Whose side is God on?  Lots of people with lots of different agendas, people with us today, people who lived hundreds of years ago have asked that question.  Throughout the lengthy course of human history, countless people have wanted to claim that God agreed with their agenda, and that he was, indeed, on their side.  And they all presented evidence, be it written, experiential, traditional, or all of the above, to back up their claim.
     So how do we decide?  From a European crusader set on "liberating" Jerusalem in the eleventh century, to Martin Luther and his ninety-five theses on the church door in sixteenth century Wittenberg, to millions of American soldiers being shipped to Europe to engage the "godless" German armies in World War I, to a modern day Islamic militant in Mali who insists that God had "told" him to amputate his brother's hand for theft, to a young Amish boy who told those who had just hacked off his father's beard and hair that, "God is not with you"--and the list could go on and on and on--how do we decide, really, whose "side" God is on?
     In a word, carefully.  Despite what we may suppose about the "rightness" of our particular cause, despite what we may imagine to be the unassailable correctness of our particular position, we too often forget that, ultimately, we march through a world undergirded by forces far greater than we will ever, in this life, fully know.  As God reminds us in the fifty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, "My ways are not your ways."  While this line of course represents a decidedly Hebraic posture on the divine, the larger point remains valid and true for every manner of transcendent belief:  regardless of whom or what we conceive God to be, we must be willing to admit that if we want God to be any kind of a God at all we must interpret his thoughts with utter and abject humility.  We are finite, he is infinite.  How can we really know what he wants?  Yes, we can through careful and broad ranging study, discussion, and reflection arrive at what appears to be God's thoughts and wishes--as we understand them in the scope of our spiritual tradition--but we must always do so in full awareness that, as the line from Isaiah reminds us, God sees things differently than we do.  We will try, but we will never succeed fully in grasping the full import of his vision.
     In this is the wonder, however, in this is the mystery, the wonder of humanity, the mystery of God.  In the end, all we can know for sure is that God is there, and that he loves us and our world far more than we can imagine.  We may reject or struggle with God's presence, we may laugh at or wrestle with his love, or we may embrace them both, but whichever we choose to do, we ought to do it understanding that, as Paul told his readers in Ephesus, even though we may believe, fervently, that God and his love are constantly present, we will never constantly comprehend them.  His love "surpasses" knowledge (Ephesians 3:19).  God's love moves mountains, and God's love moves human hearts, but precisely how it does so, well, we will never fully know.
     Do well, do your best, yes, but remember:  accept the mystery.  There is much more to come.

     A few weeks ago, the world, and the world of mountain climbers in particular, received word that one of its greats, the French climber Maurice Herzog, had died at the age of 93.  Herzog is most famous for his 1950 ascent of Annapurna, one of the fourteen so-called "8,000ers," the elite group of Himalayan peaks over 8,000 meters (roughly 26,000 feet).  His was the first ascent of a peak this elevation and size.  Though Herzog is rightly remembered for the ascent, he is perhaps better known for his descent, a long and harrowing journey marked by intense cold, storm, and frostbite that resulted in Herzog losing most of his fingers and toes.  But as he wrote in the final line of his account of his climb (Annapurna, published in 1952), "There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men."  Herzog managed to transform his pain into an enduring and inspiring metaphor for the challenges of existence.
     Herzog captured a fundamental truth about human beingness.  Those who seek out challenges, whatever they may be, challenges that stretch them to their very physical, mental, or spiritual limits, are those who most fully understand that happiness is not be found in simply embracing what is.  Real happiness often comes from penetrating deeply into its opposite.  And real joy, the more seminal--and lasting--counterpart to happiness, often emerges from life's darkest tragedies and sorrows.  Ask Herzog, ask Doug Scott, a British climber who, despite breaking both legs in a climb on the Ogre (also in the Himalayas), willed himself to survive and climb again, or ask the Catholic mystic St. John of the Cross, author of Dark Night of the Soul.
     Or ask Jesus, who as, the writer of the letter to the Hebrews tells us, "the author and perfecter of faith, and who for the joy set before endured the cross [crucifixion], despising the shame" (Hebrews 12:2).  Like Herzog, like Scott, like St. John, like countless others, so does Jesus capture for us the essential point:  only through seemingly insuperable challenge, of any kind, does genuine wisdom, and joy, come.
     What's your Annapurna?  Whatever it is, make it a matter of your deepest soul.  Make it a matter of you and God.

     "Though the mind of a person plans his way," notes the writer of Proverbs 16:9, "the Lord directs his steps."  On the one hand, this seems to put us into a trap:  what happens to our capacity for choice?  On the other hand, it may be a comfort:  someone wiser than we helps us find the better way.  Which should--or can--it be?
     Think about a bird winging its way south for the winter.  Does anyone tell it to go?  Does anyone tell it when to go?  Many decades ago, I was backpacking through the remote Brooks Range of northern Alaska when I chanced upon a duck tending to its affairs in a tiny pond.  I did not expect to see this duck; given the relatively late date (August in the Arctic), I had assumed it and its companions would have been long gone by now.  The next morning, however, it was gone.  Somehow, it knew.  And it knew at just the right time.
     As do we.  We know when we are supposed to do things, we know when we are supposed to be a certain way.  Unlike the duck, however, we can choose not to be or do them.  We are more than instinct.  We have a choice.
     Consider the universe.  It steadily spins itself out under the umbra of its creator, gyrating, expanding, turning in on itself as it deepens the abundance of its form and ambiguity.  We little know where it will end up. We only know that it is going.
     As we do for our lives.  We only know that they are going, going somewhere, and going, in an odd way, everywhere, everywhere the universe can be, the universe of our spatiality, the universe of our hearts.
     So, yes, God directs our steps.  But he does so as an infinite God in an infinitely transforming universe.
     The possibilities are endless.

     One of the most beloved ballets of all time, The Nutcracker presents a delightful and wondrous tale of opulence, warmth, and, perhaps most telling, imagination.  As Clara's Nutcracker comes to life and grows into a full-sized soldier, the wide-eyed girl is treated to a remarkable journey through a tangled and marvelous fantasy world of gingerbread, sweets, mice, and tin warriors, princes, and magical forests.  It is a world that, when she awakens from what we are led to suppose was a dream, may be more real than we or she think.
     Or believe.  But isn't that essence of imagination?  Though neuroscientists tell us that imagination is the production of overlapping and accumulating metaphor, synapse, memory, and neuronal form and structure, we know that, for us in our day to day activities, imagination is what helps us make our lives real.  We dream, we imagine, and we dream and imagine again.  We believe, we feel, we speculate, and we believe, feel, and speculate again.  We make our lives stories--stories all our own--that we write.
     Imagine a mystery, a mystery you will never unravel.  Imagine a mystery beyond all form and structure, a mystery that exceeds the boundaries of even--and this is entirely possible--your imagination.  Imagine the mystery of God.
     And believe it is true.

    

     As we remember the fourth and final Sunday of Advent and look towards its culminating event--the incarnation, the physical appearance of God in human flesh--tomorrow, let us ponder the import of its origins.  As the gospel accounts make clear, Jesus was born in Bethlehem (literally, "house of bread"), a town that we might today call a hole in the wall, a little village largely forgotten by the rest of the world.  Few people cared what happened in Bethlehem.
     Nor did few people care when, after God told Joseph to take Mary and Jesus and flee the country to avoid King Herod's deadly predations, Jesus lived awhile in Egypt.  Mary and Joseph were likely viewed as just one more set of refugees, one more group of aliens moving through the flotsam of the Empire, their lives a mirror of countless migrations before:  no big deal.
     But this is precisely God's point.  Though Jesus was an alien and refugee, born in obscurity and forgotten and overlooked by the rest of the world, he was the one in whom God chose to make himself known to all humanity.  Jesus was the one whom God would use to reconcile himself to his human creation, the one who whom God would use to draw all people to himself.  In Jesus, the poor and neglected refugee, was the greatest mission of all time.  It's the ultimate irony, the greatest surprise.
     But isn't that what God is all about?
      

    
"And the Word became flesh . . . " (John 1:14).  Wherever you are, whoever you are, and whatever you are this morning, rejoice:  God has come.  Time is meaningful, space is presence, history and journey are finished and complete. Messiah has come.
     All you need do is open your eyes.

