"Atheists ought not to be offering consolation," asserts Christopher Hitchens in Mortality, his account of his dealings with esophageal cancer (from which he died in December of last year at the age of 62).  Though it is difficult to determine precisely what point Hitchens is making here, perhaps he is saying that, given an atheist's contention about the irredeemably terminal character of existence, there really is no need to offer a traditional form of consolation to his survivors.  Most forms of traditional consolation come as assurances to the survivors to the effect that even though their loved one is gone from this life, he is doing much better in another one.  Life does not end with the grave.  Yet such thoughts do little for an atheist:  he has no belief in an afterlife.  When this life ends, that is it.

     So what is left?  Very little.  For an atheist, however, this is not so much depressing (as it would be for a person who believes in an afterlife) as it is bravery.  It is far braver, the atheist would argue, to face the fact of absolute nonexistence upon death head on than to set one's hopes in what they believe to be the unprovable possibility of an afterlife.  To do the latter is to commit intellectual and emotional suicide.  It ignores an incontrovertible truth of existence:  people live, people die, and never, ever do they live again.  Death is final, totally and frightfully final.
     However laudable this bravery may be, however, it overlooks one very important point.  Although no falsifiable evidence exists to demonstrate definitively that there is no afterlife (how would we know?!), there is ample evidence that the opposite is true.  Time and space had to begin somewhere, and they had to begin in something much richer and longer lived and, spatially and chronologically (in an infinite sense), bigger, in scope, than they, something that we might call eternity.  And if there is an eternity, chances are very good that there is eternal life, a place where space and time originate and have their ultimate purpose and meaning.
     (We say this quite apart from the testimony of the New Testament that in dying and subsequently rising again, Jesus of Nazareth affirmed for all time the fact and presence of a real and genuine afterlife, a life in which he invites all of us to join him.)
     So we are entirely justified in offering the consolation of another life to those who have lost loved ones.  The universe (and even the most ardent evolutionist will eventually admit to this) simply cannot be without, in some form, an eternity.

     In her Illness as Metaphor, the late Susan Sontag dissects and analyzes numerous instances in which illness has been used, wrongly, as she sees it, in a metaphorical way that tends to point to or underscore other issues or causes which may not necessarily serve the ones suffering from a particular illness.  To wit, metaphors of illness have often been used to justify various actions, not all of which serve the common good.

     Metaphorical or not, intrinsic to illness, it seems, is a fundamental assumption of weakness, that the one suffering from an illness is somehow physically or psychologically weaker than those who are not.  Often this is true.  On the other hand, often it is not.  Those who are sick among us often present to us a picture not of weakness but of strength, a portrait of steadfastness and fortitude, a vision of a decision to live life to the fullest regardless of the circumstances in which one finds herself.  It is a choice which those of us who are healthy often overlook, burdened as we let ourselves become by our various existential challenges.  We forget what it is really like to be healthy and well.  We come to suppose that it is normal.
     Normality, however, often breeds complacency and myopia.  It forgets to look behind and around itself, to dig beneath the surface, to seek out the hidden and unseen.
     For this reason, perhaps it is in the sick that we can best learn about health and wholeness, for it is in the sick, undermined physically and, sometimes, psychologically--but who are often, to reiterate, nonetheless stronger than most of us will ever be--that we see the real essence of health.  Being healthy is far more than physical and mental wholeness.  Genuine health is admitting to the fact of our evanescence and fraility, to embrace the truth of our tiny place in the universe and the ineluctable finitude that comes with it, to recognize the inescapable reality of space and time and the God who made them, and to be, regardless of how we feel, physically or otherwise, comfortable with and secure in it.  Real health is to recognize that we, human we be, are weak, weak in body, weak in spirit, weak in mind, our knowledge limited, our purview small.  Real health is to admit to our dependence on the grace of God.
     Sometimes it takes sickness to awaken us to who we really are.

