How does one measure a life?  Perhaps you've heard of the female emergency room physician in New York who, according to those who knew her, apparently felt so overwhelmed by the magnitude of the Covid-19 cases she was treating that she took her own life.  Her despair pushed her beyond her breaking point.  By all accounts, she was a lovely, energetic, committed, and deeply religious person who was passionate about her work on behalf of others.

Although for the spiritually minded among us, it is easy to say that this person now has her reward:  eternal, visible union with God.  While I do not dispute the truth of this eventuality, I nonetheless grapple with its starkness:  she is now forever gone from this planet.  And her loved ones mourn.
     I do not pretend to know the fullness of this woman's heart or the depth of God's activity in this world.  Yet I can say that, all things considered, I'm thankful that, because of the fact of a meaningful world, because of the fact of a world with intention and design, her life had a genuine point.
     As does the life of everyone else around the globe.  In this, we can be grateful, and in this we can move toward finding solace in all of our existential pain.

     Cloistering.  We hear this word much these days.  For many, it has a become a term of pain, a pain of not being able to work or go outside.  For others, it has become a way of slowing down and finding new ways of spending one's time.  For still others, it has become a road to starvation.
     Although the lessons drawn from cloistering are many and, depending on one's starting point and material circumstances, starkly dark, light, and conditional, they remain relevant.  In some cases, cloistering births generosity; in others, selfishness.
     Yet the essential point remains.  Though we humans are made to interact with each other, to be moral and social beings, we all equally made to be, at certain points, alone.  There is a reason why the great religious sages spent time in solitude.
    As we move forward together, and as, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, spring continues  to "spring," we find solace in our humanity, that though we grow in solitude, we find who we are in community.
     For this we are grateful, very grateful for the fact of personality, a implicitly transcendent personality, at the core of the universe.

     No doubt you're familiar with Leonardo da Vinci's painting "Mona Lisa."  It is, as you may know, perhaps the most famous piece of art in the world.  Thousands flock to the France's Louvre Museum each year to see it, and thousands more study and marvel over it in books and journals.  Although for some, the portrait of the wife of a nobleman of the Renaissance may seem decidedly ordinary and, though in a way it is, it is rather da Vinci's use of a host of innovative artistic techniques that have made it so famous.

     While I will not delve into these techniques too deeply here, I will note one or two.  These include da Vinci's decision to paint not on the basis of an outline, like a color by number coloring book, but rather to use light and shadow to delineate objects and set them apart.  The result is less a construct and more a tapestry, a river of color flowing together.  Also, in rendering the noblewoman's smile, the smile which has captivated millions around the globe, da Vinci made it simultaneously overt and vanishing, leaving the viewer struck with wonder and intrigue.  It seems as if there might be more to the picture, to the scene, but we're puzzled as to what it might be.  There's presentment, but there is mystery.
     And that's the point:  we may well affirm, as did the people of the Renaissance, the fact of God.  Yet we also do well to understand that, all things considered, who God most is is beyond our ken.  We live aware of God's love and presence, yet we also live aware of the immense befuddlement we encounter when we try to understand them fully.
     Thanks, da Vinci, for your artistic insights.  A belated, by about a week, happy birthday.

     Ramadan, one of the greatest events in the Muslim calendar, begins tonight.  Thirty days of fasting, culminating in the feast of Eid al Fitr, Ramadan is a time for every Muslim to take time to celebrate and reflect on his or her relationship with Allah and the world.  It's a season of hope, wonder, mourning, and contemplation, a slice of the year in which Muslims, like most people of faith, focus more intensely on why they live as they do.

     You may not agree with the tenets of Islam; you may not like the beliefs most Muslims hold; you may be uncomfortable with Islam in general; you may even be frightened of Islam.  Nonetheless, use the fact of Ramadan to remind yourself that we live this life as a gift, that we spend our days in the aegis of a God of sovereign love, a God who has sacrificed, immensely, for us, a God who longs for communion with his human creation.  We live in the umbra of a beautiful (and often exasperating) wave of experience, balancing what we see and what we cannot.  Ramadan tells us that we are not alone. It says to us that we live in a vision, an intensely personal vision in which all things find purpose and meaning, the full truth of what is.
     There's much more to believe.

     Today is Earth Day.  Established in 1970, Earth Day is a day on which we think anew about the wonder and fragility of the tiny globe on which we spin through this vast, vast cosmos. Earth Day is a call to attend to the ecological balance of the world.
    Many, however, deride Earth Day.  The reasons for their rejection are religious, political, and economic.  They draw from all corners of the human spectrum.


     Underlying all them, however, is human arrogance.  People who dissent from Earth Day do so ultimately because whether they know it or not, they are assuming that they, and only they are the most important thing on the planet.  They assume that nothing is more important than the human's "right" and capacity to fulfill his or her own needs above, in absolute fashion, all else.  Our desires reign supreme.
     Perhaps Earth Day opponents should learn from the Greek mythological character Narcissus. So obsessed was Narcissus with his own image that when he noticed himself reflected in a stream, he bent down to look.  Enraptured, he continued to look, getting closer and closer until he put his head in the water and drowned.
     We are living in a world which we in no way made and in which we will in no way control fully.  We are only human.  If we think otherwise, the world will drown us, metaphorically for sure, in actuality perhaps, in the effects of our ecological follies.  We will lose everything God has given to us.
     As the psalmist writes, "The earth is the Lord's and all in it" (Psalm 24:1).  Let's use our gift responsibly.

     A couple of weeks ago, the art world observed the birthday of the artist Domenikos Theotokopoulos, otherwise known as El Greco ("the Greek").  El Greco painted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, standing on the edge of the early modern and modern world.  HIs paintings reflect this liminality.  They feature curiously shaped people, fantastical imagery, and unusual colors, blending, it seems, Eastern and Western religion and artistic styles, styles that would emerge in other forms in later centuries, among them the Cubism of Pablo Picasso.

     Many years ago, I took in an exhibit of El Greco at the Art Institute in Chicago.  I found it fascinating.  Quite apart from the religious imagery which I, of course, appreciated, I saw inklings of an immensely innovative and creative spirit, a spirit that, in the best traditions of modern art, spoke of transcendence in material terms.  The paintings I saw expressed a powerful awareness of the supernatural, transforming earthly sensibilities into metaphysical longing, even while they contained enough intimations of the chimerical present to keep us thinking.
     As it should:  we tread daily on the cusp of what we cannot see, but that which we sense, in a variety of ways, must be there. 

     Who comes first?  As Covid-19 continues its relentless march across the planet, I note with alarm that, from what I can see, it is becoming increasingly apparent that once those in the affluent West obtain what they need to counteract and deal with this virus, they will, almost immediately, close their hearts to everyone else.  More darkly, they will also close their hearts to those who are still living among them, the marginalized, the poor, the forgotten.
     Are we "first"?  Is America "first"?

     Hardly.  We of the West, particularly those most resourced, are just one more wave of materially blessed yet frequently spiritually impoverished (even if we insist that we believe in a God of love) expression of humanity.  It is an expression that has appeared countless times in world history, and it is an expression that will manifest itself countless more times in centuries to come.  We are so decidedly "unspecial," so frightfully temporal and evanescent.  Our relative wealth ultimately means nothing.
     Let us not be the rich fool of whom Jesus talks, the person who made so much money that he boasted of needing new places, new banks in which to keep it.  Not once did he think about giving it to help others.  He died that very night (see Luke 12).  Be whom God wants you to be:  a person who lives for others.  And see what happens.