     I once saw, in a house in which I was staying some years ago, a plaque, a very intriguing plaque.  A parody of Psalm 23:4 ("Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you [God] are with me"), it read, "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for I am the meanest son of a b---- in the valley."  Some will find this amusing, some will find it blasphemous.  But the writer has, consciously or not, circumscribed for us two very different ways for living.
     One is to walk through life trusting in, no matter what, the goodness and protection of God for us.  The other is to walk through life trusting, no matter what, our strength and ability to overcome and master whatever it throws at us.  Ironically, though these seem diametrically opposite, they in fact work together to testify to some fundamental facts about existence.  If we assume that we are fully rational creatures made in the image of God, as Genesis tells us we are, we have every reason to put faith in our abilities and capacities to cope with the challenges of existence.  And why not:  God has made us effectual and, in our station, autonomous.  On the other hand, God presides over a world that, as we all know, malfunctions constantly, yet a world, though it may not seem like it, is one over which he exercises control.  He knows its form, he knows its destiny.  We have every reason to trust him.
     And we have every reason to trust ourselves, to trust ourselves to trust God with what we have been given, for we know that however we utilize what we have, we do so in a universe that ultimately is beyond our ability to master.
     We may well be the meanest son of a b---- in the valley, but even the meanest among us will never overcome the impact--personal and global--of his own brokenness and evil.
     We can't live without the help of God.

     Despite everything that has occurred--and, unfortunately will continue to occur--around the world lately, good, in various forms, seems to prevail.  For instance, how wonderful it was to see rock stars and musicians from all over the western world come to New York a couple of weeks ago to perform for a benefit to aid the victims of Hurricane Sandy.  Whatever we may think of their music, their lifestyles, or their politics, we applaud them for their selflessness, for giving of their time and resources to help those in need.  It was a beautiful picture of human goodness.
     Are we good?  Yes, we are.  We may do many bad things (a fact which we all know painfully well), but we are, in essence, good.  And we do good things.
     How do we know they are good things?  It is not because we think that they are, for how would we really know?  We can only know they are good things if we know what good really is.  And we can only know what good really is if, oddly enough, we do not define it.  How could we?  We're finite.  We only know what we can know, nothing more, nothing less.  And we're back to square one. What have we proved?
     We can only know good--and what it is--if there's a transcendent God.

     Besides gun control, the other discussion that seems to be emerging from the aftermath of the deadly shootings in Connecticut last week has to do with the role of God.  Where was God, many people are asking, where was God, this allegedly great and loving God as scores of schoolchildren were being senselessly slaughtered?  What was he doing?
     Countless of well meaning people have worked themselves into various conniptions trying to answer this question.  Though their efforts are both laudable and necessary, in the end we must accept that, frustrating as it is, we will never, in this life, fully know.  We will never fully comprehend the precise measure (and depth) of the mysterious--and it is indeed unfathomably mysterious--nexus of global brokeneness, divine sovereignty and agency, and human will and sin.  Never.  Our finitude guarantees it.
     So what can we do?  We can affirm that God is loving and omnipotent, we can affirm that the world is bent and broken, we can affirm that we are confused and wayward sinners, and we can try to put these together in a meaningful way, a way that we hope will bring some clarity to our angst.  But even this will not fully satisfy.  We are still left with the lingering--and unanswerable--question:  why?  Why, God?  Why?
     But God will likely never tell us.  In the end, we are left with far more questions than answers.  And no way out.
     Except one:  Jesus Christ.  In Jesus dying on the cross, God took on all possible human suffering and pain.  All of it.  Then he overcame it.  He rose again.  The resurrection is God's answer.  The resurrection tells us that God really is omnipotent, that God really is love, that God really is hope.  The resurrection tells us that God is present, that he is working, that he cares.  It tells us that, despite what we may think today, tomorrrow, or many years from now, God knows.
     Will this always satisfy?  No.  Will it always assuage or mollify?  No.  But it gives us a reason to trust.  For if we don't trust God, we really have nothing, literally nothing, there to trust.   Nothingness will never be more than, well, nothing.  As a line from Handel's Messiah (drawn from the 19th chapter of Job) asserts, "I know that my Redeemer lives."  God is there.
     Which will you choose?

     As the nation continues to reel from the horrific violence in Newton, Connecticut, last week, and politicians of all stripes raise calls for more or, alternately, less gun control, I would suggest that neither option will really resolve the issue.  We are looking at a situation that is far more than guns and whether and how we should control them.
     Ultimately, we are looking at ourselves.  We are looking at one of the most violent societies in the world, a society, though it can be one of the kindest in the world, can also be one of the most intolerant, a society, though it can be one of the most generous, can also be one of the most frightened and selfish.  We are looking at an enigma, a society that, despite its efforts to make everyone safe, seems to only succeed in making everyone feel more afraid, a society that although it craves freedom, dearly loves order--at all costs--a society that every year opens the door for increasingly graphic depictions of violence and mayhem while it continues to wring its hands over its effects.  It is a study in contradiction, a study of a society that thinks it knows what it wants, but cannot seem to agree on what that is.  It is a society that doesn't know itself.
     And nothing changes.
     We need a broader conversation, a conversation not about whether we should or should not own or control guns, though that is a conversation that may be worth having, but a conversation about who we are.  Who are we?  What do we want?  More importantly, what do we need?
     Our answer, it seems to me, does not lie with the material alone.  It is necessarily metaphysical.  It is necessarily linked to things bigger than we.  Like God.  Only God knows who we really are.  And only he knows what we really need.  But we have to ask him.
     Though I cannot say with certainty what God will say, I will say this:  the only act of violence that really accomplished its goal was the killing of Jesus on the cross.  Jesus' death is the only violence that really keeps us safe, that really sets us free.  It is the violence through which we should understand everything else, the violence with which we should frame ourselves, our wants, and our needs.  It is the only violence that provides a way out of itself.  Everything else is futility.
     We need a better way.

     Last summer, my son and I backpacked in the Wind River Range in central Wyoming.  Midway through our trip, we rose extra early to prepare for what we expected to be a lengthy hike over and across the Continental Divide.  When we got out of our tent, the sun had not yet risen over the peaks below which we were camped.  The air was still cold, the lake by which we had pitched our tent still shrouded in shadow.  So we waited.
     For what did we wait?  We waited for the sunrise, for the sun, that brilliant and life giving orb of light to rise over the peaks and bathe our camp in warmth and radiance.  As the day was still young, we waited awhile, packing up our camp, preparing breakfast, always watching for hints of the coming light.
     Then it came.  The sun seemed to explode atop the ride, bursting with rays of brilliance and wonder, its multiple filaments of splendor spreading over and across the waiting land.  We rejoiced:  the light had come.
     "For the people who walk in darkness," wrote the prophet Isaiah, "will see a great light (Isaiah 9:1)."  Isaiah speaks, in metaphorical terms, of Messiah, the one who would come to shower light upon an Israel darkened by disappointment, abandonment, and sin.  He speaks of the Christ who would enlighten and save all those who longed for him.  He speaks of the light that would come.
     On the third Sunday of Advent, we remember this fact of Messiah's light, how, like the sun exploding over a frigid mountain ridge, Messiah--Jesus--has brought us light, the light of enlightenment, the light of hope, the light of salvation, the light of meaning.  It is the light for which all of us wait, the light for which all of us, our lives spent in endless quests for meaningfulness wait, the light that if we embrace it, embrace it as ferevently as we did the warmth of the sunrise on an alpine morning, will change our lives forever.
     Once we touch this light, we'll never be the same.

     As I observe the increasingly tense negotiations between the U.S. House Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama about how to deal with the so-called "fiscal cliff" due next month, I often think about the apostles Paul and Peter's words about the role and place of government in our lives.  Although both of these men lived in the confines of the mightiest empire of its day, Rome, daily subject to its many rules and regulations, they nonetheless uniformly encouraged their readers to obey its authorities (unless these authorities decreed laws which prevented them from exercising their, ability to worship God).  Why?  Because they believed that despite all Rome's flaws and shortcomings (and there were many), it was, oddly enough, one small part of God's way of maintaining order and comity in the world.
     Government, Paul wrote in Romans 13, has been ordained by God for the good of the planet.  We may not always like a particular government, we may not always care for the leaders of a particular government, but we understand that, often in ways we do not fully grasp, they contribute to God's bigger vision of human flourishing.  We need government.  (Yes, if a government does not function well, it becomes our obligation and responsibility to correct it (and this is another issue, one which warrants much further discussion), but this does not obviate the essential necessity of government.)
     We may not like what either Mr. Boehner or Mr. Obama are hoping or planning to do about the "fiscal cliff," but we can be thankful that they are at least talking with each other, that they generally respect each other and, perhaps most important, that they are working within the structures of the government the voters elected them to serve and sustain.

