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.

 

     What if you, like Berenger in Eugene Ionesco's Rhinoceros, found yourself the only human being left on earth?  Or what if you, like Denali, a character in a short story I wrote many years ago, awoke one morning to realize that he was, after a series of nuclear conflagrations had decimated the planet, were the last person standing?
     If you were the only person left on earth, would you still know who you were?  And after you, too, were gone, would anyone know it?
     Of course not.  No one would be there to know it, much less care about it.  The earth would sit, alone and unloved, a lifeless globe circling and rotating through an empty universe.
     And what would anything mean then?  Would anything have mattered at all?
     Not unless we had a reason to be here in the first place.
     And the only way that we would have had a reason to be here would be if our origins had been grounded in purpose.  And purpose is only possible with personality.
     And personality, yours, mine, and everyone else's, is only possible if there is a God.  Can chemicals really speak?
     Unless there is a God, it would not matter one whit whether you were the first person here or the last person left:  nothing would matter, anyway.  Yes, Nietzsche's "Last Man" observes in Beyond Good and Evil that he was indeed happy and free, but what, we may ask, in a world stripped of God and meaning, will he in fact ever be?
     Do you really think you're an accident?

     If, as the absurdists, be it in drama or literature, say, life is absurd, that is, there seems to be no point to a person being born only to die and be no more and to along the way beget other people who do the same--although everyone caught in this continuum looks for a point anyway--how do we know it?  If life really is absurd, and we along with it, any conclusion that we draw about either one is absurd, too, which then begs the question:  how can absurdity know that it is absurd--when everything else is absurd, too?
     Oddly enough, unless meaning exists, absurdity cannot be.

     Thirty-eight years ago, on roughly this day of the month (I do not know the exact day), I had an experience, call it an encounter, a profoundly remarkable encounter that changed me and my life forever.  It was an encounter that undergirds everything I believe and do, guides and explains every part of my life and that, among many other things, leads me to contemplate and write this blog.
     Let me explain.  Thirty-eight years ago, in the wilds of Canada's Jasper National Park, after many years of wandering and wondering about the meaning and purpose of existence, I found the answer I was looking for, the answer that addressed and resolved all my questions and inquiries, the answer that then, now, and, I expect, forever, explains and encapsulates everything I need and want to know.
     In a remarkable flash of a moment many decades ago, I came to realize that in the person of Jesus Christ I had found--and continue to find--the fullest and most absolutely complete picture of what life and existence mean, in this life and the next.
     I share an excerpt from my book, Imagining Eternity:  A Journey Towards Meaning, in which I recount this moment, a moment at which I arrived after a lengthy and tumultuous journey of angst, quest, and adventure, a journey of revolutionary fervor, mountain sojourn, and countercultural glory, a voyage of what seemed like several lifetimes rolled into one (for details, you'll have to read the book!).
     At the end, however, I found what most mattered:  lasting meaning.  Here's the excerpt:

     "I couldn’t believe it.  Even as I talked, I heard everything in me answering “Jesus!  Yes!  Do it, do it!”  All my hopes and dreams, all my longings for meaning and meaningfulness, transcendence and eternity, purpose and destiny had come down to one word:  Jesus.  I was amazed.
     "I couldn’t resist myself.
     "'Okay, Jesus,'" I heard myself saying, slowly and carefully, “'I’m here, alone and apart.  I’m at your mercy.  You’ve finally got me.'
     "'I’ll stop running from you, Jesus.  I’ll stop ignoring you.  I’ll give you a try.  I’ll say yes.  Come to me.  I want you to.  Come now.'
     "The world didn’t come to an end.  No fireworks, no sudden surge of warm air, no exploding stars.  My clothes didn’t burn up, my hair didn’t fall off.
     "But things were different.  I knew.  Even as I spoke, I felt a tremendous release, as if a dam had broken deep within me and a rich and warm peace, like a new born river in spring, was flooding deeply and gloriously through me, filling every part of me, all at once, with a calm and serenity exceeding all I had ever known.  It was a calm that surpassed that of my most wondrous mountain days and nights, an incredibly brilliant tranquility of mind and soul that seemed to fulfill and answer the deepest longings of my heart, the deepest yearnings of my being, totally and forever.  I felt as if striving and struggling for meaning were no longer necessary, that in some amazing and mysterious way the vision was here, all of it.  I had found it.  Nothing more was needed, nothing more was required, nothing more was desired.  Everything was here.
     "'I’m free,'” I’m whispered, “'I’m really free.  Meaning, sweet and wonderful meaning, is finally mine.'
     "Something had indeed happened.  Without a doubt.  And I knew that it was not something I had consciously tried to create.  It had come upon me like a flash flood.  Total surprise.
     "Jesus was real.
     "No one was awake when I walked down the hill and returned to camp.  I entered my tent, crawled into my sleeping bag, and fell asleep.
     "I awoke to a cool and clear morning.  The mountains across the river still looked like multicolored crystals, sparkling beneath the dawning light.  The river was still flowing by, moving smoothly and easily to the north.  The world was as it had always been.
     "Then I felt my heart breaking.  I couldn’t believe it.  I had an overwhelming urge to read the Bible."

