Writing about the French Impressionist recently, an art critic remarked that Cezanne drew his "religion from his art."  In other words, as this critic saw it, in contrast to some people who formulate their art on the basis of their religion, Cezanne reversed the equation and instead formulated his religion on the basis of his art.  It's rather akin to a person who draws her religious inspiration from walking through a forest:  on the basis of her experience in the forest, she develops her religious perspective.  Yet Cezanne's art is something that, unlike a forest, he himself created.  Hence, as I am to understand the critic's argument, it is in the doing of his art, in the work of his creation, that Cezanne finds his religious moment.

     I find this idea particularly compelling when I consider the work of some artist with whom I am currently collaborating on an art/writing project.  As they do their art, these artists find themselves and, usually, a new facet of their spirituality.  It's not too far from existentialism's creed that what we do makes us who we are.  On the other hand, although I find various levels of validity in this perspective, I also note that, in the end, it makes us the end and beginning of our spirituality.  Yes, as human beings, we are inherently spiritual.  As I see it, however, it is our movements toward the spiritual that underscores that we are not alone in this vast cosmos.  If we are spiritual, there must be spiritual presence.  A presence that we did not make.

     Otherwise, we're just spinning our wheels.

      It's been nearly a week since the world remembered the day, seventy-five years ago, that a nuclear bomb was detonated on living human beings.  Hundreds of thousands of people in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki perished, most of them incinerated instantly, gone before they had a chance to know what was happening, and many others from the aftereffects of the radiation that the bombs unleashed.  It was a disaster of catastrophic proportion, a tragedy beyond sense and imagination.

          Although we can debate, perhaps endlessly, about whether the U.S. should have dropped the bombs, this misses the point.  On the one hand, the bombs demonstrate, albeit in deeply chilling fashion, the remarkable inventive capacity of the human being.  On the other hand, however, the bombs present, in horrific form, the full picture of human depravity, the human being's frightening ability to turn on its own, to dismiss the infinite value of its very self.  To forget who it is.

     The bombs underscore that, absent a transcendent moral anchor, humanity will forever struggle to find its way.  To wit, without a God, is anything really moral?

    

     Hieronymus Bosch, the late Renaissance Dutch painter, left us a curious legacy.  On the one hand, his art seems to reflect a wish for the traditional, the staid and religiously structured medieval past that the Renaissance left behind.  On the other hand, it evinces a desire for a breakage from tradition, a severing of ties to what had long been considered to be morally valid.  His "The Garden of Earthly Delights" is a prime example.

     In a way, we're all like Bosch.  Most of us appreciate tradition, most of us value the tried and true, and few of us entertain a wish to overthrow the existing order completely.  Conversely, however, not too many of us wish to maintain things exactly as they have always been.  We wouldn't be fully human if we did.

     Consider religion.  Repeatedly, the many religions which have emerged in the course of human history have advocated a new way, a fresh way of looking at the world.  That's their appeal:  a richer perspective on existence.  We may agree or disagree with any or all of the world's religions, but we cannot deny how they have opened new and, usually positive, avenues of thinking for billions and billions of people.

    It's tricky, this humanness of ours is.  We constantly balance a compelling desire for stability with an equally compelling desire to undo it, to undo it for a greater day.  As we should.  God didn't make us to stand still.

     Testifying to the U. S. Senate Committee on Women's Suffrage in 1898, Elizabeth Cady Stanton observed, "There is a solitude which each and every one of us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea:  the solitude of self . . . to it only omniscience is permitted to enter.  Such is individual life."

    Ms. Stanton makes a telling point about the nature of the human being.  As she notes, ultimately, all people are individuals.  That is, although humans are made to be in fellowship with other human beings, they remain individual entities, entities in which there is a place that, in ways no one or nothing else can, defines them:  the very deepest part of their soul.

     And it in this depth of being that we find what most matters to who we are as human beings:  the presence of transcendence, the fact of omniscience, the order which undergirds the cosmos.  We find our connection to the seminal principle of existence.

     Without this point of depth, as Ms. Stanton suggests, we are beacons of inner solitude, grand bastions of individuality without any larger point.

     Do you wear a mask?  Do you believe that freedom is being able to do exactly what you always want to do?  That you're free to do what you wish so long as you do not harm others?

     Fair enough.  However, the challenge making this assertion is that you become the arbiter of what constitutes harm to others, people most of whom you do not know.

     In writing, many centuries ago, about the right to liberty, John Stuart Mill observed that, absent a government rooted in popular consent, liberty is futile.  We might even go a step further and suggest that, absent a measure of transcendence, liberty is meaningless:  how can we insist that we are free if the world has no point?

     When many decades ago the rock band the Who sang that freedom tastes of reality, whether they knew it or not, they were onto something.  When we make freedom the path to reality, we must also affirm that we live in the shadow of a larger presence.

     Even avowed atheist Jean Paul Sartre acknowledged that if there is no God, freedom is no more than useless passion.  It goes neither forward or back:  it just sits in its own miasma.

     All this is to say:  wear a mask!

      They called it "Stalin's Famine."  In an effort to modernize Russia, dictator Josef Stalin, in the 1930s, systematically forced millions of Ukrainian peasants off their family farm into massive agricultural collectives.  And the wheat they grew, he did't leave for them.  He shipped it overseas to fund his modernizing efforts.

     And millions and millions of people died.  Until an Englishman named Gareth Jones, whose work has been recently immortalized in a film entitled "Mr. Jones," sneaked into Ukraine and reported on what he found, the rest of the world had no idea.

     Then it did.  Sadly, however, the pragmatics of international relations demanded that America and Britain, the leaders of the Western war effort against Adolf Hitler, establish good relations with Stalin to win the war.  They had to overlook the famine to achieve what they considered to be a greater good.  It was utilitarianism at its finest.

        This notwithstanding, Jones did the planet a favor:  he exposed the perfidy of a philosophy that, although its founder intended for it to liberate, will, if mismanaged, do exactly the opposite.  It's a perplexing irony of who we are that we often build liberation on the back of oppression.

      To wit, it's hard to be free in metaphysical chains.

     Perhaps you've heard of German musician Richard Wagner.  He's most famous for two things.  One, his "Ring" cycle opera (the most well known part of which is probably "Gotterdammerung" ("The End or the Twilight of the Gods").  Two, the influence that his music exercised, and not in a positive way, on Adolf Hitler.

     Wagner's "Ring" is a very long opera.  Only those who really like it are wiling to sit through its seventeen hour length.  The plot is involved and complicated.  And rich with Norse mythology.  It's a singularly powerful work.

     In thinking about the "Ring" as I read a study of it recently, I was reminded that, at its core, the "Ring" is about the point of life.  It says this, however, in a deliberately exasperating way.  As this study put, the "Ring" argues that although love is beautiful, it is worth nothing.

     In other words, although we should love and treasure love and life, we should also know that when they end, everything else does, too.  It's not difficult to see how this thought undergirded Naziism:  if there's no afterlife, there's no meaning.  Therefore, as British occultist Aleister Crowley once observed, whatever is met:  do whatever you wish.  You're going to die anyway.

     For some, this is simply accepting the brave futility of existence.  For others, however, if mythology is to mean anything, anything at all, existence must have a deeper underpinning.  Otherwise, why even dream of it?