     "So are the ways of everyone who gains by violence," observes the first chapter of Proverbs, "for it takes away the life of its possessors."  As we look at our fractured world, full of animosity and strife, rife with war and conflict, violence seems ascendant, seems to overwhelm all attempts at peace.  Tragically, many of those pursuing or using violence to achieve their various political and economic ends are, more often than not, responding to violence, in numerous forms, that they have experienced and for which they see violence as the only viable response.  And perhaps it is.  Not all revolutions and upheavals produce an unpleasant or oppressive end.  On the other hand, as the writer observes, those who view violence as the only means of gain, as the only means of accomplishing a goal, may be in the end undermining, philosophically, metaphysically, and politically, everything they are hoping to achieve.
     And this is the perhaps the greatest tragedy of all.  Change may come, but with a heavy price, and those who pursue it by violent means, however justified they may seem to be, do well to remember that even if we are reaching for laudable ends, we achieve them in a broken world, a world bent under the weight of its turmoil and sin.  No victory is forever, no gain will last, and no conquest will permanently change a heart.  Life will go on, but it is a life lived in a world singularly inhospitable to spiritual and metaphysical clarity.  It will always be incomplete.  As are we.
     Though violence may be inevitable, it doesn't need to be.  Life is greater than its pain.

     "I wish I had never been born," sang the late Freddie Mercury of the rock band Queen.  Though he may not have been aware of it, Mr. Mercury is echoing a sentiment found in Ecclesiastes, which observes, in its sixth chapter, that perhaps the miscarriage is better off than one who has lived, only to die.  Although "it has never seen the sun and never knows anything," the text notes, "it is better off than he."
     Many people have doubtless felt this way.  Sometimes life really does not seem worth living.  As we continue through the Advent season, however, let's remind ourselves that, yes, although existence can be very problemmatic indeed and we may wonder we even bother, without it, nothing would ever be.  In fact, we would not even be here to think about why we would not like to be here!
     On the other hand, as we continue our journey through the Advent season, let us bear in mind that the Christian message that God really did appear in human form (John 1:14) validates everything about why we are here, everything about why we are even here to ponder why we are here.
     After all, had God not appeared in human form, all we would have is a world that, however grand and glorious it may be, is a world without a point and, even worse, a world without a name:  it's here, but not really.  Who would know it?
     Even if we were never born, we would still need a name.

     A line in a novel which I read recently observed that, "One day, there will be nothing left."  This is a truely radical thought.  And in the absence of a God, it is entirely true.  But what, really, is nothing?  And how there be nothing if there is, truly, nothing?
     It is so difficult for we who are something to imagine nothing.  It is counterintuitive to who we are.  And perhaps that's the point.  Perhaps that's why we have so much difficulty (and, for some, terror) imagining it.  We are something, made to be something, made to engage in something.  We are made to long for something, the something that explains our somethingness.
     How could Jesus, the one whose goings forth, as the prophet Micah observed, "have been from long ago," have been nothing?  Indeed:  we are made to long for the "somethingness" of God.

     "For the grace of God has appeared," writes the apostle Paul in the third chapter of his letter to Titus, "bringing salvation to all people" (Titus 2:11).  What is Paul saying?  Simply, that as we remember the second Sunday of Advent, we can come to understand more fully that in Jesus, God in the flesh (as we observed last week (John 1:14)), we see, in flesh and blood, concrete and visible expression of God's grace, physical manifestation and display of his truest posture toward us.  In Jesus we see the fullest possible picture of God's intentions for favor toward us.  Jesus tells us that, above all, God is gracious and loves us, and he provides us with a way to know him, fully and intimately.  Jesus is the grace of God.
     Jesus' appearance tells us that whatever else we may think about God, what we ought to think most about him is this:  God is loving, God is gracious, and God is for us, for us today, for us tomorrow, for us forever.  All we need do is accept his invitation, his invitation of his son Jesus, to us.  God's extended the invitation; now he's waiting for us to reply.
     What else do we really need to do?

     December 7, 1941.  For members of the so-called "Greatest Generation," this is a day, the day of the attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, which will forever remain in their memories.  In the same way, December 8, 1980, is a day which (along with November 22, 1963) will likely forever remain in the memories of their children.  On this night, John Lennon, the former Beatle, was assassinated in front of his apartment building in New York City.  Similarly, September 11, 2011, the day that two jets flew into the World Trade Center Towers in downtown Manhattan, is a day which, although it will certainly remain in the minds of all Americans for many years to come, will perhaps burn most strongly in the memories of the Baby Boomers' children.
     Three days, three generations, three seminal events, three liminal moments.  Such moments are the stuff of historical angst and cultural tragedy, the Urstoff that moves hearts and shapes minds, the liminality that bursts categories and horizons, thrusting those who experience them into unexpected perceptions of what life can hold.  They change the way that people see the world.
     As they should.  When such momentous tangles of metaphysical and material horror erupt into our everyday experience, we are often aghast, struck at the seeming capriciousnss and unanswerability of existence.  We weep, we ponder; we wonder why.  We wonder why they happen, we wonder why they have to be.  And we feel helpless that we cannot go back and stop them.  Our grasp of time is so fleeting.
     But this is our reality, our place, our world.  We wander in the shadows of forces and movements over which we have absolutely no control, living out our lives in the umbra of twists and turns of space and time from which we at times wish only to flee, only to find that we cannot.
     Yet, really, should we?  To flee is to deny the facts of existence.  Not that we embrace the tragedy, not that we rejoice that we experience it.  But we understand it is part of living on this planet, part of walking on a globe bent and broken by sin.
     What can we do?  We weep, we wonder, we restore and repair.  Ultimately, however, we trust.  We trust in the fact of a loving God.
     Darkness, be it come in 1941, 1980, or 2001, need not be ascendant.

     "My work isn't about form, it's about seeing," asserts the artist Roy Lichtenstein.  Though this is an aesthetic statement, an observation about the nature of an artist's craft, given the Advent season which surrounds us at the moment, we may profit from considering its sentiments in a theological light.  To the point, from the days of Plato and Aristotle, philosophers have struggled to define form.  Is form, as Plato suggested, an ideal set in another realm, something into which we come, as he concluded, through the activity of the memory of our soul?  Or is form, as Plato's student Aristotle opined, simply a statement or expression about the characteristics of a given object of perception?
     If we assess these things in light of the Christian notion of incarnation, that God, in Jesus, became a human being, perhaps both positions are true.  If God is a distant form, lost in the heavens and beyond seeing, then we will not know him.  Yet if God is no more than an object of our sensory perceptions, as material as we, he may not be any greater or more useful than any other object on the planet.  If, however, God is a distant and omnipotent and loving and creator form that becomes an object of seeing, one to whom we can readily relate, well, then we have a profound artistic statement, one that affirms the wisdom of Lichtenstein's insight:  wouldn't we rather imagine--and have--a God whom we can see?

     "To be or not to be," says Shakespeare's Hamlet, "that is the question."  Indeed:  it is the question.  Every moment of every day, we bump into this question.  Should we choose to embrace life with its joys and challenges, or do we run away from it, ensconsing ourselves in philosophical oblivion.  The choice is always ours.
     As it was for George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life.  Though he didn't want to live, he eventually was persuaded that he really did.  He chose existence over its absence.
     But why do we pursue existence?  More often than not, it is because we do not wish to leave it.  And why is this?  Simply, we think that this existence is the only one we have.  From our mortal vantage point, this existence seems to be, in itself, the beginning and end.  It's it.
     And perhaps it is.  But have we really come from nothingness?  And we will really one day return to the same?  Have we really never had a point?
     It's enough to make one believe in God.
    

     How do we see?  We see what we want to see.  Although what is in the world, that is, what there is to be seen does not change, what we see about the world does.  Depending on our background, circumstances, and mindset at a given time, we all see differently.  We all see different things in what there is to be seen.
     Perhaps this is one reason why many of us tend to deny recountings of spiritual experiences.  We do not think human beings can see what people who have had these experiences claim to have seen.  Fair enough.  But this assumes that what there is to be seen is limited to, well, what we think there is to be seen, and how do we know--really know--that we are seeing everything there is to be seen?
     What if there are things to be seen that, due to our respective notions about what can be seen, we cannot (or will not) see?
     Enter faith.  But not faith in faith itself, for that misses the point, but faith in a someone, and a personal someone at that, a personal someone who, all things considered, is the only viable explanation for our experiences of seeing what we think we would otherwise not.  It thinks, it purposes, it acts.  Like us.
     Only this kind of faith will really see what it cannot.