     In Theology of the Event, a book published a number of years ago, theologian John Caputo sets forth what he terms the "weakness" of God.  It's an intriguing proposition:  can God be weak?  According to Caputo, yes, God can be weak.  God is weak because unlike the God of orthodox Christianity, God is not apart from the events of the world, nor does he guide or grant purpose to the events of the world.  Instead, God is an event; he is not a being.  God is an integral part of the fabric of this reality, as subject to chance and circumstance as much as anyone and anything else.
     This is a powerful thesis.  Given that in our cause and effect universe every event is merely a prelude to another one and therefore an open book, its effects ever subject to alteration and change, it means that God as event means a God who is no more than another flash of activity in an evanescent and dying world.  He is nothing more than the next thing, no more than the next random twist of matter and time.
     In order to mean anything to us personally, however, God must be more than event.  He must be a person, a person with individuality and purpose.  Otherwise, we may as well put our trust in a slab of granite.
     On the other hand, quite apart from Caputo's assertion, God did, at one time, become weak.  Although he is the creator of the universe, at one point in history, God, the strongest of all beings, became weak, as weak as you and me.  He became a human being.  Though he remained God, a personal being, God became an event, an event of weakness that rocked the world.
     But it was precisely in his weakness that this God, unlike Caputo's God, subservient to and defined by event, displayed his strength.  Because God in his strength--the strength of cosmic supremacy--became, in the person of Jesus Christ, weak, God demonstrated that strength is ultimately the servant of weakness, and that it would be in weakness--a weakness of, oddly enough, strength, the strength of one who chooses to be weak--that he would make himself fully known.
     And in this was the greatest event of all time.

     Consider the notion of land.  Land is our beginning, land is our ending.  In land, however we define it, we find ourselves, we locate our path, we endeavor to shape our destiny.  Land is a metaphor for all that we find good and worthwhile in the world.  Land is the foundation, and repository, of dreams.
     But land is nowhere without sky above it.

     If we are to fully make sense of what seems to be an utterly confusing reality, we must learn to think in terms of paradox.  We must learn to embrace things that do not seem to fit together, things that do not appear to align cleanly, but things which, if we are sufficiently wise and honest with ourselves, we admit that, even if we do not wish to, we must nonetheless accept.  As Blaise Pascal noted long ago, we must accept the limits of our reason.  We must accede to conclusions which may explain in part, but not in full, conclusions which, as the theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg puts it, are “contrary to experience by exceeding its capacity” (italics mine).  Again, this reflects the demands and constructs of our humanness:  we will never understand everything as it actually is (a fact which Immanuel Kant pointed out as well).  Logic, as Cardinal John Henry Newman argued toward the close of the nineteenth century, has its limits.
     For finite creatures living in a finite reality and searching for meaning, real and genuine meaning in that finite reality, paradox is inevitable.
     Consider the Greek word αρχη.  Aρχη denotes a beginning which never really began, a beginning which required nothing to be, for it has always been.  Yet αρχη is a beginning which, if we hope to develop a credible picture of global origins, we cannot do without.  We need an αρχη to make sense of our origins.  As odd as it seems, we need a causeless beginning to explain our own “caused” beginning.  Can we who have a beginning really explain why we are here?  We need a beginning which nothing else can claim it began, a beginning without cause and beyond effect, a beginning which never really began.
     Clearly, this is a paradox.  But it is also inevitable.  We are creatures of finitude who inhabit three and four dimensions in a universe with, according to cosmologists, at least ten more.  We have limits.  We have boundaries.  We simply cannot grasp everything, to borrow a term from the legal profession, prima facie.
     We must learn to live with what we do not fully understand, we must learn to live with things that are beyond our ken but things whose factuality we must admit to being present, if not always available.  We must learn to live with paradox.

A longing for freedom is one of our most fundamental passions.  We long for freedom, long to be liberated from the constraints of finitude—spiritual, mental, physical—and break into a higher understanding of what is real.  We long to make our will, our free will (at least as we see it), the sole and unchallenged arbiter of our truth and reality.  We want to be, as John Muir and Henry David Thoreau have noted, and exist in a way that releases us from all constraint.    
So did Nietzsche set forth his Ubermensch, and so did Tom Wolfe, in Bonfire of Vanities, call his Wall Street protagonists "masters of the universe," people in total control of their worlds, their freedom limited only by their willingness to realize, guide, and further it.  They are total masters of their destiny.  There is nothing greater than they.  As Titanic director James Cameron remarked upon receiving the 1997's Academy Award for Best Picture, “I’m king of the world.”

