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.