(From Imagining Eternity:  A Journey Towards Meaning, copyright 2008, William E. Marsh)

     "When you're in a myth," the writer Franz Kafka once observed, "you believe it.   But if you step outside of it, you stop believing it."  So might say many people who do not believe in God about those who do.  As long as those who believe in God do not look past the curtain of their beliefs (think about Plato's allegory of the cave), these folks might suggest, the believers will continue in their, as the unbeliever would describe them, delusions.  But if these "deluded" believers could be convinced to step outside of their carefully circumscribed world, so the unbeliever might argue, perhaps they would see the folly of their beliefs and stop believing in the "myth" of God's existence.
     Perhaps.  But what if the myth is not a myth but reality?  And how would we, captives of our mortality, know it?
     Ironically, we will only know if we agree that there is something to be known.  And if the universe is a vast impersonal blast of dust and plasma--and we along with it--there is really nothing to know:  it's all an accident.
     And that's the biggest myth of all.

     "It is not forbidden for reason to speak of unity and even of unities,"observes Lev Shestov in his Athens and Jerusalem, "but it must renounce total unity--and other things besides. And what a sigh of relief men will breathe when they suddenly discover that the living God, the "true" God, in no way resembles Him whom reason has shown them until now!"
     Whatever else they may have done for him, Shestov's explorations of the limits of philosophical wholeness aptly enabled him to proffer this profound observation about the boundaries of reason.  Though we of finitude long for unity in our world, though we crave to see an inkling of comprehensive meaning in our experience, outside of looking beyond ourselves, we will likely never find it.  We live in a broken world, a world that, though pronounced good at the point of its creation (and remains so to this day), is a fractured world, a world in which those who live in it strive endlessly (for this is our bent) to identify some apex, some fulcrum upon which they may find how it--spiritually as well as materially--fits together.  And although we rightly employ our reason to pursue this goal, the nature of the world demands that we will never succeed fully, not least of all in regard to the inner workings of the divine.  "It" remains to be found.  As Shestov astutely notes, for all its marvel and wonder, reason will never show us the full reality of what really is, especially its relationship to God, for reason cannot fully grasp what it cannot fully see. 
     Only faith--faith as an informed, reasoned, and reasonable conclusion about the nature of immanent and transcendent reality, a reality inevitably undergirded by the presence of God and his communciation of himself in human form--has the eyes that really see.