     Running through the theology of the early Christian church was a belief called Gnosticism.  In sum, Gnosticism held that all things pertaining to the flesh, that is, of the body, were harmful and evil, while only that which was spiritual or intellectual, that is, of the mind, were good.  What the Church found most insidious about Gnosticism was that although it elevated God above all else, it at the same time made it impossible to associate God with anything having to do with matter, that is, things of everyday existence on earth.  God was there irretrievably distant from the flesh and blood problems and challenges of humanity.  And if God is impossibly distant from us, why should we both with him?
     Here is why we must consider, in this first week of the Advent season, the time of year in which Christianity remembers and celebrates the appearance of Jesus Christ on the earth, just how important Jesus' coming is.  If Gnosticism were true, we would never see God, we would never know God, we would never understand God as a personal presence in our lives.  He would be always infinities apart from us.  But Christianity says that, as John's gospel tells us, "The Word [that is, God] became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14).  God, in the person of Jesus, became part of our world, became an integral part of our everyday reality, became a being as flesh and blood as you and me, subject to all its infirmities, hardships, and limitations while, and this is crucial, remaining the omnipotent and creator God.  God became like us, as real as you as real as me, as real as anyone else in this world.
     Most importantly, God became for us, ready to be our counselor, friend, and greatest joy and meaning forever.  It's the ultimate paradox:  a perfect God in an imperfect world.  But it works.  How can flesh and blood ever be the same?

     Reading a few days ago of the death of Patrick Edlinger, a French sport climber (cause of death undisclosed in the obituary), I thought about the death, in 2009, of free climber John Bachar (falling while climbing, as he had always done, unroped on a rock face near his home in California), as well as the passing, in 1985, of mountaineer Gaston Rebuffat of breast cancer (unusual in a male, but does happen), and remembered, with poignant fondness, some of Rebuffat's (who wrote several books) words about existence.
     We should ever live as children, Rebuffat observed, to view the world with openness, eagerness, and joy for "there will always be something new."  So true.  Though our world may not be as big and grand as that of a high altitude climber or mountaineer, it is nonetheless our world, our place, our wonderland, our unique journey of potential and pleasure.  It will always be new.
     So did these men live, ever eager to go, ever eager to venture, ever eager to engage all that life held for them.  Life was always new.
     As it is for us, each day an adventure to unfold, a journey to take.  So often have I thought while standing atop a mountain summit, peaks and valleys opening before me, sun burning through the ultramarine sky:  life is unspeakably grand.
     Of course:  it's the work of a grand--and personal--God.

     In a book (Proof of Heaven) that is sweeping through the best seller lists this week, Eben Alexander, a leading neurosurgeon, recounts what appears to be a so-called "near death" experience that he had while in a coma brought on by severe bacterial meningitis.  Though well aware of the controversy surrounding such experiences, Dr. Alexander insists that, because all available instruments indicated his neocortex was "entirely shut down, inoperative" (in other words, his brain "wasn't working at all"), he has no way to explain what he saw other than attributing it to something beyond himself.
     As to what that "something" is, Dr. Alexander is not yet willing to say.  Although believers of every stripe may be lining up to attempt to reconcile his vision with their own understandings of the afterlife, that is not the point.  What we can most take away from Dr. Alexander's experience is that despite all our protestations to the contrary, we must admit that we live in a universe whose deepest dimensions we will never, in this life, fully understand.  There are things beyond our grasp, things of which, try as we might, we cannot make total sense, things that perhaps though we would like not to have to think about them, we inevitably do.  We cannot escape our sense of eternity.

     What precisely are money and achievements worth?  It's an age old question.  Most of us will say that, well, money is useful, and, clearly, achievements indicate that we have made the most of our short lives on earth.  Most of us would also say, however, that, in the big picture, neither money nor achievement are worth sacrificing everything else in our lives to gain.  Some things, some largely intangible things are, for most of us, more valuable than either.
     On the other hand, given that we in the West live in thoroughgoing capitalistic societies, we often find resisting the impulse to elevate money and achievement above all else difficult, if not impossible to do.  Given the choice, most of us would rather have money than not and, given the choice, most of us would rather live a life that we consider to be full--of activity and accomplishment--than empty.
     And we are not wrong to do so.  We are incredible creatures, endowed with incredible gifts, and we ought to, for the sake of ourselves, our family, our fellow human beings, and the God from whom these gifts come to exercise and express them to the fullest and, if doing so proves financially renumerative, be grateful, very grateful.  We ought to seek to live, as an annual December edition of The New York Times Magazine would have it, "a life well lived."
     But what does a well lived life really mean?  The first chapter of Ecclesiastes tells us that, in the end, all is futility, and that there is really nothing new under the sun.  Other chapters state that regardless of how much we accumulate or how much we do in this earthly existence, when we die, we no longer have control over it, no longer derive any benefit from it.  Our memory may endure, but we are not there to know it.
     So what is the point of anything?  Jesus puts it nicely.  After predicting, to his disciples, that despite the transforming teaching and wondrous deeds he is proclaiming and effecting, he will soon die--and then be raised on the third day--Jesus says, "For what will it profit a person if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?"  Precisely:  what really will we gain if we become the richest and most accomplished person in the world yet lose, shorn of starting and ending point, who we are?
     Or worse, forget why we're even (or have been) here.

     "I wish to render what is, what I feel," stated the artist Claude Monet, the French impressionist painter perhaps best known for his depictions of haystacks in the Normandy countryside.  Perhaps without intending to, with these words Monet expounds a crucial truth about the way that we view and see the world.  Do not we go through life wishing to render, that is, compose and construct and express our experiences, those things we confront, face, stumble into, and enjoy each day, those things that spark passion, feeling, and wonder in us?  We live to experience, and we live to express those experiences, be it in writing, speech, music, or almost anything else.  We live to explore and explicate the content of our lives and the world in which we live them.
     What does this say about us?  What does this say about the world?  It says that we and the world have meaning and, if we are honest, we believe that we have meaning.  Why else would we wish to render it?
     Let's enlarge the picture.  Think about God as one who renders, as one who renders and constructs what is, as one who renders, as an expresssion of his loving creativity, all that exists, including you, me, and all in which we find life, breath, and meaning.
     Think about the world as what is and what, given the love of God, could only be.  Think about yourselves and this remarkable world and ask this:  what else would a loving and living God render?

     We who live in the twentieth-first century, enamored as we are of the seeming infinitude of human achievement and possibility, largely bent on maximizing our existence, on living life to the absolute fullest, yet oftentimes rejecting any notion that a personal God could have any genuine connection to our lives, may forget that, at one point in history, one glorious moment, human possibility and divine order came very close to reconciling and coinciding, to wondrous effect.
     I speak of the Renaissance, the grand "rebirth" of civilization that surfaced at the close of the Middle Ages in the West.  The Renaissance was marked by a powerful belief in human possibility and destiny, that humanity was a special and anointed creation of God and therefore fully capable of doing anything it wanted.  Its future was limitless.  Simultaneously, however, the people of the Renaissance (for the most part) never stopped believing in God and his guiding light and presence in the world.  Though they firmly believed in unlimited human potential, they also believed, with equal fervor, in the fact of God, in the reality of the one who, as Nicholas of Cusa put it, "is the center of the universe, namely God, whose name is blessed . . . the infinite circumference of all things."  The people of the Renaissance demonstrated that we can believe in human greatness and magnificence while acknowledging and submitting to the presence of a living and personal God and, in so doing,underscored the truth of Ecclesiastes 7:18 that, "It is good to grasp one thing and not let go of the other, for the one who trusts God will come forth with both of them."  The Renaissance confirmed that if we properly manage and understand our boundaries and possibilities, we really can have it all.
     God has made humanity infinitely special, and so we are:  infinitely capable of astonishing and amazing things, yet infinitely bound to acknowledge from whom we have come.
     Would that we always strive for both.

     As Thanksgiving ends and most of us, at least in the West, proceed, ready or not, into the Christmas season, we do well to remember the essence of the moment before us.  It is that, as Jesus put it in Mark 1:15, "The kingdom of God is at hand." It is not a kingdom of arrogance and might, not a kingdom of dogma and exclusivity, but a kingdom of love, a kingdom of community, a community rooted in the truth that God, the great and longed for Emmanuel, the Christ, is with us, with us now, tomorrow, next year, and forevermore.

     Though we often find much with which to be confused or disappointed in this world, we all can be thankful for at least this:  we are here.  We are here to live, to grow, to be.  By God's grace and intention, we are here--and nowhere else--here to find hope, here to find meaning, here to find God.  We are here.
     On Thanksgiving, rejoice in existence, for right now, in this present moment, it is the only existence we have.  , Rejoice that many thousands and millions of years ago, as Genesis puts it, God "created the heavens and earth," giving, as John's gospel tells us, through his Word, his spoken Word, form and life to all things.
Rejoice.
     

