I'm Back!

"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 here:  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; light and dark woven with liminality and change:  life displays its glory once more.

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

    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 faith in the certainty of the seasons, ordained, as they saw it, by the gods.  It's good to remember the ceaselessness of the rhythms that ripple through the cosmos.  It's good to think about the certitude embedded in a mercurial and capricious world.

    It's good to think about what really lasts.

     A few days ago I wrote about the wildfires that threatened to consume the little town of Jasper in the heart of the Canadian Rockies.  Since that time, tragically, wildfires did indeed move through and envelop Jasper, consuming, by some estimates, up to half of its buildings and rendering what many Canadians considered the crown jewel of their country a place of blackened desolation and abject ruin.

    It's unbearably heartbreaking.  And it's difficult to find words to say.  How does one comfort the forest?  The people who have lost their homes?  The tourist industry facing immense loss?

    I don't know, really, I just don't know.  Jasper is a special place to me, the place where, fifty years ago, I found Jesus.  But now it's a place of immolation.  Is God good?  He is.  Are we good?  We are.  Is the earth good?  It is.

    It's a purposeful world, it's a purposeful cosmos:  meaning remains.

    Thanks be to God.

    By the way, I'll be traveling for two or three weeks.  Talk to you when I return.  Thanks for reading!

         A musician, an artist:  colorists consummate, each painting images of the world.  The one does so with his music, the other with his brushes.  Last month, in looking at the music of Robert Schumann, we noted its sense of fantasy and wonder, its blend of magic and reality, the way that its melodies transport us to new lands.  When we turn to the work of the Dutch artist Rembrandt Harenszoon van Rijin, otherwise known as Rembrandt, we stumble into an equally remarkable vista, one of profound and telling detail infused with extraordinarily rich and vibrant color.  We often wonder whether our world is really this amazing.

      Perhaps it is.  Perhaps what Rembrandt most does for us to open our eyes so as to allow us to shed our preconceptions about existence, the often utilitarian way that we view being alive, to encourage us to let our imaginations roam to what could be and, perhaps most important, what

ought to be.  Maybe Rembrandt is showing us how to look for more than we expect to see.

     To see, for instance, in the "Return of the Prodigal Son" (based on the timeless story presented in the gospel of Luke), a father's love, yes, but even more a transcendent God's love for us all.

     It's the ultimate vision of our humanness.

     Perhaps you know, perhaps you don't.  As I write this, the little town of Jasper, Alberta, has been evacuated and Jasper National Park has been closed due to encroaching wildfires.  Emergency personnel estimate that over 25,000 people have been forced to leave the area.  It's awful in every way:  awful for the residents of Jasper, awful for the vacationers in the area, and horribly awful for the forest itself.

    At the root of this conflagration is the effects of climate change:  a rapidly warming planet.  While many of us in the West can retreat into our air conditioned cars and homes and, relatively speaking, insulate ourselves from, at least for a time, the impact of intensely hot weather, the mountains, lakes, forests, and animals of Jasper cannot.  They are suffering immensely from the unwillingness of many people, principally in the West, to mitigate their use of fossil fuels.

    It should not be their problem.  But it is.  And the results are tragic.

    Pray for Jasper.  Pray for its landscapes, pray for its wildlife, pray for its people.  And pray for humankind.

 

    In a letter he wrote in 1888, Vincent Van Gogh remarked about the deeply felt capacity of the stars to speak about God.  Indeed.  When I look at the starry abundance of a  mountain landscape, I remain awestruck by the mystery implicit in creation's dance of life.  And it is this mystery, this mystery of simultaneous presence and absence, that pushes me beyond the black and white categories of my humanness.  It is this mystery that makes me think that although we may know the universe, we'll never know, fully, life.  It is, perhaps, these stars, the "starry night" that opens our eyes to what life is--and can be--the door to God.

     We're always looking for more.

     Saxophonist Marshall Allen is now 100 years old.  And he's still playing music.  He's still finding harmony, he's still finding rhythm.  He's still playing with the chords of human creativity.  It's remarkable.

    Creativity is a fascinating phenomenon.  Difficult to fathom, difficult to define.  Are humans uniquely creative?  In some ways, yes; in others, no:  creativity is the fabric of the cosmos.

    I recently had a conversation with a person who, although he believes in God, has trouble accepting that he is truth.  I get that.  Yet she also observed that unless there is a God, we cannot explain why we are the way we are.  For instance, we both noted, is creativity a work of immateriality?

    Hardly.  If so, from where does it come?

    Marshall Allen is living proof of creativity's utterly divine mystery.

 

Ernest Hemingway

      Isn't truth a funny word?  Most of us appreciate it, most of us desire it. Very few of us, however, can define it.  Philosophers tell us there are essentially two ways of looking at truth.  The correspondence theory suggests that truth is simply that which corresponds to reality.  While this seems logical enough, it raises other questions:  how do we know what is real and how do we therefore know what corresponds to it? 

    Taking a different tack, the coherence theory holds that truth is the sum total of what seems apparent, logical, and right.  Truth is not fixed but is rather what appears to be most correct based on the prevailing evidence.  Yet how do we decide what is most correct and right?

     Though I see virtue in both perspectives, I won't try to reconcile them now.  I merely wish to make an observation about the necessity of truth.  When we insist that truth is relative or a creation of the moment, we are essentially saying that truth does not exist.  If so, we have no good reason to hold that even we exist.  If nothing holds, if nothing is sure, then neither are we.

     We need truth to be truth.  Otherwise, we became like the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, who, in the final scene of the novel, when he has just watched his wife die giving birth to his child, then stood by as the child died, too, "put on his hat and walked into the rain."

    The end.