     Can you love your enemy?  In October of 1950, the Communist government of China, fresh from its leader Mao Zedong’s successful takeover of the Chinese mainland, invaded the nation of Tibet.  Brutal and efficient, the Chinese army spared no one who stood in their way.  Thousands of people lost their lives, thousands of monasteries were destroyed:  an entire way of life vanished forever.  Among the many families affected was that of a certain Tibetan monk who was forced to watch, amidst the carnage and upheaval, Chinese soldiers torture his mother to death.
     For years afterward, this monk, despite his sacred oath and calling to love each and every one he came across, hated and despised the Chinese.  He loathed even the thought of them.  In 1971, twenty-one years after his mother died, however, he forced himself to eat at a Chinese restaurant.  As he did, he met someone whose father had died in the same way as his mother, and who had managed to put the past behind him.  It was then that he realized how wrong he had been.  No longer could he hate the Chinese.  That was over.  His former tormentors were, he now saw, just like he, people and human beings with whom he lived on planet earth.  He began to love his enemy.
     One of the most remarkable passages in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) is one in which Jesus, in describing for us his vision of a community whose people have committed themselves to live life differently—radically differently—than they had before, tells us that we are to love our enemies.  Hard as it is, difficult as it sounds, he says, we are to love those who hate and despise us.
     Why?  As Jesus well knew, inhumane and vicious though he or she may be, our enemy is a creation of a loving God.  Like us, our enemy is made in the image of the creator of the universe.  Our enemy is valuable, our enemy is important, our enemy has eternal value.  Our enemy has meaning.
     Does God like what our enemy does to us?  Of course not.  But he wants us to love our enemy anyway--because he made him (or her).
     On the first Christmas Eve of World War I, a number of German and British soldiers, after some preliminary bantering, emerged from their trenches to celebrate Christmas together.  For a few wonderful hours, these soldiers, long commanded to hate the other, recognized who, beyond all else, they really were:  fellow human beings living together on a planet blessed and sustained by God.  Although their countries had declared war on each other, these soldiers, for one remarkable night, did not.  They loved their enemy.
     Hating is easy, but loving is hard.  Hating, however, is for this life only; it’s as evanescent as a candy bar.  Love, on the other hand, lasts.  Love is for eternity.
     We'll never regret love.

 

     Rare is the person who loves, who really loves authority.  While most of us are willing to submit to authority, given the choice, most of us would also rather not have to deal with it.  Authority, be it from a teacher, parent, employer, country, or anyone else, by its very nature presents us with boundaries that contain us, bind us, and set fences around our ambitions, hopes, and dreams, be they for the moment, the day, year, or the entire scope of our lives.  It shapes our world in ways that we often do not invite or desire, ways that rework visions and intimations of what we might have wanted our life, or at least our immediate experience, to be.
     On the other hand, the fact and presence of authority indicates that we, as a community of people living together on this planet, believe that the world in which we move has order, that the creation in which we find ourselves has a structure, that it is the product of purpose.  It has meaningful content, content which we, by investing in authority, wish to preserve and sustain for our greater good.  OUr interest in authority underscores that we believe that beneath the rawness and wildness of the universe lies a greater purpose, a deeper intent, a richer vision, an order, human, divine, or both, into which we fit ourselves.
     Ironically, when we invoke authority, good or bad, we are telling ourselves that we and the world have meaning.

     About one year ago today, I traveled to California to meet my three siblings so that we could scatter the ashes of our mother on her favorite mountain.  Mom passed away in July of 2012.  After another year, we managed to sell her house and dispose of her remaining possessions.  All that remained was to scatter her ashes, which one of my sisters had been keeping since we got them from the mortuary.
     As anyone who has lost a parent knows, such a task is bittersweet at best.  Though we all missed Mom terribly (our dad had died many years before), we knew that she would want us to scatter her ashes on the top of Mt. Baden Powell, a 9,400 foot peak with which she had grown up.  It had been one of her favorite places, one to which she, while she was able, returned time and time again.
     As had we.  Now, however, the four of us were on the mountain alone, no Mom, no Dad, just us and our thoughts and memories about them.  They were gone.  It was a heartbreaking thought, really, to realize that the ones whose presence had graced our life the longest, the ones who, in the course of our  lives, had loved us most fully and dearly, were now irretrievably and forever gone.  It was a poignant commentary on the fleetinglessness of existence.
     Once we were on top, we opened the box.  The bag seemed so small, much too little to house one who had been one of the biggest parts of our lives.  Mom had always seemed larger than life, a person whose life had pervaded ours with more than we could usually grasp, a fount of love and care that never failed to move and brighten and enlighten us.  She was wonderful beyond words.
     A few days after I got home, I penned the following thoughts, which I sent to my siblings:

