It's been a big month:  Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Halloween, Reformation Day, and more.  But as we mark the passage of October into November, we have occasion to think about another big day:  Diwali.  It is a holiday sacred to over a billion Hindus around the world:  a joyous occasion.  Diwali is known as the festival of lights, the lights of color, brilliance, enlightenment, and happiness:  all that which enters into the mystery and wonder of life and the God who gives it.

    It's apt.  Unless we celebrate life in the framework of higher purpose, its lights becomes little more than momentary confluences and coalescences of dust and plasma, things in which we have found ourselves, raw and unknown, and told we must live.

    

    Enjoy life, enjoy its lights.  Be happy for it.  And rejoice in the fact of purpose, the purpose of a creator.  Light won't shine long in a forgotten universe.

    By the way, I'll be traveling for a few weeks leading up to Thanksgiving and will not be posting of a while.  Thanks for reading and see you soon!

  

    Around this time a few years ago, I wrote, using an excerpt from my book Imagining Eternity, about the moment in which I decided that Jesus Christ was undeniably divine, real, and objectively and subjectively true.  

    This week marks fifty years since that moment in the mountains outside of the tiny town of Jasper, Alberta, in the heart of the Canadian Rockies.

    The pivotal moment of my life.

    I find these fifty years difficult to fathom or measure.  They are fifty years of believing in and grappling with a person whose fullness I cannot in this life exhaustively assess; fifty years of following and listening to a being who has never made himself visibly known to me; fifty years of trusting in a invisible personal transcendence.

     So why believe?  Why live a life that, as the apostle Paul puts it, is one of faith and not one of sight?  Why be a rational being who is living a life devoted to the non-rational (but not irrational)?  Oddly, I live this life because I see that faith, believe it or not (no pun intended!), is, in light of everything that this life comprises, the most rational thing I can do.  Given the fact of my personhood; the fact of my mind and consciousness; the fact of the universes's incredibly complexity and order; the fact of the moral sense; the historicity and veracity of the Bible; and the millions and millions of people, including me, who have completely changed, in a positive way, their outlooks on themselves and existence in response to what they perceived to be a divine inbreaking or call:  I see no other way to understand existence.
    

    I believe because I cannot believe that, to borrow some words from Carl Sagan in his best selling Cosmos, the world is all that is and all that ever will be.

    Indeed:  if Sagan is correct, why do we all long for more?

    Zoya Cherkassy-Nnadi:  have you heard of her?  As the war between Gaza and Israel drags on, you may be hearing more about her.  Cherkassy-Nnadi is one of Israel's foremost artists of dissent, creating work upon work that seeks to critique some aspect of Israeli society.

    With the onset of the war, Cherkassy-Nnadi has turned to painting images of the effects of the war, be it Israeli or Gazan.  When once questioned as to why, she, a loyal Israeli and committed Jew, would grant each group rough parity in her artwork, she responded, sarcastically, "I am very, very happy that there are privileged young people from privileged countries that can know how everybody in the world can act."

    Rarely do we find clean divisions in political convictions or religious loyalties.  Furthermore, as Cherkassy-Nnadi implies, those who insist on drawing such black and white pictures of oppression inevitably trip over their baggage of their privileged circumstances and upbringing.  Put another way, they do not always know what they are talking about.

    Or what they are saying really means.  The Israel-Gazan conflict has rocked countless epistemologies and metaphysical viewpoints around the world.  It has caused immense cultural and political upheaval.  Yet as Cherkassy-Nnadi insightfully points out, a good deal of this upheaval has been caused by people who, broadly speaking, rarely know the deeper implications of what they arguing.

    We must all tread very carefully.  Particularly if we claim to know and love God.

      Free speech?  We all appreciate it; we all, in principle, endorse it.  That's why I am troubled to read about various protests mounted to prevent speakers of both political persuasions from speaking on college campuses.

     Regardless of whether someone else's political beliefs align with mine, we all are beings who are loved and magnificently designed.
     

