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.

 

     "Whenever I hear that we should not teach people what makes them uncomfortable, it sends shivers down my spine."  I heard these words from a native German, one of the many guides I employed while I was leading a student trip to Central Europe a few years ago. We were in Berlin at the time, visiting various sites of memory, getting firsthand looks at the many ways that the nation of Germany was trying to never forget the atrocities of its past.

     "Whenever I hear that we should not teach people what makes them uncomfortable, it sends shivers down my spine."  I heard these words from a native German, one of the many guides I employed while I was leading a student trip to Central Europe a few years ago. We were in Berlin at the time, visiting various sites of memory, getting firsthand looks at the many ways that the nation of Germany was trying to never forget the atrocities of its past.

    Our guide had a good point.  At the moment, many people in different parts of the U.S. are seeking to ban certain books from being used in the classroom or local library or, alternately, attempting to prevent teachers from talking about anything that makes students "uncomfortable" upon hearing it.  Although I understand the wisdom of assigning or making available age appropriate texts in the classroom or community library, I also believe that, by its very nature, teaching should make people uncomfortable.  Teaching should challenge people, should jar their categories, should make them rethink their positions, and cause them to look more closely at why they believe what they believe.  While teaching can be a way of affirming or solidifying belief, it is also a way of creating conditions that allow people to consider, even change, belief.  To consider and change for the better of the student and the community in which he or she participates.

    As to book bans, well, one doesn't need to look farther than Nazi Germany to see where those can eventually land.  Discernment in material, yes, elimination of material, no:  ultimately, we're better off knowing than not.

    

       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.