Shusaku Endo was a prolific Japanese author who passed away in 1996.  A life long Catholic, Endo wove religious themes into everything he wrote.  One of his most memorable novels was Silence.  Silence tells the story of an American priest who comes to Japan to evangelize one of the least Christianized nations on the planet.  Unsurprisingly, the priest encounters much apathy, even antagonism, as he attempts to carry out his mission.

    Eventually, the priest is arrested.  He subsequently endures what I can only describe as spiritual torture.  Slowly and steadily, his captors force him to confront the full import of the silence of God, to ask himself why God seems to be doing nothing to help him.  Why God seems absent and gone.  Why God has abandoned him.

    Subsequently, the priest appears to change his perspective. He rejects the Christian God and embraces the Buddhism of his captors.  His life is good.  Along the way, however, he sees numerous Christians, native Japanese who have converted as a result of Western evangelism, choosing to endure horrendous torture and painful deaths rather than abandon Jesus.  Even if God seems to do nothing for them.

    Even if God seems silent.

    Many years later, the priest dies.  Per custom, his body is placed in an urn to be burned.  As his material self slowly immolates, however, we read that he still has  one thing in his hand:  a crucifix.

    What of faith?  Even if God seems silent, be it for a moment or be it for decades, he is still there.  Transcendence may be elusive, but it is never gone.

 

     Did you fool yourself on April Fools Day?  Despite its frivolity, April 1 is also a day to remember one of the greatest of the Romantic pianists:  Sergei Rachmaninoff.  Born in Russia, eventually emigrating to America and, shortly before his death in 1943, becoming an American citizen, Rachmaninoff (my wife's favorite musician) composed some of the richest music ever written for the piano. His work blends intense and mournful melody with powerful and intricate chords and keyboard movements, beautifully capturing the deepest spirit of the Romantics.

    Rachmaninoff's music gives us a poignant window into our perennial struggle with the vast and unyielding import of sentient existence.  It shows us that however intellectual we may suppose ourselves to be, we are, in the end, creatures of heart and imagination.  We live as sensual beings.

    Rachmaninoff helps us realize that although reason is an essential part of who we are, we make our biggest decisions with our heart.  To put this in theological terms, although we may believe, as a matter of intellectual assent, in a particular religious tenet, we can only trust its truth for our lives with our heart.  Trust is the wellspring of rational belief.
    

    As much of Rachmaninoff's music tells us, though we live for the moment, we flourish in the eternal, however we conceive it to be.  We affirm transcendence even as we live in the immanent.

      With the advent of Spring, we also remember the birthday of Johannes Sebastian Bach.  Wrapped in the rhythms of vernality and spring, Bach's birthday comes replete with the sounds of singing birds, greening forests, and 

 skies.  And his music fits the season.  Fresh, bright, and resonant with joy, Bach's music 

 the wonder of the newly born creation.

     We thank Bach for what he has shown us about life, wonder, and Spring.  We also thank Bach for giving us a glimpse of the unfolding mystery, and the mystery behind it, of this vast, vast--and loved--universe in which we revel.

     So did Bach write on every piece of music he composed, "Soli Deo Gloria" (All Glory to God Alone).  Bach knew very well from whence all things come, that we are not accidents.
     

    In this time of great uncertainty we can be grateful indeed that the world has a point.

    By the way, I'll be traveling for a couple of weeks and will not be posting.  See you upon my return.  Thanks for reading!

    

  

    Today is the day:  the Vernal Equinox,  the first day of spring.  For those of us who live in the colder climes of the planet, the Equinox is a day for which we wait, some of us patiently, others not, enduring or, for some, enjoying, a few or many months of snow, cold, and generally harsher meteorological conditions until, one day, it's over.  And we rejoice.

      

      In chapter thirteen of the third book of his Anna Karenin, Leo Tolstoy writes, 

    "Invisible larks broke into song above the velvety green fields and the ice-    covered stubble-land; peewits began to cry over the low lands and marshes, still bubbly with water not yet swept away; cranes and wild geese flew high across the sky, uttering their spring calls. The cattle, bald in patches where they had shed their winter coats, began to low in the pastures; lambs with crooked legs frisked round their bleating mothers who were losing their fleece; swift-footed children ran about the paths drying with imprints of bare feet; there was a merry chatter of peasant women over their linen at the pond and the ring of axes in the yard, where the peasants were repairing their ploughs and harrows.
    "Spring had really come."

    Indeed.  Enjoy the resurrectional character of existence!

        It’s “news from nowhere,” wrote nineteenth century artist and anarchist William Morris, "a new age that has come."  So his patterns and sketches state.  But unless we seek the well at the world’s end or, if we are so inclined, follow Charles Williams, he an Inking of Oxford fame, in his descent into hell, we look for this age in vain.  Like kainos, like chadash:  it comes out of nowhere.  

As it should.

     Many a theologian, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jew, and more, has told us that, well, it is God from which everything comes.  From this God, this hidden and omnipotent presence embedded in the circles of the universe, this immaterial yet material somethingness that somehow pervades all of reality, seen and unseen, they argue—in a variety of ways—comes all that is to be, as well as all that is to come.  What will one day be.  Even nowhere.  Once where, now nowhere, nowhere is where in disguise, a doppelgänger, a phantom, a voiceless voice of another world.

But that’s the point.  If, as the curious and inquisitive medieval thinker Hermes Trismegistus once contended, “God is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere,” then even if we know where “God” is, we really don’t.  Or as the Italian and allegedly, pantheist Giordano Bruno noted, building on Trismegistus’ words, “We can [only] state with certainty that the universe is all center, or that the center of the universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.”

Newness is our greatest unknown.

       If you're Irish or have some Irish in you, you may well be thinking about today:  St. Patrick's Day.  Patron saint of and missionary to the Irish nation, St. Patrick came into a remote and unsettled land dominated by various strands of Celtic religious thought and proceeded to teach and explain the Christian gospel.

     It seems that he did so rather successfully, too.  Despite what has historically been some very deep cultural rifts among the Irish populace, Christianity is still celebrated throughout the land. God and Jesus remain very important.
     

    One of the beauties of St. Patrick's Day is that although it is a commemoration of the saint's supposed day of death, it is on the other hand a day of celebration.  Sure, some people celebrate to excess, but usually even this is done with every good intention:  life is beautiful!
    

    Amidst the revelry, however, we sometimes overlook the profundity of what Patrick had to say.  Consider one of his meditations on Psalm 46:

     "Be still and know that I am God.
      Be still and know that I am.
      Be still and know.
      Be still.
      Be."

     Amidst the "beingness" and celebration, Patrick is saying, remember from whom it all comes.  "Be" in the fact of the creator.  Understand what life is really all about.

       As a mug I inherited from my mother always reminds me, March is Women's History Month.  It is a month that reminds us that for too long, historians tended to overlook women and the role they played in moving humanity forward.  Conditioned by the social nuances of their times, and driven, perhaps, by various levels of chauvinism or myopia, such historians, traditionally male, dismissed the contributions that women have made to the human adventure.

    If we are to hold that men and women are both made in the image of God and are therefore of equal worth, we err seriously, when we ignore, reject, or pass over the many ways that women have shaped human history for its good.  In truth, we are forgetting the framework, physical as well as metaphysical, in which the universe functions.  We're failing to realize that the notion of the human being as both male and female is woven deeply into the created order.

    Moreover, as we all know, without women, none us would be here today.  Say what one will about the so-called "ills" of feminism, but realize that, as far as the Creator is concerned, every human being is of equal value and worth and should be treated as such.

    The fullness of our humanness is a remarkable--and delightfully inscrutable--thing.