     As America prepares to celebrate Thanksgiving, I find myself giving thanks for, among other things, its religious diversity.  Although on one hand I do not agree with everything that adherents of other religions believe, although I might at times wish that other people believed what I believe, on the other hand, I am grateful for what I learn from examining and studying the countless other spiritual perspectives that dot the American landscape.  If, as many theologians have observed, all truth is God's truth, then we ought to be able to find truth, that is, that which is consistent with and accurately reflective of reality, reality, that is, perceived physically as well as spiritually, in a wide range of metaphysical (and, at times, materialistic) viewpoint.  Americans live in a massively large and variegated country, one with plenty of room for many, many worldviews, each of which represent, in their own way, uniquely human expressions of the perennial human quest for meaning.  We don't need to agree with them to learn from them.
     In short, this Thanksgiving, in addition to giving thanks for the many familial, intellectual, and material blessings that flow through your life, give thanks to God.  Give thanks to God that, despite the fractured state of modern spirituality, he is nonetheless able to communicate and present himself--and his son Jesus--in just about any place you look for him.
     Wherever and whoever you are this Thanksgiving, be grateful for the ubiquity of God.

     Have you struggled with God?  Most of us have.  How could we not?  God is infinite and omniscient, we are limited and finite.  We rarely understand why life is the way it is or why things happen as they do.  We usually have no answers to the puzzles and conundrums that enter and inhabit our lives with such regularity.  So we wrestle and struggle with the person whom we think does:  God.
     Oddly enough, however, in a curious but telling way, God expects us to struggle with him.  Ask Jacob.  As Genesis tells it, Jacob had a lengthy and tumultuous journey with God.  He was was a person who, though he believed in God, seemed to do everything he could to get away from him.
     In chapter 32, however, we read that, after many years of troubles and travails, Jacob ends up on the River Jabbok, where he spends the night wrestling with a man who, it turns out, is actually God.
     In the morning, as God takes his leave, Jacob asks for, as he had often done before, a blessing.  And God blesses him by renaming him Israel, which means, "one who struggles with God."  God recognized Jacob's nature and character, his life, his reality.  God understoood that Jacob, like all of us, struggled with him, that he struggled with God because he didn't always see where God was taking him, didn't always see why God was doing what he was doing, didn't always see the big picture of his life the way that only God could.  God understood that Jacob, like all of us, struggle with our trials and limitations, trials and limitations which we often think, for better or worse, only have explanation in God.
     Do not think you will never struggle with God, for you inevitably will.  It's intrinsic to our humanness.  God expects us to struggle, indeed, God embraces our struggle.  And, happily, even though God expects and embraces our struggle, God, precisely because he is omnipotent and omniscient, is fully able to work with us, any time, any place, to help us through it, to guide and uphold us as we travel through the uncertainties and hardships of this existence.
     As the late Pope John Paul II, observed, it is our struggles with finitude that underscore the fact of our transcendence, the fact of our existence in a meaningful and created universe.  Go ahead and struggle:  God is big enough to wrestle with anything you have.

     In his "Father and Son," singer Cat Stevens paints a dialogue between an aging, perhaps on the verge of dying father talking with his son, trying to pass on, despite his son's frustrations about the way he has spent his life listening to others and not having opportunity to find things for himself, some advice on living.  Does the son want to listen?  A little.  In the end, however, the father's advice goes essentially unheeded.  The son wants to wrestle with existence himself.
     As do we all.  Though we rightly respect our elders, those who have lived longer than we and, we hope, have accumulated the insight and wisdom which can only come with age, in the end, each of us must find his or her own way.  And the way we find will not be anyone else's.  How could it?
     "Rejoice, young person, during your childhood, and let your heart be pleasant during the days of young adulthood.  And follow the ways of your heart and the visions of your eyes . . ."  This verse from Ecclesiastes (11:9) is a celebration of human individuality.  It tells us that although we are to honor our parents, in the end, we must pursue our way, our special and unique way in which God is directing us, and to follow our vision, the vision to which we believe God is calling us, and only us.  We are not made nor designed to follow anyone's vision but, before God, our own.
     God has made each of us uniquely, and has unique plans for each of us.  Can you hear him calling?

     "To write music like that you must be a chosen instrument of God."  So said pianist Dinu Lipatti as he reflected on the music of Ludwig Beethoven shortly before he (Lipatti) died in 1950 at the age of 33.
     Lipatti's words underscore the magnificence of human possibility.  Though Beethoven certainly had his share of woes and eccentricities, no one doubts the depth of passion and creative power that he brought to his music.  We listen to his compositions and marvel:  how could one person create such beauty, such sublimity?  Or Mozart.  As a contemporary said of him, "He was like an angel sent to us for a season, only to return to heaven again."  Most of us can only stand mute and astonished before Mozart's immense musical ability.  How could one person write works of such extraordinary wonder?
     Let's consider a verse from the first chapter of Genesis.  "And God created man [man and woman] in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created him" (Genesis 1:26).  The God who created the universe with all its immense complexity and wonder is the same God who created, with equal wonder, every human being.  For this reasons, every person who has ever been born and walked through the history of this planet has the potential to duplicate and express, albeit in finite (yet often, in the case of Mozart and Beethoven, astounding) form, the creativity that birthed the cosmos.
     Rightly do we crater and weep at the beauty of Beethoven and Mozart's music; they are works of unsurpassed wonder.  Yet rightly do we marvel equally at God, the personal infinite God who made and fashioned these artists--with all their prodigious abilities--and enabled them to be and become who and what they are.
     In truth, where else could have creativity come from?
    

     Late one afternoon in the autumn of 1978, Seattle based climber Jim Wickwire and his partner reached the summit of K-2, the second highest peak in the world.  Although they were elated, they realized that they did not have enough time to return to their camp by nightfall.  So they bivouacked, digging in below the summit, without a tent or sleeping bag, until the morning.
     Wickwire's diary, written at various points during the bitterly cold night, poignantly tells of his struggles to stay awake (if he had fallen asleep, he probably would have frozen to death), his thoughts about his comrades at the lower camps, and how deeply he longed for his wife Mary Lou.
     As he saw the sun rise after what had seemed an interminable darkness, Wickwire knew that he had made it.  He had survived the worse the mountains could throw at him.  Though he was tired and unspeakably hungry and thirsty, Wickwire could now believe that he would live.  Life had never looked sweeter, never looked more precious than it did on that morning on the frigid slopes of K-2.  "I'm coming home, Mary Lou," he wrote in his diary, "I love you."
     In the grand newness of the sunrise over the snowy folds of the Baltoro Himalayas, Wickwire saw his salvation.  Did he expect to?  Only he knows.  But at this point he knew that he would make his way home safely.  Although that sunrise was for the rest of the world just one more rotation of the earth, a flash of renewal embedded in a rhythm that had been present since the world began, for Wickwire it was a consuming picture of meaning and hope.  He had looked in the darkest darkness, and found a renewing newness, the “rebirth” that set him free.
     Even if they are not as intense as Wickwire's, we all experience such moments, we all experience points of grace, times of newness, passages of transition, entrances of rebirth.  Such moments stir our hearts, infuse our minds, rock our soul; they shape us, they change us; they show us the possibilities of existence, the existential potential of a living God.  They show us what life is meant to be.
     All these moments pale, however, before the ultimate moment, the ultimate "rebirth" of all:  the definitive redemptive experience of knowing God, the God of infinite potentiality, of knowing God as savior, creator, and friend.  As the apostle Paul wrote, "If anyone is in Christ, that person becomes a new creation . . . all things have become new" (2 Corinthians 5:17).
     Rebirth in Jesus is the rebirth that never ends.

