"I went down to the countries beneath the earth, to the nations of the past; but you have brought up my life from the pit, O Lord, my God."  The Hebrew prophet Jonah, he of being swallowed by a whale fame, understood life well:  so is the fate of all nations.  None will last forever; none will endure indefinitely.

    Neither will we.  One day, we, too, will descend to the lands beneath the earth, slip out of this existence into another one, one that seems far darker than this present experience, and fade from all that we know and love, never to return.

    But this is not end of the story.  Although in Good Friday, I see the nadir of blackness, I also see death in a new light.

    Yes, we will not know what death is like until we die.  On the other hand, however, we will not really know life until it is gone.
    

      For although it can seem a cold world, a cold and insensate world that for too many of us often appears to not care one whit who we are, it is also a world that lives in the grip of resurrection.
    

    So what will you do?

      In this terribly broken world, we cannot help but wonder:  why cannot we control, why cannot we mitigate, why cannot we turn back the forces of evil?

    As we think about this week, the week of the second Sunday of Lent, we have opportunity to wonder about this anew.  Even if we are in a position of great authority, we cannot control everything, nor can we extinguish all evil.  Lent is about giving up, giving up our time, our pursuits, our hopes of lasting control.  We acknowledge that if we try to control everything, we will inevitably end up creating a world of us and us alone, a world without any real point.
    

    Lent is one of God's ways of telling us that though we are remarkable creatures, seemingly capable of directing the course of our life and that of the world, we will never control it all.  Lent reminds us that we are finite, that we have limits, that our marvelous attributes can only take us so far.  Sooner or later, we encounter a bump:  we realize that we are not so remarkable that we in ourselves can decide what we are and what existence means.  How can we?  We are only us.

    We in Lent are like the "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog," standing before the world, its joy, its pain, watching, planning, waiting, yet unable to exercise ultimate control over that which we see.
     

    Precisely.  To live wisely, we must give up.  We must give up who we are now to find whom we are, in truth, destined to be.

  

     

    Purim!  Today and tomorrow, our Jewish brethren celebrate Purim.  

    Purim is a remembrance of liberation, a day to recall how God, once again, rescued the Jewish people from potential annihilation.  Like the Exodus, celebrated in about a month from today at Passover, Purim recognizes that despite all the machinery we have amassed to keep ourselves safe and secure, personally and internationally, it is ultimately transcendence that provides seminal meaning and value to our efforts.  It is only the work of larger presences that ensure purpose in our dogged attempts to keep ourselves free.

    Purim tells the story of Queen Esther, a Jewish woman chosen by the Persian king Ahasuerus, probably Xerxes I, to be his bride.  As things go on, Esther's uncle, Mordecai, learns of a plot concocted by the courtier Haman to slaughter all the Jews in the Persian Empire.  In words that have resonated with believers for centuries, he goes to his niece and advises her that, "And who knows whether you have not attained royalty for such a time as this?"  It is you, Esther, and only you who can intervene with the king to save us.
    

    And Esther does, delivering her people from potential destruction.  Although we may not always see the passage of transcendence in our earthly reality, and while we may miss its intimations in the life of the world, Purim demonstrates to us that, as much as we might like to suppose that the cosmos is void of larger purpose, purpose nevertheless prevails.  Given our technologies, we may well be able to rescue ourselves from almost any situation of peril, yet we may overlook the greater point:  in a planet stripped of transcendent meaning, what does it really matter?
    

    "For such a time as this."  We really do have value.

       Ramadan, one of the greatest events in the Muslim calendar, began a couple of nights ago.  Thirty days of fasting, culminating in the feast of Eid al Fitr, Ramadan is a time for every Muslim to take time to celebrate and reflect on his or her relationship with Allah and the world.  It's a season of hope, wonder, mourning, and contemplation, a slice of the year in which Muslims, like most people of faith, take time to focus more intensely on why they live as they do.

    You may not agree with the tenets of Islam; you may not like the beliefs most Muslims hold; you may be uncomfortable with Islam in general; you may even be frightened of Islam.

     

    Either way, do use the fact of Ramadan to remind yourself that we live this life as a gift, that we spend our days in the aegis of a personal transcendence.  We live in the umbra of a beautiful (and often exasperating) wave of experience, balancing what we see and what we cannot.  Ramadan tells us that we are not alone. It says to us that we live in a vision, an intensely personal vision in which all things find purpose and meaning, the full truth of what is.

    There's much more to believe than what we see.

     Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent.  Ash Wednesday reminds us that, whether we believe in an afterlife or not, we are ultimately no more than dust.  When we die and pass out of this life, what remains of us will soon be no more, too, subsumed in the earth from which it has come.  A number of years ago, when my wife and I were in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, I took an afternoon to hike to a meadow where, one year before, one of my dearest cousin's ashes had been scattered.  Tragically, she had died of mesothelioma at the age of 58.  Long did I stand before the meadow, catching the wind, soaking in the vista, thinking about her.  All Liz's years, all her love, all her joy, all her meaning, all her hopes and dreams now strewn among the flowers and rivers she loved so dearly.  Joyful, but deeply sobering.

    Even more sobering is that one day, every one of us will be exactly the same.  We are so fragile, so frightfully fragile.  What meaning have we?  What is our point?  As we contemplate our mortality, we see ever more clearly how thin the line is between life and death, sentience and dust, fire and ashes.  We are so contingent, so tenuous:  how can we ever hope to be?

     Yet Ash Wednesday also reminds us that we are not dust and ashes only, that life is not total absurdity.  It tells us that we are physical creatures, yes, but spiritual creatures, too.  We are created beings.  We are meaningful, we are significant.  We are loved.

    Death is not the end.

         What we say about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (his birthday was yesterday)?  Although Mozart died, sadly, at the tender age of 35, he produced an array of musical expression that most musicologists agree is unmatched.  As a contemporary said of him, "He was like an angel sent to us for a season, only to return to heaven again."

    Confronted with Mozart's prodigious talents, we marvel.  We marvel at the nature of the human being, we marvel that we are creatures of such remarkable abilities, that we are gifted in a nearly infinite number of ways.  How could such a thing be?

    Such is something for which materialistic evolution has yet to give us a convincing answer.  Its inability to do so reminds us that, consciousness and sentience aside, we, and life, are far more complex than an inexplicably fortunate blend of chemicals.  

    

    Maybe we really are not alone in the universe.

   

        Today, January 27, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  It is a day that should cause all of us to stop, think, and weep.  How does one begin to grasp the deliberately engineered deaths of over six million people?  How does one connect with a person who lost the sum of his lineage in a concentration camp?  How can we possibly comprehend being the object of such virulent hatred and racism?

    And how can we categorize those who fomented this horror?

     We can't.  And that's the point.  God aside, evil has no explanation.  It has no point, it has no plan.  It is beyond our ability to fully understand.  Many Holocaust scholars insist, and rightly so, that the Holocaust is an event that surpasses the widest and deepest boundaries of our ken and imagination.  It's beyond intelligibility.
     

    Yet it happened.  So does 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel ask, "How can you not believe in God after Auschwitz?"

    Precisely.  Though the Holocaust overturns all convention notions of who God is, it also affirms him.  Take away God and all we have left is ourselves, our confused and meaningless selves in a dreadfully empty universe.

     Weep for our Jewish brothers and sisters, and pray for those who persecute them.  And believe.  At all costs, believe in the ultimacy of God.