But there is a problem.  It is the problem of God.  If God exists as a sentient and active and omnipotent being, acknowledging him as such means that we no longer have absolute freedom.  Sure, we can still do whatever we choose to do, but we now do so aware that we do so under the aegis of someone who will one day judge how we have used what has been given us.  Our entire life equation changes.

In addition, even if we do not believe that God exists, we must nonetheless understand that no one has unlimited freedom in a finite universe, much less a universe whose ultimate parameters are beyond her control.  Our freedom is merely the degree to which we believe ourselves to be free.  It has no genuine substance.

Moreover, though we of finitude can criticize this God, we cannot change this God, and we certainly cannot give ourselves any more freedom than what our limited constitutions and fragile and temporary occupancy of space and time allow us to do so.  We realize that we have unlimited freedom only to the extent that we are free of who and what we are, something we will never be able to fully do.  For who we are will never change:  we will always be human, nothing more, nothing less.  As the Smashing Pumpkins put it, “Even after I finished venting my rage, I’m still a rat yelling in a cage.”

So are we free?  Yes.  Are we free to be free?  Yes.  Are we free to be free to be free?  No.  Were we totally free to be free, we would never struggle with limits, never struggle with meaning, never struggle with the conundrum of evil.  To be free is to know and successfully wrestle with what constrains it.  Only this is a freedom that makes itself free.  Any other freedom means nothing.

     If, as John Rawls observed, justice is being fair, how do we define what is fair?  If, as much of America's judicial system seems to say, justice is being retributive, how do we decide what is appropriate?
     To the point, for the length of its relatively short history, America has arrived at what it considers "just" through social and political consensus.  Under the weight of cultural and historical circumstances, such consensus, however, inevitably changes.
     Hence, the issue remains:  how do we know what true justice is?  Compounding this dilemma is the challenge embedded in Emily Dickinson's long ago observation that, "This world is not conclusion."  Does believing that this world is but a part of a much greater whole solve the problem?  Will deciding that this world "is not conclusion" allow us to contemplate and do justice in a more expansive and realistic way?
     It can.  Only if, however, we admit that, ultimately, we will always be dependent, materially and epistemologically, on a presence in whom resides the final boundary and definition of what is just.
     Otherwise, we are creating justice with a justice that may not actually be just.  We're just dancing in the dark.

     There is a land, Fionavar, a land whose location no one knows, a land of mountains and plains, of woods and oceans, but a land which can only be reached through magical assistance, be it from Dana, the Mother Goddess, or the Council of the Mages.  Only through these divinities will people be able to enter Fionavar and find the truth that it holds, only then will people be able to step into the epic battle between Rakoth Maugrim the Unraveller and Conary the High King, and find the full meaning of their days.

     But how do we know Fionavar is real?  How do we know that it contains the truth?

     We will only know if we decide that truth, that is, the definition of that which closely corresponds to and most accurately reflects the reality that we experience (a reality which necessarily includes visible as well as invisible phenomena—more on this in a later blog), is something that we ourselves to not create.  For if we define truth only by what we see, hear, touch, taste—or imagine—we make ourselves the creator of something which we, in our finitude, cannot really create.  How do we know truth if we ourselves do not know what is really true?

     (And it doesn’t do to insist that because this world is all there is, we therefore are free to decide whatever about it we choose, for we still do not absolutely know that we are indeed all that is.)

     When we make ourselves the definers of truth, we end up affirming and congratulating ourselves for conclusions and beliefs we have no way to prove.  We believe without knowing whether we can legitimately and honestly believe it.