     One motif that runs through the novelist D. H. Lawrence's (often controversial) books is the desire of his characters to have no past, to have no history, to live free and unencumbered by the memories of what to them is now gone, the events and ideas that had once surged through their lives but which, as they would like them to be, are no more.  Why?  To have no past is to have, in effect, no beginning, to live in a state of not being, but becoming, a state in which nothing matters but the immediate moment, a state of continual and, inevitably, often unsettling discovery and renewal.
     On the one hand, this is a grand vision.  We live fully in the present, liberated from all the regrets of the past.  What is gone no longer matters.  On the other hand, it is a debilitating vision.  Without a past, we do not know what it means to have a present.  We will not know what discovery, much less the renewal that often springs from it, are.  We have no starting point.
     It is the past that gives meaning to the present.  When Jesus, as the apostle Mark records him doing in the first chapter of his gospel, announces that, "The kingdom of God is at hand," it was his audience's memory of the past that gave his words genuine weight and worth.  It was the past, with its listeners' rich recollections of God working in the life of the nation--and then seeming to leave it--that reminded people just how important his announcement was.  After centuries of promising to do so, God had returned.  What had been in the past had now, again, become the present.
     And it would be a present that would change the world.  Yet it was a present that could only do so because of the past that had enabled it, a past that, though it was long gone physically, was a past that, in the grand newness of God, had now become forever and unmistakably present, physically as well as spiritually, in the life of the world.
     Though we may want to forget the past and the incomprehensibility of some of its moments (who wants to entertain bad or troubling memories?), we need the past.  We need the past to tell us what is coming which is, in this instance, the fact of our future presence in God.

     With a few exceptions, most creation stories, the world over, picture the planet as emerging from some form of water.  If you've ever stood on a beach, perhaps you can begin to see this.  So vast is the ocean, in breadth as well as depth (consider the over six mile deep Marinas Trench in the Pacific), that its scope boggles the imagination.  We may fly over it, we may dive into it, we may sail across it, but we have trouble comprehending just how enormous and expansive it is.  Its real measure staggers our senses.
     Moreover, not only does water appear in many creation stories, but in scores of myths about the afterlife as well.  Around the world, people have liked to imagine the next life as having, in some shape or form, water.  Water is present at the birth of the cosmos, and it is present at its end--and beyond.
     To wit, when we look at water, we are looking at an astonishingly remarkable fount of present vision and future imagination.  And do we not need both to enjoy the fullness of existence?
     How grand is God.

     William King, the eighteenth century Archbishop of Dublin, once suggested, in so many words, that the desirability of a thing's existence bears no relation to its excellence. Everything exists with reason and purpose and we who share existence with it cannot judge why it's here.  We can only marvel that it is.
     The bishop has a good point.  If we are finite, created and dependent beings living in a world we did not imagine or make, what else, really, ought we to do?
Be in awe of what God has made life to be.

     Despite Voltaire's Candide's clever parody of Gottfried Leibniz's contention that this world--the one we are living in now--is the "best of all possible worlds," if we look at Leibniz's observation from another angle, we may come to think that perhaps the old German philosopher was not too far off after all.  To wit, if this world is really not the best of all possible worlds, how would we know it?  We can only draw comparisons about something if we have something to compare it to--and we do not.  Also, if we say that this world is not the best of all possible worlds (how could a planet with so many problems possibly be the best one possible?), we must know how to imagine a better one--and we can only imagine a better one if we are already alive and well on this one.
     We need to be somewhere, albeit anywhere, to be possible and entertain possibility.  And we cannot be anywhere unless we are somewhere.
     Sure, it's a problemmatic and troubling world.  But consider this:  if this world was not here, we would not be here, either.  Isn't it better to live with the possibility of possibility than to never be possible at all?
     After all, it is the possible that makes us possible.  As God tells the prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 43:19), "Behold, I will do something new, now it will spring forth":  it is in possibility that we see most clearly the fact of newness, that is, God's steady and constant newness, the newness without which the possible would not even be possible.
     Always, today and forevermore, look for the possibility in God.

     If you have seen the original Planet of the Apes (the one starring Charleton Heston), you may remember its intriguing and, from some standpoints, tragic ending.  As Heston treks into the hinterlands beyond the confines of the apes' city, he chances upon what appears to be a massive pile of various and assorted materials, seemingly without any point.  As he looks closer, however, he sees something which sends a chill down his spine.  There, nearly concealed in the debris, its tip faintly rising into the fetid air, is the Statue of Liberty, that famous icon of the American dream, now buried in the detrius of a remote moonscape of a land.
     What happened?  Perhaps the most sinister of the apes (Dr. Zaius) was right in his assessment of the human race.  Humanity had indeed destroyed itself, a victim, the movie wants us to think, of its pride and hubris, caught up, fatally, in a wave of empty and meaningless ambition and greed whose shortcomings it failed to see until it was too late.
     "How lonely sits the city," the prophet Jeremiah writes in the opening chapter of the Book of Lamentations in the Hebrew Bible, "that was full of people!  She has become like a widow who was once great among the nations."  As the entire world knows, America just had a presidential election.  It capped a bitter and divisive campaign, one that tore the country apart, ideologically, religiously, and otherwise.  Unfortunately, those tears may never heal.  The nation is terribly divided and asunder, likely for many years to come.  America may become a very lonely country.
     Let us hope not.  Let us hope that, before God (or as theologians like to put, coram Deo) and each other, the American people can rise toward unity, to forswear sectarian mongering and vitriol and remember the image of the Statue of Liberty beckoning from the New York shores, remember that, for the good of the country, and the world, comity and wholeness and community are more important, and certainly longer lasting, than hegemony and always insisting on being right.
     May America (and the world as well) not slip into the lonely hinterlands of myopic imagination and ideological folly.
     How lonely sits the city.

     "Then I looked again at all the acts of oppression which were being done under the sun.  And behold I saw the tears of the oppressed and that they had no one to comfort them; and on the side of their oppressors was power, but they had no one to comfort them" (Ecclesiastes 4:1)
     The writer makes a good point.  Although we rightly weep over at the pain and oppression that roam across the world, and often crater at the immensity of coercive suffering that visits too many of our fellow human beings, we can realize that those who are causing this pain, though they have power, and though they have authority, as the writer notes, they really have nothing.  In truth, they are separating themselves from their humanness, ripping apart who they really are.  They are giving up their place in the human community.
     And there is no one, as the writer observes, who will invite them back.  Though Josef Stalin ruled Russia with total authority for over twenty years, his word and will unchallenged, he lived a life alone and apart.  He became, in the narrative of Aleksandr Solzhenitysn's First Circle, one whom no one could know, who could not be loved, a person who, in making victims of so many, had become a victim himself.
     This of course doesn't justify Stalin's actions, nor does it offer much comfort to those whose lives were destroyed, utterly destroyed by his mad paranoia.  Such things will never be remedied in this present existence.  But these words do allow us to better understand the character of an oppression that, unfortunately and broadly speaking, affects, in some way, all of us.  Oppression is never right, and it is, tragically, driven by a thirst for power which will never be satisfied.  Such thirsting is, as the writer opines elsewhere in Ecclesiastes, "vanity."  It's worthless.
     As Lord Acton cogently put it, "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely."  So did Stalin (and all other oppressors as well) die, corrupted absolutely by the absolute nature of his power.

     In so many ways, it's a fractured universe.  In so many other ways, however, it's a beautiful universe.  Day in and day out, it overwhelms us with its magnificence, a magnificence whose depths we often cannot fathom.
     But we try anyway.  And why not?  Better to believe, though not always seeing, the beauty, than to never believe at all.  Can we really deny it's there?
     How else can we really be?

     Have you had a birthday yet this year?  I had one, a rather significant one, yesterday, and found myself engaged in no small amount of meditation and pondering, reflections that I broke down in three ways, as poem, prayer, and promise (a framework I drew from the late John Denver's song "Poems, Prayers and Promises").
     In so many ways, my life--and, really, yours as well--has been a poem, a narrative, a story, an unfolding of time, space, and memory, a journey of adventure and intrigue, of love and love and more love, a voyage of wonder, challenge, heartache, astonishment, and profundity, a marvelous and mind boggling sojourn through existence, a life lived, in the fullest sense, in the compass of eternity and the fact of God.  We're on wonderful treks!
     When I think of prayer, I think about my earliest years, years when I wondered why I was here, why I was doing what I was doing, why I was being told to believe the things I was told to believe, and how in subsequent years I looked beyond these things, sought other visions, other perspectives, other ways of looking at this befuddling existence in which I found myself and, along the way, came to grasp what was for me, a seminal vision of guidance and truth, a life, mine (and, really, yours, too), as a prayer to the encompassing presence of God.
     So has life also been, for me and, given the fundamentals of our reality, you as well, a promise, a river of promise, really, an unfailing expectation of more, the steady anticipation of a next, a constant inkling and glimmer of what could be, a promise that, like a stream in desert spring, inundates me and you with hope, determination, joy, and the fact of beyond, the assurance of meaning, the fact of beginning and end, endlessly.
     So (to repeat) it is for all of us, our lives a poem that we write, our prayers a life that we make, our promises the hope that drives and molds us, our days lived out in the infinite actuality of a loving God.

