that what is genuinely wise is beyond our human ken.  We are left to pick away at the intimations of the transcendence in which we live our lives.  And to always believe we see, as Paul said, "in a riddle."
     Faith is difficult, isn't it?