I just finished writing a letter to a friend of mine who is in the U.S. Army.  Though he has yet to tour Iraq or Afghanistan (he entered only recently), he is well aware that he will likely do so soon.  As a result, he also knows, he may soon be asked to kill another human being.  Yes, he will do so under orders, and yes, he will probably do so to deter aggressive attacks or defend himself but, regardless, he will be put into a position to end another person's life.
     Granted, the context of war is extremely complex, and difficult to understand from one standpoint alone.  We judge it with caution and care.  On one hand, as Barack Obama noted when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, sometimes war may be necessary.  On the other hand, as Civil War General William Sherman put it, "War is hell."  It's a two edged sword.  If we ever come to enjoy, to genuinely enjoy war, however, we step into a moral abyss from which there is no return.  Sometimes death is welcome, sometimes it is not.  But it's never normal.  It's never the way things ought to be.
     God surely weeps at the wars in which humanity has engaged (and in which it continues to engage).  He weeps for those fighting them, he weeps for those killed by them.  Above all, God wants peace.  Above all, God wants shalom (Arabic shalim), that wonderful and ancient word for harmony and well being.  The global calculus we face is of course extremely complicated, but God wants us to approach it with wisdom and compassion, to live for the greater good of all.  So does the New Testament letter to the Galatians urge us, "Do good to all people."
     By the way, I will be traveling next week, off on another wilderness adventure.  I'll catch up with this blog when I return.  Thanks so much for reading!

     A couple of years ago, I wrote about the death of Patrick Edlinger, a French sports climber.  In his prime, Edlinger dazzled the climbing world with his ability, traveling across the globe to scale rock face after rock face, and winning countless climbing contests.  His peers marveled at his endurance and speed.  A recent issue of Rock and Ice, a leading climbing magazine, contains an article about Edlinger that describes not his prowess but his personal angst.  Driven, torn, and often desperate for meaning, Edlinger, while amazing climbers around the planet with his skill, wrestled with innumerable personal demons.  His was a life divided in two.
     Similarly, Dougal Haston, one of the greatest British climbers of his generation, tangled with intense personal angst.  His journals speak frequently about his desire to fight the walls that he felt were always before him, his longing to break free of all constraint, his burning wish to let go and step into the unknown.  Like Edlinger, Haston struggled with his angst until the day he died.  (He perished in an avalanche in the French Alps.)
    Two highly gifted men, two tragic lives.  How sad that such ability was consumed by such angst.  How sad that too many gifted human beings are fractured by their dark sides. We all have dark sides, we all struggle to balance passion, ability, and desire.  It's our lot as human beings:  personal perfection will always elude us.  On the other hand, we are marvelous and wondrous creations, and it is this on which God wants us to most focus.  He demands repentance for transgression, yes, as he should; he is a moral God.  Yet the only reason he does is because we are such valuable creations to him.  He made us, he trusts us, we trust him.  As the writer of Psalm 130 observes, "There is forgiveness with you [God], that you may be feared [trusted and revered]."
     It is the fact of God and our humanness, giftedness, darkness, and all, that ground our hope of moral forgiveness and meaning.

     Since the Seventies, Buddhism has become highly popular in the West.  It's not hard to see why.  It promises a path to inner peace and contentment, a way to deal with the multiple stresses that seem to afflict so many in the West, a doorway to set oneself in harmony with all living things.  Buddhism offers a way to find personal satisfaction and wholeness without having to entangle oneself in various permutations of religious dogma.
     I thought about this, again, as I  attended a talk given by a friend of mine at a Unitarian Universalist service recently.  For her, Buddhism has provided solutions to the angst of her life challenges.  It has improved her life considerably.  She has found her way forward.
     Periodically, I get together with a Buddhist monk.  Born in Sri Lanka, he has been in the U.S. for over twenty years.  He meditates hours each day and radiates peace in his every word.  Although we differ greatly on what constitutes God and truth, we enjoy getting together.
     That's the point.  While I would like for the monk and my friend to take hold of, in a personal way, the tenets of Christianity, I genuinely enjoy them as fellow human beings who are created in the image of God.  God has made a remarkable world and filled it with remarkably diverse human beings.  Each one of us is extraordinary and amazing.  We all can learn from each other, we all can help each other.  And we all can come to understand that, in the big picture, none of us would be here if the universe were not infused with love as well as holiness which, together, constitute the essential ground and nexus of purpose and meaning.
     Indeed, only if God is both will the universe ever make sense.