     "As I threw the last of my share of Mom’s ashes into the breeze slipping across the slopes of Baden Powell, I spied a crow, its black wings catching the wind, soaring effortlessly on the currents, hovering about the vastness of the valley below, the enormous expanse of sky arcing overhead.  I smiled.  Mom may be gone, but her spirit remains, soaring over the mountain she loved, the sky under which she had such joy, dancing about the memories she bequeathed, the memories we will take through to the last of our days. It was as if the final lines of Tolstoy’s Resurrection that, “Everything had been endowed with an entirely different meaning,” had come to life before me.  Even in the angst of the moment, everything before us, past, present, future, suddenly became a doorway, "showing" us, as Tolstoy put it, the way forward and home.
     "So it was as I read, on the airplane, in Mom’s book which Kath [one of my sisters] so kindly brought to me before we started our hike, some lines of the I Ching that Mom had highlighted in the initial chapter about Lao-Tse, “To merge silently, freed, into the stream of infinitude is the greatest good of life.”
     "Ah, yes, like the crow rising, coalescing with a blue eternity, so has what we left of Mom on the mountain risen as well, merging, ever so silently and without nary a whisper, with the earth from which she came, forever part of the infinitude which envelopes us all."

     So it is that I say today how thankful I am for my mother, and how doubly thankful I am to God for giving her to me.  She was the joy of a lifetime, a beautiful and enduring work of our creator, a God without end, a world without finish, the coming of eternity for us all, the Word made forever true.

     When, in the Franco Zeffirelli movie Jesus of Nazereth, Joseph (Jesus' father) dies, his now widowed wife Mary, who had been sitting by her husband's bedside as he passed away, turns her eyes upward and prays Deuteronomy 6:4.  "Hear O Israel," she says, "the Lord your God, He is one."
     These words are, for Mary, the supreme expression of her faith.  Did they bring Joseph back?  Of course not.  Will they make Mary's way any smoother?  Maybe, maybe not.  But that's not the point.  In saying these words, Mary is telling God that despite the immense loss she has just experienced, she will continue to believe in him.  Despite this onslaught of pain and sorrow, Mary will continue to believe that God is there, and that, regardless of what has happened, she will believe that he is full, perfect, and good.  While Mary knows full well that reciting these words will not change her situation, she knows just as well that in saying them she is proclaiming that over and above all earthly hardship and pain, there is a God who, somehow, some way, understands, a God who, somehow, some way, infuses her existence, the days and years of her earthly sojourn, however painful they are at this moment, with meaning and purpose, fills them with a meaning and purpose that exceeds all others, a meaning and purpose grounded in a love that exceeds all  form and imagination.
     Above all, Mary is telling God that she believes that she is living not in a cold and disconnected world, a world shorn of all heart and feeling, but in a world that overflows with life, justice, and compassion. Why?  Because, she believes, there is a God who, in an act of profound and enduring love, has created it.
     For Mary is acutely aware that her only other option is to forever wonder why she is even here, why she even lives, thrust (or, to use Martin Heidegger's term, "thrown") into a world whose meaning and purpose she will never, ever fathom to the day she herself dies (for without God it has ultimately none), a life lived, loved, and lost, never to be found and loved again.
     If God is not there, what is?

     “It is God who reduces the rulers of the earth, [it is God] who makes the judges of the earth meaningless; scarcely have they been planted, scarcely have they been sown, scarcely has their stock taken root in the earth; but he merely blows on them, and they wither, and the storm carries them away like stubble.”
     So does the prophet Isaiah say about the rulers of the earth.  Though they may appear mighty and unstoppable, invincible and unchallenged, the people who rule the earth are, in the end, nothing more than chaff in the wind, as evanescent as a desert wildflower, here today, gone tomorrow.
     I thought much about this passage as I watched the presidential debate last night.  Although both candidates are fine people and have much to commend them to us, in the end they are but two more potential rulers of the earth, people who, though they may be powerful, influential, and mighty in their time are, in truth, as I noted above, as evanescent as a desert wildflower.  Their day, their rule, their kingdom are but expressions of a finitude that will never find its fullness in this life.  Their "reign" can be nothing other than thoroughly temporary.
     To wit, though all of us have hopes for November 6th, we all do well to realize that in the big and most definitive picture, whatever happens that day is in the hands of God, for it is God, and God alone who decides the rulers and nations of the earth.
     As the psalmist put it (Psalm 24), "The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it."