    Therein is our dilemma.  We appreciate what God has made, yet we recoil at how it often seems to be so wrong.  That's life in a fallen world.  Just as Psalm 19 states that the heavens "are telling the glory of God," so let the earth on which we live speak with the confusing cacophony of the human creation.

     After all, it's only us--and God.

      A few years ago, I backpacked through a part of the Rockies with two dear college friends.  As I reflect on our trip, I am struck that, in an eventuality of which I had no inkling beforehand, we ended up following a trail on which my wife and I had hiked forty years before.  It was mind boggling, really, to revisit a trail so full of memories, a trail that represented our first foray into the wilderness together, all those decades in the past.

     But the mountains had not changed.  The peaks were as jagged as ever, the meadows still overflowed with wildflowers, and the lake, our destination, as lovely and serene as it was forty years before.  It was a picture of timelessness, really, a picture of the incredible ability of a landscape, when untouched by human hands, to sustain itself, presenting fresh wonder for every successive generation of backpacker to tread its depths.

     

    One of my Colorado companions believed in God; one did not.  The one who did not often struggled to balance his sense that something spiritual ran through this world with the notion that, on the other hand, this could not possibly be.

    Who is right?  Well, it seems odd that we humans believe we can entertain thoughts of the ineffable without also entertaining thoughts about why we, material and finite beings.

    Many years before, as I backpacked through Alaska's Brooks Range in 1972, I emerged from a thicket of willow bushes to see a grizzly sow and her cubs some fifty yards away.  Happily, the sow didn't seem to detect my presence.  As I quietly slipped away, however, I thought of how wonderful it was that this family of grizzlies was able to continue its ways, unbothered by human intrusion:  all sense of time and chronology vanishes.

      International Stuttering Awareness Day, 2024.  I'm willing to say that this is a day with which you are not familiar.  It happens today, October 22.

     Although stuttering affects only about one percent of the global population, for those who endure it, it is pivotal.  Stuttering, that is, the inability to verbalize fluently, can be debilitating.  While a stutterer knows what she wants to say, she cannot say it easily.  She will "block," that is, she will not be able to voice her words without running into physical difficulty in saying them.  She cannot just say what she wants to say when and how she wants to say it.  Stuttering can be very frustrating.

     Many famous people have stuttered.  One of the earliest recorded instances is that of Moses, the Moses who, many centuries ago, led the Hebrews out of captivity in Egypt into the land of Canaan.  Another is Demosthenes, the ancient Greek orator.  More recent examples include the actress Marilyn Monroe and U.S. President Joseph Biden.

     What's my point?  I've stuttered for many, many years.  Overall, it's been quite a ride, and I could probably talk about it at length.  For now, however, I will say this.      

    Broadly speaking, stuttering is a very little blip on a very big screen of human adventure.  Yet like any physical difficulty, it troubles as much as it teaches and grows us.  It also underscores the riddle of our humanness, capturing at once our grandeur as well as our fragility.  It reminds us of how challenging and complicated it is to wrestle with a broken existence in a finite world.

    But a world infused with God.

       This week, as my siblings and I reminded each other, marks another year, another year since the passing of our father forty- years ago.  Despite the span of those decades, we still miss him, and our mother as well.  Time may heal some, yes, but time will never fully overcome the scars its events imprint on our lives.  There are losses that, try as we might, we cannot completely assuage.  Although we learn to live with them, though we may even come to develop a measure of acceptance about them, we will never totally erase them from our hearts.  For always and forevermore, they are embedded in the innermost patterns of our soul.

    In 1983, as my siblings and I prepared to leave our mother to return to our lives after saying our final good-byes to Dad, one of our uncles remarked, "Everyone is going back to their lives."  True enough.  But we'd never look at our lives in the same way again.  Nor should we.  We're personal beings who respond to our lives in personal ways.  Our lives continue, yes, but take on more furrows with every passing year.
    

    Yet God and the universe remain, nearly inscrutable mysteries, the one never ending, the other its ultimate destiny in the first.  As are we.  And what then?
    

     Thank you, Dad.  Thank you for everything.