In the heat of existence, on the days when we are feeling particularly overwhelmed with the exigencies of being alive, we may feel as if we are like people who, as Virginia Woolf observed in her "Lives of the Obscure," are "advancing with lights in the growing gloom," heading toward obscurity, the obscurity of a life lived, a life enjoyed immensely but a life one day to end and be gone, never to return.

      Believing in more than life is hard in the morass of the material present.  We cannot see it, so why put our trust in it?

    Fair enough.  Yet as William Yeats reminds us, "And God stands winding his lonely horn, and time and the world are ever in flight."  Though time wears on and the years drag by, unyielding, sometimes burdensome, and, ever changing, something permanent remains.

    It's hard to see the end of a road at its beginning, yes, but if the world is to have any point, any point at all, there is always a road to follow.  And there is always an end.  An end rooted in the permanence of the necessarily personal ground of existence.

     Have you read anything by George Orwell?  Whether he knows it or not, his name has spawned a number of other words.  Among them is Orwellian.  What's Orwellian?  It signifies an effort to rewrite the meaning of a word or event so as to render it either of greater or lesser significance.  And then pretend the original event never happened.

    Although January 6, 2021, in the U.S. is over five years behind us, its scars remain.  I know it happened:  I watched it on live television.  It was not a "day of love;" it was an insurrection.  Many people, mostly police officers, lost their lives.  Property damage reached the millions.  Over a thousand people were eventually convicted of crimes committed that day, including sedition, and sentenced to lengthy prison terms.

    But in classic Orwellian fashion, the current U.S. presidential administration wants to act as if that day never happened.  The official White House website has recently published a lengthy rewriting of that day, producing a narrative that is totally false, and yet one that it insists is absolutely true.  Worse, every single one of those who were sent to prison have been pardoned by the same person who encouraged them to riot.

    "Without revelation [transcendent standards of value]," Proverbs 29 writes, "the people perish."  Replace law with royal whim and a nation falls.

    It's still falling, too. 

    

       Perhaps you can identify with a longing for outdoor adventure, a longing to step out of the regular and normal, a deep seated desire to break away from the staid rhythms of quotidian existence.  If so, you are decidedly not alone.

     But you might wish to be.  You might wish to be tromping through an uncharted wilderness area hundreds of miles from anyone or anything else.  You may seek the deepest unknown there is.

     American novelist Jack London, whose birthday fell in January, wrote profoundly on this spirit of adventure, this thirst to explore, to topple boundaries, to abandon everything in quest of inner fulfillment.  His Call of the Wild captures this urge perfectly:  the lonely yet determined human pitted against the forces of the distant and remote wilderness, the former seeking meaning, the latter inundating him with it.

     There are many wilds, there are many unknowns.  Although London focused on the wilds of the material world, it's not difficult to see that in seeking the wilds of this world, we cannot help but find the wilds of another.  Finite creatures wandering in a nearly infinite cosmos, we humans need the wilds of transcendent mystery to really see who we are.

 

      If you are familiar with the writer J. J. R. Tolkien, you may like knowing that the thinking of William Morris, a famous artist (and anarchist) of the late nineteenth century, exercised a significant impact on him. In his reflections on his craft, Morris talked about the notion of a Second World (Tolkien discussed this, too).  This is a world apart from present reality, a world completely unto itself, a self-contained world with its own laws, beliefs, and reality:  a world of fantasy. Tolkien's famous Lord of the Rings trilogy is a case in point.  Those familiar with this remarkable work know that Tolkien presents its events in a world that he has created and which has no connection to the world the rest of us occupy.  It's a surreal world.

    I mention this in relation to, predictably, the supernatural.  Part of the reason some of us have trouble grasping or accepting the supernatural is that it appears to function in a way that seems at odds with the world to which we are accustomed.  It does not always evince a credible connection to what we currently know.  The perfunctory response to this is of course, "Well, one must have faith."

    While no doubt this is ultimately true, if it is all that is true, then we are left with intimations of a world that we will never really know.  It's easy to reject the validity of such a world:  of what value can it possibly be to us?
    

    On the other hand, if the Second World, i.e., the supernatural, is accessible to us, its credibility magnifies considerably.  We can know it, feel it, hear it, and see it in our experience.  We connect.

     And the Second World becomes the First.
     

     About a month ago, I traveled to Santa Rosa, California, to surprise one of my sisters on the occasion of her (gasp) seventieth birthday.  Although her husband and my other sister, who also lives in Santa Rosa, were aware that I'd be showing up, Ellen did not.

    The look on her face was priceless!  She was totally taken aback to see me strolling into her house.  As the evening spun itself out, I looked at Ellen often:  she was so thankful to be celebrating this moment with her family and friends.  She glowed with gratitude.

    Of course most of us want to live as long as we possibly can, even if we are acutely aware that we will not.  It's one of the complexities of being a human being.  So how to measure the value of our brief time on this planet?  A recent review of Ross Douthat's Believe:  Why Everyone Should Be Religious captures this dilemma well.  Although the reviewer, whose religious sensibilities clearly do not align with those of Douthat (who is a person of faith), observes that value is still possible in a world without religion, it is at the same time a condition without any significance.  In an accidental world, he writes, there is no justification to claim that any value is real.

    I agree.  Be grateful for your life, be happy for your years.  Yet remain painfully aware that if there is no reason for either one, you're just shouting into the dark.

     A king.  As they studied the Zoroastrian and biblical prophecies about a coming king, the magi--wise men--of  ancient Persia realized this king would be a special king.  In him, the magi saw, God would really come to earth, would really make himself known.

    Small wonder that these people made the arduous journey over the Zagros Mountains, across the arid expanse of Arabia, and onto the international trade routes that coursed through the Levant, to enter Palestine.  Who would have imagined such a thing?

    Epiphany demonstrates that only when we decide to allow the possibility of the divine made immanent will we understand what the world is really all about.

    

    Physical sight is only the beginning.

  

     "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.

    

    As many of us reflect on the year past 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?