     Are you listening?  Of course:  everyone listens.  But not everyone hears.  Consider Hayden's famous oratorio, "The Heavens Are Telling of the Glory of God".  Based on the words of Psalm 19, this stirring piece lauds the presence of God in all creation, the active and constant movement and speech of God throughout the cosmos.  As the psalm observes that "by day and night [God's] voice goes forth, resounding in the firmament of the sky," announcing, steadily and continually, that God is there, present and available, speaking to all who would hear.
     Or think about Proverbs 8, which opens by proclaiming that "wisdom calls," calling to all who would hear, calling to anyone who seeks insight into the mysteries of the creation, the seeker, the learner, the one who wants to know more about the universe in which she finds herself.  The truth, contained and embodied as it is in the creator God, is always calling us.
     In both cases, however, the writers note that this speech, this calling will only be heard by those who desire to hear it, by those who believe that there is something to be heard.  Whether God speaks through wisdom, the creation, or the person of Jesus, we will not hear him unless we choose to hear him.  God is always be talking to us, but unless we make an effort to listen to what he is saying, we will never hear him.
     How do we know God is speaking?  Ponder this first:  clearly, the universe speaks to us, speaks to us through its wonders, its tragedies, its life, its people.  It never stops talking, never ceases promulgating its majesty and grace.  If the universe is an accident, birthed from a vast nothingness, a pervasive vacuum of nonbeing (as many believe), however, its existence really has no point.  What can it then speak about?  If the universe cannot explain why it and no other universe exists, we well wonder what it can really say to us.  Sure, we can enjoy it, and sure, we can live and die in it, but if the universe has no purpose, then precisely what is it?  What is the real content of its speech?
     If the universe speaks, we must assume that it has a purpose.  And we can only assume that it has a purpose if it is not an accident, if it has been purposefully created and endowed with a meaning greater than itself.  This can only be true if the universe originated in something (someone) with purpose, value, and meaning, someone like, well, God.  Hence, if we believe we hear the universe (and everyone, in some way, does), what we are really hearing is God, speaking, as the psalm and proverb we mentioned above attest, to us, speaking to us of his presence and love for us.  We are hearing God speaking in what he has made.
     Can you hear God now?

     Because we are human, we listen.  We listen to ourselves, we listen to each other, we listen to our lives and, if we are so inclined, we listen to God. 
     Are you listening?    

     What's a word?  Actually, quite a bit.  For instance, the first verse of the gospel of John reads, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

     Although this is a mouthful of assertions, we can distill them into one essential point:  the Word, whatever it is (and we shall soon see exactly what it is), is God.

     As God, for what is this word responsible?  According to the next verses, this word is responsible for nothing less than the creation of the universe.  Through this word, the gospel observes, “All things came into being” and apart from word, “nothing came into being that has not come into being.”
     Another mouthful of assertions.  How can a word create the world?  Consider the creation account as it is presented in Genesis 1.  Here we see that God created all things by simply, as it were, speaking them into existence.  So, yes, we can say that word, that is, speech, created the world, that speech shaped and molded the world, that speech established the foundation and ground of the universe.

     And it did so, as the medieval Christian mystic Thomas á Kempis notes in his Meditations, with Prayers, on the Life and Loving-Kindness of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, “without any labour.”  A word, a word that is of speech from God, is the ultimate and unaided power of genesis and being.
     And if speech connotes meaning (how can speech occur without a purpose behind it?), we see clearly that by being the speech that "speaks" the universe into existence, a word affirms the meaningfulness of every created thing.  The speech of a word, the speech that birthed life and reality, weaves meaning into every corner of the cosmos.  Hence, we--and every other living thing--are meaningful.
     And so is the universe.
     All because of a word.