     Truth must be grounded in and defined by something that can prove that it is the truth, the truth in which all other "truths" are rooted.  It must be able to verify that it is the sole arbiter of what is real.  But it can only do so if it is the genesis of all that is.
     How can it otherwise know the truth of all that is--and can possibly be?

     What's grace?  In its purest form, grace is something undeserved, something freely given apart from the recipient’s standing, ability, or merit, something the recipient didn’t expect or deserve to receive.  Consider Jean Valjean in Les Miserables.  Although Valjean stole some silver from the priest with whom he had spent a night--and the priest knew that he had--the priest allowed him to leave without retribution.  He gave Valjean grace to go on.

     Grace confutes reality, for it falls upon the good and evil, the bad and the good, seemingly undoing normative patterns of justice and what is fair. Yet grace cannot be any other way:  it must be free and unencumbered by social and cultural nuance.  To this end, grace, pervades the universe, pervades every nook and cranny, penetrates every dimension of our lives, every part of the cosmos. It's the operative principle of existence. Without grace, existence would not be; in fact, nothing would be. Without grace, there is no meaning, nor is there any explanation.
     Without grace, our universe is an accident--as are we.
     But isn’t grace only fully real if the person granting it has some degree of power over the one to whom he gives it?  Grace's richest sense connotes dependency, a dependency on objects or beings greater than oneself.  Yet grace could not come from an object, for an object has no way to give it.  Grace must come from personality, a personality in whom is vested thought, intelligence, power, and emotion, personality in which communication is active and working.  Grace is truly grace when it comes from a personality that is more powerful than as well as inexorably and favorably inclined toward the recipient.
     Genuine grace must come from a presence and power centered beyond this world, yet a presence and power invested in this world as well. It must come from a personality greater than the present moment, a personality that is able to overpower and guide present and past and future.
     Genuine grace must come from God.  As the seminal fount and source of grace, God is its final and ultimate dispenser, the beginning and end of all favor that can possibly be.  In God, grace is the foundation of the cosmos, the essential and continual outpouring of divine blessing upon every part of the creation.
     Grace is the beginning of love for every human being.

     When, in the final moments of the highly regarded movie The King’s Speech, King George spoke to the nation as it prepared to enter the Western effort to defeat Nazi Germany, he, as he had done all his life, stuttered.  With the help of his gifted therapist and fresh resolution of character, however, he soon stopped his stammering and proceeded to deliver a speech that greatly encouraged and inspired the listening nation.  As the war progressed, the king continued to be the nation's beacon of hope, presenting and upholding the moral discipline and imperative that the people so desperately needed from their ruler.  In the off and one stuttering sovereign, the nation was able to lift its eyes beyond its immediate situation to the far larger framework of eternity, an eternity that superseded the theatres of the war, an eternity in which they found the vagaries and machinations of the present moment ultimate direction and meaning.
     As is eternity for us:  a measure of meaning.  We can understand little about this existence without it.  Indeed:  if there were no eternity, there would be no meaning.  Only as there is eternity, is there any purpose to the here and now.  The world could not be if there were not a world before it, a world and presence that have always been, a world and presence that will continue beyond its end.  Though for now eternity is a burden, for we in our finitude cannot see its fullness, when temporality ends, we will be burdened no more:  we will see in full.
     And our world really begins.

     The recent death of theologian Gabriel Vahanian, one of the prominent members of the so-called "Death of God" movement of the last century, prompts us to think about a point he made in his 1964 work, Wait Without Idols.  In this, Vahanian, presenting some of the points he made in his even earlier work The Death of God:  The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era, states, "God is not necessary but he is inevitable."
     If we can set aside the ontological argument for the necessity of God (briefly, if God is the greatest being (or as Alvin Plantinga puts it, "maximally" greatest being) that we can think about, then there can be nothing greater than God.  God is therefore necessary, and God must therefore exist) for a moment, we can learn a rich truth from Vahanian's observation.
    And that truth is this.  When we look at the broad span of human adventure and achievement, even if we do not believe that God is necessary, we must conclude that regardless of what we may believe personally, God is inevitable.  In every culture, in every time, people have demonstrated that, try as they might, they cannot live without the idea of God.  Though there have been (and still are) people who choose to not believe in God or conclude that the very idea of God has no content, most of us, though we may have vastly different opinions about who God is, even they must eventually admit that the notion of God becomes, after a fashion, inevitable.  Maybe we cannot live with it, but we cannot live without it, either.
     Consider these words from Bertrand Russell:

     "Even when one feels nearest to other people, something in one seems obstinately to belong to God, and
      to refuse to enter into any earthly communion--at least that is how I should express it if I thought there
     was a God.  It is odd, isn't it?  I care passionately for this world and many things and people in it, and
     yet . . . what is it all?  There must be something more important, one feels, though I don't believe there
     is."

     Atheist that he proclaimed himself to be, Lord Russell still could not divest himself of the need to confront the notion of God.  Regardless of what we believe, in the end, the idea of God, however we define it, becomes inevitable.  Whether we accept it as meaningful or not, we cannot think about life without it.  Inexorably and inevitably, and regardless of how we deal with it, we must, at some or many points in our life, face--and deal with--the idea of God.

     Every Halloween, when my wife and I prepare for the many people who will come to our door looking for treats, we post a note on the door, a note drawn from a verse in the first letter of the apostle John.  This verse reads, "God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all."
     Only a few words, but they contain a profound truth.  Regardless of how we may feel about a situation of misfortune or tragedy, be it one involving us directly or one that affects some--or many millions--of our fellow human beings, we remind ourselves that, despite it all, God remains light.  God is light that is always present, light that is always loving, light that is always moving, moving with meaning and purpose, even in the darkest of darknesses, even in the deepest of maws and abysses.
     For many of us who are contemplating tomorrow's anniversary of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, this is tough to swallow.  Where was God the morning of September 11?  Why didn't he stop the hijackers from flying those airplanes into the towers?  Why did he allow all those people to die?
     I can't answer this question.  No one can.  No one can tell us why, really and ultimately, these things happen.  And no one can tell us why God seems to stand by when they do, watching, maybe even laughing, unwilling to care, unwilling to intervene.  No one.  Our finitude simply will not allow it.
     What can we do?  Whether we are remembering the tragedy of September 11 and the thousands of lives it ended (and the many more thousands of lives it changed forever), or one that has ripped our own life completely asunder, we need to believe that regardless of what we may think, and irrespective of what we may see, God is--and always will be--light.  We need to believe that, somehow, some way, God, the God who once sent his son to die for us, will always be our light, our beacon, our measure and fountain of greatest hope, the light in which, as the psalmist puts it (Psalm 36), even in the blackest of nights, "we see light."
     Though these words represent but a very short (and perhaps, for some, inadequate) response to the perceived absence of God in the midst of tragedy, I trust they underscore, in part, an enduring point:  "God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all."

     A number of years ago, the Art Institute of Chicago presented an exhibit of work of Andy Warhol.  A leading avante-garde artist of the last century, Warhol is perhaps most famous for his unusual and creative depictions of Marilyn Monroe, Campbell soup cans, and other enduring symbols of American culture.  Warhol also gained recognition as an observer and critic of the culture whose symbols he portrayed, and attracted a substantial following of people (and hangers-on) who, uniformly, grieved over his untimely death in a New York hospital in 1987 at the age of 58.
     Outside Warhol's world, however, not everyone mourned.  Many never could understand the point that Warhol was making in his art, nor could many grasp the meaning of many of his often trenchant and sardonic observations about the human condition.  Many dismissed Warhol's work as silly and exploitative.
     However, the point remains:  whatever we may say about him or his work, we can nonetheless accept Warhol and his work for what, ultimately and seminally, they are:  reflections of the inexhaustible creativity of the infinite God in whose image we all are made.  An infinite God is, logically, infinitely creative, fully and absolutely capable of creating an infinite array of possibilities and actualities to populate the world he birthed.  Consider the uniqueness of every single human being.  No one is precisely the same, no one has precisely the same quantity of gifts or talents, no two people have the absolutely identical view of the world.  Each of us is a unique manifestation of an infinitely creative mind.
     Warhol's work demonstrates this aptly.  We may not like his art, we may not appreciate his aesthetic vision, we may not laud his lifestyle, but we cannot dismiss the fact of who he was:  a uniquely creative individual created by a uniquely creative God.
     As are we.  God's handiwork shines in every one of us and, together, we, gifted in nearly infinite ways, reflect the human fullness of the unerring reality of his sustaining creative presence.
     The value of art will always be debated, and this is good:  it is a necessary part of what it means to be human.  What is not debatable, however, is why we do art in the first place:  we are uniquely creative creatures made by an inexhaustibly creative God.