     As I contemplate the immense damage and heartache that Hurricane Sandy unleashed on the East Coast of the United States, I sometimes ask myself, given my post of yesterday, whether some of those whose lives Sandy turned upside down are asking about God.  Where is God in all of this?  What is he doing?
     There are no easy answers to this question.  I find myself returning, again and again to the fact of God's love, that despite God's seeming indifference to unmitigating pain, without God's love, I would really have nowhere to go, absolutely nowhere.  My life would just be me and our corporate pain, experienced, perhaps eventually overcome--love won--but, tragically, perched upon and washed away in a vast insouciant nothingness.
     Hence, as I weep over the suffering so many of us are enduring (and not just that left by Sandy, but suffering across the globe), I remind myself that even if I cannot feel or see the love of God, I believe in it.  I may not get answers.  But I can live with that, for I know that without God's love and presence, life--and our perceived meaning and purpose in it--has no real home.

     As we pick up after Halloween and consider the fact of All Souls Day, we might ask, thinking of another angle on this day of mystery, remembrance, and sorrow, this:  how do we explain darkness?  How do we explain why on the day of his wedding a groom to be was informed that his wife to be had been killed in an automobile accident the night before?  How do we explain why on December 29, 2004, a tsunami rose out of the Pacific Ocean and killed, in the sweep of a moment, over 200,000 people while we in the United States were basking in the aftermath of Christmas?  How do we explain why a young man in Illinois, aged seventeen, was walking through a forest preserve when, out of the blue, a limb fell and killed him, instantly?  How do we explain the Holocaust?  How do we explain genocide in Rwanda?  How do we explain ethnic extermination in the Balkans?  How do we explain tragedy unwarranted and unforeseen?
     Humanly speaking, we cannot.  Sure, we can say that it is the product of a fallen world sundered by sin, the inevitable result of a cosmos bent irreparably by evil, but this still doesn't tell us why some people die when they do, why God seems to allow some to live and others to die, why suffering comes to some in such immense quantities and to others not at all, why some people lose loved ones way too early and others do not.  How can we explain the randomness of evil and pain?
     We cannot.  All we can say is this:  "God is light" and, as the writer of the first epistle of John says, "in Him there is no darkness at all."  Though darkness will wrap itself around every corner of our lives, ensnaring us in hopelessness and despair, we can nonetheless remind ourselves of this, that, "God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all."
     Somehow, some way, explanation exists.  Somehow, some way, purpose prevails.
     God is light.

     As Halloween, the night that, in ancient tradition, the spirits and goblins of the inner earth escape, for one bone chilling evening, their chthonic imprisonment and roam about the planet, weaving magic, confusion, and mystery into the lives of those still living, approaches, we might think of it in another way.  We might think of Halloween as a night not of goblins, but as a night of God, a night in which God is afoot, on the loose, tearing open reality, overturning assumptions, undermining the obvious, and unfolding an otherness, a beyondedness, a somethingness which we might not otherwise see.  On this night, we might imagine not deceased spirits wailing of their ignominy, but God, a living God who is presenting himself and making himself known, making himself known as a presence of the more, a herald of the future, a proclamation of a new life, a richer hope, a new dawn.
     Think about God as one who eclipses and overcomes the tangible and apparent, who overwhelms present form and long ago imagination to promulgate and usher in a new day, a new day of insight, wisdom, and truth, a day in which he appeared as we are to show us who we could most be.

     On some days, days when we are feeling particularly overwhelmed with the difficulties of existence, many of us may feel as if we are, people who, like 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, never to return.
     But what if, as Emily Dickinson opined, "This world is not conclusion"?
     Obscurity no more.

     Most of us want to be better people tomorrow than we are today; most of us would like to improve morally, to be more “moral” a week from now than we are at the moment.  To this end, most of us spend at least a little time during the course of our day thinking about what we have done wrong (less time, in fact, I would wager, than we spend thinking about what we have done right) and how we could do better the next time around.  We may wake up in the morning feeling good and determined to do well, only to find that, in a way that we did not expect, we do bad, that we have done the very thing we did not want to do.
     It’s a frustrating lot, really, being a finite yet thoroughly moral human being.  But maybe we are missing the point.  If we are broken morally (which, if we are honest with ourselves, we will admit), how can we fix ourselves?
     Not that he set out to do this, but in his The Year of Living Biblically, author A. J. Jacobs undertakes an intriguing task.  He resolves, for one year, to adhere as literally as possible to the dictums—the rules and regulations—of the Bible.  His task becomes rather amusing as he confronts and deals with various and diverse laws about diet, travel, clothing, even women in menstruation.  He quickly finds that conforming to every rule and precept is decidedly difficult in a modern western society.
     Toward the close of the book, however, he admits that despite spending a year doing this, he is not sure whether he is now a better person than he was before he began.  All of us can relate:  though we may follow moral laws, inevitably we break them, over and over again.  We do better, but are we better?
     Our hearts will only change in the hands of someone other than their owners (us).  Yes, we can do better, and yes, we can be better people, but ultimately the only thing that will make us genuinely and permanently “better” (that is, morally whole and justified before our creator) is God himself.
     Only God can really change a human heart.

     As I strolled through a nature preserve near my home a few weeks ago, I thought of a song, a song done by Neil Young in the late Seventies.  It is called "Holiday."  In this song, Mr. Young sings of how city dwellers, looking to refresh themselves, spend a day in the country, trying earnestly, as he sees it, to enjoy its pleasures, its wonders, its slower way of living and looking at things.  But he also notes that try as they might to imbibe and ingest this ambience, these city dwellers in the end must return to the city and the frenetic lives they lead in it.  He closes the song by talking about how before we know it, "lives become careers" and, he adds, children cry in fear, "let us out of here!"
     Although we could read this song a number of ways, it certainly seems to be a testament to the angst that many people feel when they look at their lives.  We are born, we grow up, we go to college, we find jobs, we get married, we raise children, we become empty nesters, and then, when we have done everything we think we can (or, unfortunately, sometimes before we think we have), we die.  Small wonder that people cry out, "Let us out of here!"  We wonder why we ever lived.  What, really, was our life about?
     Absolutely nothing, unless, as the writer T. C. Boyle pointed out recently, God exists.  Without God, as he sees it (and he is absolutely correct), there is no other purpose than to live.  But how can we insist that living is in itself purpose if we deny, in the absence of God, that purpose even exists?
     No wonder that so many of us are crying, "let us out of here!"
     Unless there is a God, we will never know where we are really going.
    

     What would you do if you could become invisible and, in essence, do whatever you wanted?  Would you?  Would you take advantage of people?  Would you listen in on private conversations?  Would you amuse yourself at the expense of others?
     This is the dilemma that Plato poses to us in his "Ring of Gyges" dialog, which appears in the second chapter of his Republic.  If a reasonably intelligent person, he asks, could don a "ring" and become invisible and therefore evade any judgment for his (or, if we extrapolate this to our time, "her," too) activities, would this person still be moral?
     I guess it depends on how we define morality.  And that's the problem.  If we define morality on the basis of our perceptions, inevitably it will be flawed.  How can we really know, in ourselves, even with society and social consensus (which is always changing), what is moral?  How can we, bent as we are, really know what is right--all the time, in every age?  Sure, we can come to reasonable conclusions about right and wrong, but ultimately we are looking at, if there is no transcendence, beings without meaning developing morals, as it were, without ground or meaning, too.   Absent a transcendent guide, any way that we look at morality eventually becomes relative, a victim of the constantly changing circumstances in which it is developed.
     And if morality is relative, then, yes, one could do, if he or she were invisible, whatever he/she pleases.  It wouldn't matter:  there is no final authority by which to measure, arbitrate, or judge.
     Well, one could argue, there are certain moral convictions, say, a prohibition against murder, that are constant in every culture.  In general, history seems to support this.
     But all it takes to dispel this notion is one culture.  And we are back to square one.  Again, unless there is a permanent transcendent rule and/or authority, we really have no way to know what is fully and truly moral and whether we are indeed, ring or not, moral.  Finite and limited beings that we are, how could we?  It's all a function of our moment.
     Though we as intelligent and rational beings are fully capable of constructing morality, we must ask ourselves why, really, in a world devoid of point or transcendence, we do (and are able to do) so.  Without a transcendent and personal God, morality lapses into futility.  Brave futility, yes, but futility nonetheless.
     So does Richard Dawkins, whose name we have mentioned before, observes that, in the absence of God or transcendence, there is "no design, no purpose, no evil and no good."  In short, there is no real morality
     Dawkins is more than right.  In the absence of meaning, in the absence of transcendence, in the absence of, to put it another way, a personal God, nothing, including morality, really matters anyway.
     And you can use the ring all you want.

