I've always wanted to read the memoir of Julia Butterfly Hill, the young woman who, in the late Nineties, spent two years living on a platform attached to an ancient redwood tree to prevent it from being cut down.  Thanks to my daughter thoughtfully giving the memoir to me for Christmas, I finally got the chance to do so.

    It's a very honest account.  Julia leaves out little detail about how she lived on the platform.  Nor does she make any effort to mask the extent of the psychological and physical torment she endured.  Living 180 feet off the ground in the middle of a redwood forest is not always a glamorous exercise.  Although Julia found much beauty in the forest, the harsh winter storms and constant wind throughout the year left their mark on her.  She often suffered brutally.

    But she persevered.  Some might think devoting two years of one's life to saving a single redwood tree is plain silly; others might laud the intention but question whether it was the more effective means of protest.  Still others would accuse Julia of flagrantly breaking the law.  Regardless, her quest to save "Luna" (the name she assigned to the tree) and her meditations on the relationship between humans and the natural world should strike home with all of us.  We humans are intimately connected to the world of which we are a part.  And we should care for it.

    Moreover, how interesting that although Ms. Hill has left her childhood religion (her dad was a traveling Christian evangelist) far behind, she continues to pray.  She prays to a loving Creator.

    Shouldn't we all?  A universe absent love is a universe unknown.

    "Life is all a sublet anyway, of course.  We don't fully own even the bodies we live in; we can't stop them from changing."  So true.  On the one hand, we may feel helpless against the progress of time and aging, powerless to halt our demise; on the other hand, we may feel comforted and, I suppose, innervated that, try as we might, we will not be complete in this existence, for it will never be anything we control.  We're no more than wayfarers and sojourners, sailors on a voyage of, as poet Rainer Rilke put it, a life that is "incomprehensible."

    Yet if life really is incomprehensible, why do we try so hard to think we'll ever understand it?  We try because we think we can; we try because we, consciously or not, believe this life to be more than a "sublet."  We try because we believe that life is more than what we see.  Life will always be this way, for life, like everything in it, is not of its own making.

    We're helpless before what we do not know.

       Who are the Funhogs?  The Funhogs were a group of men, now in their seventies and eighties who, many decades ago, spent their days roaming across the planet in search of adventure.  Some of their names may be familiar to you.  They include people like Yvon Chouinard, founder of the outdoor clothing manufacturer Patagonia; Doug Thompkins, founder of the outdoor equipment company The North Face; and others who are not as well known:  Dick Dorworth, once a prominent skier, Chris Jones, and Lito Tejada-Flores.

     The Funhogs are perhaps most famous for their epic 1968 driving journey from California to the tip of the Americas, where they successfully summited the formidable Fitz Roy in, of course, Patagonia.  They reached the top on Christmas Day.

     1968 is a long time ago, yet the Funhogs still look back on that year as one of the highlights of their lives.  As Thompkins later wrote, "So I give thanks, as I look back, that fate played its mysterious hand guiding me along a wonderful path, in a life with never a single moment of regret.  If I could play it over, I would let it go just as it has, with all the minor bumps that came with it.  Just like those bumps along the last 900 miles from Bariloche to the Fitz Roy valley--sometimes a bit uncomfortable, but still very enjoyable all the way."
     

    Thompkins's words surely underscore the joy and marvel of life, whose twists and turns he attributes to fate and its mysterious hand.  Don't we all wonder why life goes the way it does?  Do not we all occasionally sit back and ask ourselves how it is that we ended up where we are today?

    As we enter into 2025, we should.  Are our lives a collection of glorious moments mysteriously enabled by swirls of impersonal fate?  Or are our lives a collection of glorious moments grounded in the intentional swirlings of a personal God?  In other words, are we glorious moments without a reason to be, or are we glorious moments with every reason to be?

 

     "Midnight Sky" tells the story of a scientist living alone in a research outpost in the far North who is one of the only people to survive a global catastrophe that killed most of the planet's inhabitants.  As a result of the catastrophe (whose precise nature is never fully explained), the planet's air is toxic and unbreathable.  No one will live above ground again.

    One day, however, he hears from a spaceship, Aether, on its way from Jupiter back to earth.  He tells them to go back to Jupiter's inhabitable moon.

     

    At this point, only two crew members, a man and woman, are still on the ship.  She's pregnant.  What to do?

    

    They turn back to Jupiter.

    

    On this New Year's Eve, on a day in which many of us reflect on the year that is almost finished and ponder what lies ahead, and wonder, sometimes with optimism, sometimes with trembling, what the New Year will bring, it's a question worth thinking about:  how much are we wiling to trust the unknown?

    

    Put another way, what are we most willing to trust:  where we know we've been or where we do not know we're going--but must go anyway?

    Happy New Year!

     Unless you've been living in a cave, you likely know that Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, passed away yesterday, December 30th.  Regardless of how we feel about him, his presidency, even his post-presidential years, we can agree, I think, that Carter lived an exemplary life of service and dedication to the dignity and welfare of humanity.  The world is a poorer place in the wake of his passing.

    In 2015 I was privileged to attend a conference at the Carter Center in Atlanta.  During my time there, amidst the meetings and seminars, I met Jimmy Carter.  I'll not forget it.  He was a thoroughly kind and humble human being.

    Let us give thanks for Jimmy Carter.

     Have you ever read Revelation, the last book of the Bible?  It's a wild book.  After walking through a forest preserve the other day, I decided to read it, again.  As always, I wondered about its precise meaning.  How will John's vision of the end of the world really be expressed in the span of human history and time?  Will there really be massive lights and flames in the sky?  Will there really be angels sounding trumpets across the planet?  Will there really be a plague of some type of locust that will kill one third of humankind?  Are there really glassy seas in heaven?

     No doubt, some of these descriptions are figurative, and no doubt that the person who had this vision lived in a very different time from our own, many historical miles from the abundant scientific technology we possess for exploring cosmological variants today.

    Yet maybe that's not the point.  I think most of us can agree that the world will one day end, as will all of us.  And I think that all of us can agree that when we die we will no longer be physically attached to our earthly achievements.  Death is thoroughly black and white.  We're either alive, or we are dead.  There's nothing in between.

     So what do we really know?  Two things.  One, life means more, right now, because it ends.  We do not know our time.  We therefore strive to make every minute count.  Two, if God, in some way, is working through the world, this end means more than itself.  Each moment rests in the tangible vision of a personal and infinite God.

    Although Christmas has dominated the holiday news lately, we cannot overlook that today, the day after Christmas, yesterday, marks the first day of Kwanza.  Based on a Swahili term meaning "first fruits," Kwanza, its principles grounded in African culture, celebrates  harvest, bounty, and human diversity.

        Kwanza lauds the beauty and meaningfulness of this world, its harvest, its bounty, its joy of a year rightly lived.  The happiness of living in a world whose wonder speaks constantly to us, the beauty of the rhythms of the planet:  a call to treasure the immensity of existence.

     Christmas's celebration of God's presence in the world is essential, yes, but Kwanza's rejoicing in the munificence which this presence ensures is worth remembering, too.