     In an article published this week, reporters for the New York Times presented a tragic account of how various groups of people, some that are renegade, some that are supposedly legitimate arms of a government are, in efforts to increase their revenue, systematically poaching elephants in many parts of central Africa.  Hundreds of elephants are being slaughtered, their mottled carcasses, rapidly drying in the sun, strewn across the savannah and jungle that mark the region.
     The most horrific part of this story is that in most instances the poachers are not killing the elephants for food; they are killing them solely for their tusks.  Because ivory tusks--but not elephant hide--fetch a high price in markets around the globe, members of these groups have a high incentive, after they kill the elephant, to take only the tusks.  Why lug the carcass out of the jungle?
     Whether or not we believe that an elephant, like any other animal, is a wondrous creation of God and therefore fully deserving, apart from any legitimate human need for it, of life and existence, we should certainly deplore this senseless slaughter.  Every animal we without good cause kill, depletes our experience of the totality of the created order.  We remove a vital link (think about chaos theory's butterfly effect) from the remarkable chain of interconnections that pervades and sustains the creation in which we live and breathe.  When we kill animals for no good reason, we undermine the vitality and integrity of the planet's harmony, a harmony from which we humans benefit as much as our fellow animals, a harmony which, rightly appraised, reflects, in so many astonishing ways, the existence of the purposeful love and guiding intelligence in which the earth had its origins.  We miss the full picture of what God would like us to see.
     Put another way, we miss the seminal truth that undergrids, inhabits, and perpetuates our lives.

     Ah, work!  Given a choice, many of us would not work, at least not at the job in which we are engaged currently.  On the other hand, given a choice to work at a job which we genuinely enjoy, we would probably not mind working.  If we like what we do, we will not mind getting up to do it, will not mind the time it may take away from other things we enjoy doing.
     In the end, however, most, if not all of us, would like it if we did not need to work, if we did not need to get up each day, if we did not need to insert ourselves into a tiresome world of competition, supervision, and frenzied activity simply to earn a living and pay our bills.  We might enjoy a life of continuous and unrequitted leisure.
     Or would we?  Unless we are properly retired (and retirement is not an altogether undesirable experience), we, the human species, are made to work.  From the very beginning, since the day that God set Adam in the garden and instructed him to work, to till and cultivate the land before him, people have worked.  To work is to be human, and to be human is to work.  Working enables us to discover our humanness most fully.  It challenges us, involves us, enables us, fills us.  Working gives us a more complete grasp of reality.
     So why do so many of us not like to work?  Unfortunately, once Adam and Eve plunged the world into a state of atropy and disrepair, the existential meaningfulness of everything their descendants (you and me) would do would not be as meaningful as it was originally intended to be.  Though we continue to work, we do not find it to be as meaningful as it could be.  It never completely satisfies.
     Should we weep and wail over this?  Perhaps, to a point.  But we should also remember that regardless of what we do with our time in the workplace, we do so in the umbra of the God who created the world in which we do it.  We need to realize that however we may feel about our jobs, by doing them we, believe it or not, become most fully human.  We come closer to becoming whom we are created to be:  people who are meaningfully involved and purposefully enmeshed in this remarkable world, people who are gainfully and mightily contributing to the common history of humanity, people who are eloquently and passionately communicating what they have been given to further the greater good of us all.
     Thanks for working.