     It's an age-old question:  does God exist?  Without taking sides, Amir D. Aczel, a mathematician by training, recently set out, in a book, to establish that regardless of where we stand on the issue, we cannot expect science to definitively resolve it one way or the other.  In other words, as he writes in his Why Science Does Not Disprove God, "The greatest mystery of all--Is there a God?--may be one of those truths that are unattainable to us from a purely logical-mathematical framework."
     Before coming to this conclusion, Aczel explores an array of fascinating mathematical approaches to the problem, including probabilistic analysis, chaos theory, and set theory, along with various ideas of physics, principally quantum theory and the multiverse concept.  He emphasizes the impossibility of asserting existence from nothing; the difficulty of explaining consciousness arising from materiality alone; and the notion that probability can be used to predict God's existence as much as it cannot.  He also stresses that although evolution is the best way of explaining why the world and its animal species are the way they are, it does not explain why some animals, including human beings, practice altruism when there is no evolutionary or survival need to do so.
     But Aczel's final conclusion, the one I quoted above, is the one most worth pondering.  It's also the one most true to the nature of the human exchange with God.  If God is there, we will not find him, the ultimate and absolutely infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being, through the confines of our human experimentation.  How could we?
     One response to this might be that we only find God by faith.  But this doesn't get us any closer to knowing him or proving that he exists.  The fuller response is that, yes, we need faith (after all, we are finite) to grasp what exists beyond our material world, but also that what is beyond this world, that is, God, must make himself unmistakably known in this world.  And so, from my standpoint, he has:  the person of Jesus Christ.  In other words, if you can't find the infinite in the infinite, look for it in the finite.
     Bottom line, if you're reasonably open minded, you won't miss seeing God.

     Is nihilism possible?  A book by theologian Hans Kung, Does God Exist?, which I read many years ago but had occasion to reread recently, suggests that it is.  Life's ennui and uncertainty, he suggests, make nihilism possible.  It is possible, he goes on to say, that this life is meaningless, a chance and random occurrence without any point.
     Though in theory Kung is right, in practice, he is not.  To assert that there is no meaning is to insist, ironically enough, that some level of meaning exists.  We can't have our cake and eat it, too.  Meaning or no meaning, either way, how do we really know?  We can't see outside ourselves.
     Many years ago, the British band Traffic wrote a song that began with a question:  "On the one door is truth, on the one door is lie; which one will you answer to, you really must decide?"  It's a paradox:  how can we decide between truth or lie if we do not know what they are before we open the door?  So it is with nihilism and meaning.  Absent outside input, we do not know which one is true and which one is lie.  So how do we decide?
     On the other hand, if meaning does not exist, why do we still think about it?  Though we may try to live atop the skein of existence, blithely denying that it is anything other than a twist of quantum fluctuation, its deeper truths eventually surface.  If we are to make the material world mean anything, we must embrace more than its randomness.
     Cosmic accidents don't need a reason to happen, but meaning and purpose do.  And we would not know this unless we, quite apart from ourselves, are meaningful beings.

     Weep for the world today. Weep for the Gaza strip, its people caught in a maelstrom of jingoism, authoritarianism, and revolt; weep for the Ukraine, its people unintentional witness to the Malaysian airline tragedy that has unfolded before their eyes.  Reading various newspaper accounts about these events, I cringe at the now far too banal detritus they left behind.  Scattered plaster and rubble, blood stains on a door, bullets lodged in a concrete wall, a child's notebook, a tour guide to Indonesia, a pair of pants, a container of hand cream, an I-phone, sundry and assorted evidences of lives now forever gone.  Some reflected persons who had lived long, others persons whose lives had barely begun.  No matter:  each is a tragedy, an immensely moving tragedy, a tragedy that unfortunately is now spawning others, creating gaps and crevasses in other lives, the lives of those now left to continue without the person who is gone.  It's a picture of a creation fractured beyond belief.
     God is weeping, too.  He is weeping for the deaths of people he made, weeping for the end of lives before their time.  He weeps for the tragedies that afflict human beings.  While in the wake of these tragedies--and countless others--we can argue for days about the precise exchange between divine sovereignty and human will, we can certainly agree that death is not what God wants.  Above all, God wants us to live.  He wants us to live and trust, to trust and see that he is there, always and forevermore.

     Does being religious really make a difference in how we behave?  A fascinating survey that appears in the current edition of Christianity Today, the flagship publication of the evangelical Christian world, puts this question in an intriguing light.  Conducted by the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, the survey asks self-identified "evangelical and born-again churchgoers" about what sorts of things they might do for hard, cold cash.  One that caught my eye was that 40% of those surveyed indicated that they would, for money, throw a rotten tomato at a politician.  Another was that 33% indicated that they would, for money, "flip off" their boss or teacher.  Two others were that 24% indicated that they would, for money, cheat at poker, and 12% indicated that they would, for money, kick a dog "hard" in the head.
     So, the unbeliever might now ask, what difference does religion really make?
     Much depends, I think, on the reasons people come to believe.  If we believe in say, Jesus, out of fear; if we believe in him on the basis of what we should or should not do; or if we believe in him because we think we will be a "better" person; we will likely be disappointed.  Conversion or not, we will still have the same personal baggage, and conversion or not, we will still have to live our lives.  Granted, we can overcome what is in us, and granted, we can carve out a new life path, but we will never be anything more than a sinful--yet marvelous and valuable--human being who has been created in the image of God.
     And that's the point.  As people who have not made themselves, as people who are frightfully contingent, as people who do not know what will happen in the next moment, we ought to recognize that we are very limited beings.  We believe in Jesus not necessarily because he will make us better people but because he and his life's work best explain, ameliorate, and resolve why we are here, why we are the way we are, and why we are going where we are going, in this life and beyond.  We should not believe, however, because we hope that we will be perfect people.
     Those who believe in Jesus ought to be the most abjectly humble people on the planet.