     What's humility?  Though we could look at humility in many ways, I suggest that we look at it as a sense of place.  Humility is knowing who we really are and where we are really going, and understanding--profoundly--the full depth and extent of the realities in which we move.  To be humble is to confront and embrace what is most true about us and our place in the world.  It is agreeing to accept the paradigms and limitations and liabilities that define us and our lives and to purpose to live within these frustratingly fluid yet paradoxically immovable boundaries of our humanness.
      Humility is also to admit that in the big pictures of time, history, and reality, we are really quite small and insignificant.  It is to acknowledge that although we may be grand and marvelous in our time, we are ultimately dust.  We are not permanent, we are not eternal.  In the vast span of the cosmos and the billions of years that comprise it, we are but a tiny, a very tiny speck of plasma and flesh.  While our present moments may seem all that is possible, they will soon fade into a future that will quickly forget we ever existed.
     Yet humility as a sense of place is not simply admitting to our limitations.  Ultimately, it is about acknowledging the reality of beyondness, that above and beyond this reality there is another, another very real and seminal realm of form and understanding which animates all others, a foundational idea that informs all that is:  God.  Humility recognizes that against all else that may challenge it, there is the reality of God.  Humility is admitting that despite whatever science or philosophy may assert or say about reality, an enduring divine presence nonetheless pervades the universe, upholding and guiding it to greater purpose (a sense of purposefulness which we all recognize we have and enjoy).  To be humble is to acknowledge the fact and presence of divine order.
     For this reason, humility recognizes that what we imagine to be truth is not ours to define, that what we believe is real is beyond us to determine, and that what we think we know is but a semblance of what can really be known.  Humility understands that, ultimately, knowledge and truth are determined and shaped by God.

 

     One of the British rock band Led Zeppelin’s most famous songs, a song that stayed in the top hundred songs of all time for decades, is “Stairway to Heaven.”  In ethereal and mythological language, it weaves a story, a story in which lead singer Robert Plant talks of a lady who is looking for a word, a way, a means to meaning and, after following her in her journey, says, at the end, simply, that she is "buying a stairway to heaven."
     But would heaven be heaven if we had to pay for it?
     Not really.  And that's the beauty of it.  Heaven, that wonderful expectation of being in the presence and aura and landscape of someone whose very essence and being, spatiality and temporality magnified and stretched beyond present form and imagination, at once and continually, makes us feel complete, now and forever, is absolutely free.
     We need only believe in and embrace, in confident and abiding trust, the reality of the one who upholds it.

     Anyone who has spent any time with children knows that children tend to believe whatever we say to them, regardless of whether it is true or not.  Believing us to be an impeachable source of knowledge and truth, they accept unquestioningly what we say to them.  They trust us implicitly.
     Adults are different.  We tend to be far more skeptical of what we hear or see.  Yet in terms of spirituality, we are really no different from children.  Adults though we may be, we, like children, must learn to "trust" if we hope to understand the fullness of spirituality is about.  We may have a very good grasp of how the natural world works, but our finitude prevents us from developing an equally good grasp of how the supernatural works.  Try as we might, we will never know it fully.  We must rely on faith.
     And faith involves trust, a trust in things and entities bigger than we understand and see.  So did Jesus remark, “Unless you are converted and become like little children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3).  Jesus was saying that when it comes to genuine spiritual insight, that is, conversion which, as he saw it, is full-hearted trust in and embrace of himself as God’s son and savior of humanity, we must, like children, trust, unquestioningly, the essence of how God defines it—because we do not know what will happen once we say yes.
     In his Spiritual Life of Children, author Robert Coles tells how a young Jewish girl who, as she lay dying from leukemia, continued to recite Psalm 62, “Hear my cry, O God, attend to my prayer.  From the end of the earth I cry to you; when my heart is overwhelmed, lead me to the rock that is higher than I.”  Although this girl was old enough to know that she could reject trust in God as a viable means of comfort and solace, she endured, steadfastly reciting and believing in the psalm.  In the darkness of her illness, she trusted implicitly in God.  Though she couldn’t see God, though she couldn’t hear him, though she had no physical evidence that he was there, she, like the child whom all of us must be if we are to really commune with God, trusted in him unquestioningly.  She wasn’t afraid of faith.
     Nor should we be afraid, either.  God is infinite, we are finite.  God is omniscient, we are not.  And God is always love:  we can trust him implicitly.  We can trust him to show us, fully, the path to who we are meant to be, a person in abiding moral relationship with her creator.
     We can always trust God with what we cannot see.

     This seems to be a particularly poignant couple of weeks, replete with anniversaries and remembrances. Last week, I recalled the scattering of my mother's ashes on her favorite mountain; a few days ago, the day of my spiritual birth; and today, the 29th anniversary of my father's passing.
     Dad died suddenly, quite unexpectedly, victim of a heart attack. It happened on an otherwise perfectly ordinary day. After Dad and Mom had done their usual exercise routine at the Y, Mom left for several hours. When she came home later in the afternoon, she noticed that the coffee pot was still perking on the stove. Puzzled, she began to walk through the house, looking for Dad. She found him, but not in the way she had expected. He was lying on a bed in what had been my sisters' room, dead, his body and skin cold and gone. Dad was 63.When Mom called that night to give me the news, I burst into tears.  I loved Dad so much.  He was the greatest, and I thought, as most of us would like to think of our parents, he would live forever.  I cried all night.
     But I prayed, too.  I prayed to affirm and remember the fact and reality of  God, that he was there, that he was with me, sharing my pain, suffering with me in heart, mind, and soul.  I tried to remember how much he himself had wept as he watched his son Jesus die on the cross.  I realized anew that God had known pain and privation as much as anyone possibly could.  I knew he understood my angst all too well.
     That was really all I could say.  God was there, nothing more, nothing less.  He, the transcendent presence of love and purpose, was there.  The cosmos was not empty, not devoid of thought or meaning.  God was there.
     A couple of days after I returned from the wake in California, I listened to Bach's chorale, "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring," thinking about, among other things, the first time I heard it.  It was the summer of 1977.  A friend of mine had presented me with a collection of piano performances by the late Dinu Lipatti, who died of cancer in 1950 at the age of 33.  "Jesu" was the first track on the record.  As its lilting strains slipped into the room, Dad exclaimed, "That's Bach!"
     As I played "Jesu" again that autumn day in 1983, I remembered Dad's words, and wept all over again.  His voice was now forever a memory.  I also wept at the power of the music.  The gentle flow of its melody carried me along like an ocean breeze, lifting me high above what I could see, taking me to the realm of what one day will be.  I dreamed of the face of God, that astonishing fusion of mind and spirit that will put to rest for all time and for all people the question of why and what really is.  There was, I realized, once again, meaningfulness even in death, hope even in hopelessness.  There is God.
          Do I miss Dad?  Of course, every day.  But I am continually convinced and persuaded that because God, the personal and purposeful God who created and loves me, is there--and always will be--I have hope.  There is heart, there is meaning; there will be another day.
     Never stop believing in the real reality of a personal God.

     In an experiment done a few years ago, resesarchers gave a group of college students two choices.  Would they like to live in a perfectly tuned environment, an environment absent of all problems and heartaches, but an environment in which they had no opportunity to discover anything about it?  Or would they prefer to live in an environment with headaches, problems, and challenges, yet an environment which they could manipulate, explore, and touch every moment they were in it?
     Most of the students opted for the second choice.  Why?  They would rather live in a world in which they could find and discover things, rather than a world, although it is devoid of problems, offers no hope for finding a meaningful way to live in it.  They wanted to feel and know meaning, any kind of meaning; they wanted to know that they were more than well manicured robots in a sterile and seemingly safe environment.  Regardless of the challenges that attended living in an open-ended way, they wanted to know that if they wished to do so, they could live in a manner that allowed them to find out why they were alive and here in the world.  They wanted to know that they could find meaning.
     As do we.  We all live for meaning.
     Or do we?  In Walden Two, psychologist B. F. Skinner presents his version of a utopia, a society composed of people who have been essentially programmed to be happy.  But what's missing from this picture?  What's missing is the opportunity for these people to discover, on their own, happiness, to uncover, by virtue of their own volition and will, what life means for them, and them alone.
     Finding meaning can be difficult.  Some of us spend all our lives looking for it.  But if we opt to have meaning without taking the journey to it, though we may be happy, we are, in the end, no more than things, happy things, but things, nonetheless.  We really haven't found anything.
     So look for meaning.  You won't be disappointed.  We live in a meaningful world.
     Enjoy the inexhaustibility of God's creation.