It's almost a new year.  For many of us, this is a time for resolution, aspiration, goal, vision, and intention, a time that our hearts, if only for a moment, spur us to consider aiming for new heights of accomplishment, new levels of achievement, new pictures of who we think we ought to be.
     As it should.  We are creatures made to long to become something better than what we are at the moment, what we are today.  It is part of being human.  We all want improvement, we all want renewal.  Indeed, pity the person who supposes that she needs neither.
     Yet does not the writer of Ecclesiastes point out that, "There is nothing new under the sun"?  Absolutely.  But he also urges us to "do whatever our hand finds to do."  These are wise words.  Yes, life is a merry go round of routine and repetition (after all, 2014 is but one more year), but life is also a voyage of wonder.  It is a journey through our brokenness and sin, but it is also a journey through the inexhaustibility of God.  We and our planet may be changing, aging, even, unfortunately, deteriorating, but God remains new, unspeakably new for us and our world.  Always.  His infinite presence guarantees it.
      As the New Year dawns, walk in this newness.  Walk in the grace of the new, the freedom of God's more, his uncompromising abundance toward us.  Enjoy the magnificent promise he embodied, in his son Jesus, for our world.
      As tomorrow I will be traveling West again, this time for a backpacking expedition in the depths of the mountain winter, I will not be posting for a week or two or so.  I look forward to resuming our conversation at that time.
     Thanks for reading!

     Al Goldstein died last week.  Who was Al Goldstein?  Al Goldstein was the publisher of Screw, perhaps one of the most unabashedly pornographic magazines every produced in the United States.  As famous litigator Alan Dershowitz observed, "[Although] Hugh Hefner [publisher of Playboy] did it with taste, Goldstein's contribution was to be utterly tasteless."  Or as Goldstein himself put it, "We will be the Consumer Reports of sex."
     I've never read Screw, nor do I ever intend to.  So why do I mention Al Goldstein?  I mention him because as I read his obituary, I kept thinking  of how he spent his life, what he devoted his days to doing:  shocking and offending people with explicitly lurid and perverted depictions of sex.  Was this really the best use of his 77 years?  Not that sex isn't good or necessary for human perpetuation, enjoyment, and fulfillment, but surely it is not the most important thing about existence.
     "All is vanity," says the writer of Ecclesiastes, "all is vanity."  Indeed.  We all pursue useless and irremediable things; however, most of us are aware that they are in, the long run, exactly that:  not the most important things.  Maybe Al Goldstein knew he was pursuing vanity; maybe he never thought about it.  Maybe it was both.  Nonetheless, here he was, a highly creative mind, endowed with abundance and life, a person made in the image of God, devoted to something that will fade away the moment we cease breathing.
     Is this really why we are here?

     Christmas has come, and now it is gone.  People are taking their ornaments down, stores are offering their after Christmas sales, travelers are going home.  It's over for another year.
     Or is it?  If Christmas means anything, anything at all, it cannot possibly be contained in one day.  If God has really come, if God has really visited his creation, how can anything--and any of us--ever be the same?  History, and everything in it, including you and I, has irrecoverably changed.
     Enjoy the moment, enjoy the day.  Enjoy existence.  Enjoy them, rejoicing, fully aware that they now mean more than you can possibly imagine.  The light of eternity, the word of the ages, the spoken beginning of space and time has entered our world.
     God has come.

     "Joy to the world," the famous hymn goes, "the Lord is come."  And so he has.  And the joy he has brought is a joy that is more than a joy of human delight, more than a joy of material satisfaction or vocational achievement.  It is a joy that exceeds all others, a joy that is the ground of what makes joy possible, a joy that defines and enables and expresses what makes life meaningful and real.  It is the joy of life itself:  the joy of God.
     As you move about this morning, think about joy.  Think about God being joyful, about God delighting, delighting in you, me, and everything we are.  Think about God's happiness, his kindness, his grace:  the joy that changed the world.  Think about the joy of finding the greatest joy of all.
     God is here, God is there, God is among us, now and forever.  The Lord is come.

     Merry Christmas!

     After months of, for the children among us, waiting, and for the parents and other adults among us, pondering, shopping, scurrying, and worrying, the big night is upon us:  Christmas Eve.  For some, it will be just another night; for others, a time of deep familial connections; for still others, a night of profound religiosity; and for some, perhaps a combination of the two or three.  Whatever the case may be, Christmas Eve is a night that resonates in our inner and cultural imaginations.  It's a night apart.
     Why?  Consider the words of the old hymn that, "The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee [Jesus] tonight."  We all have hopes, we all have fears.  Some delight us, some overwhelm us.  Some amaze us.  Christmas Eve remembers and commemorates a night in which God, the loving and transcendent God, in the person of Jesus, enveloped, reconciled, conquered, and resolved them.  Whatever we hope for, and whatever we fear, in Jesus we find their meaning, trajectory, and resolution.  There is nothing more we need.
     Of course, we will continue to nurture hopes, and we will continue to experience fears.  We're still human.  But Christmas Eve tells us that we need wait no longer to know what life's hopes and fears, with all their challenges, frustrations, wonders, and curiosities, ultimately mean.
     God has come.

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

     There is an old Swedish fable that tells the story of a family that has been told to expect, at a certain hour, the arrival of someone whose presence will change their lives forever.  As the narrative moves along, the family waits and waits, glancing often at the clock, wondering if this person will really come.
     Then the hour comes.  But the person does not appear.  After thinking about this for a few moments, the father remarks, "The hour has come, but not the man."
     So is history, humanity's as well as our own.  How many times has an opportune moment arrived in the global narrative, a moment, a kairos, that could change life forever, and no one is there to seize it?  Oddly, we will never know.  We will never know because if we did, we would have stepped into it ourselves.  We rarely discern a transforming kairos until after it has happened.  All we do is try to keep moving forward.
     For instance, did Albert Einstein know that when he published his Theory of Relativity he was inaugurating a seminal moment in science?  Did Leonardo da Vinci know that when he developed the theory of perspective in art he was changing forever how we do painting?  Did Abraham know when he ventured forth from Haran into Canaan that he was unleashing a torrent of political machinations that endures to this day?  Did Buddha know that his ideas would transform thinking across enormous stretches of Asia?  Did Mary Woolstonecraft (mother of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein) know that her writings on female freedom would help birth the feminist movement of the nineteenth century?
     In every instance, it is unlikely.  In most cases, it is the "man" who appeared first--and the hour came.  Except once.  "In the fullness of time," Paul writes in Galatians, "God brought forth his Son, born of a virgin . . . "  In Jesus, time and the "man" came together, came together in a singularly unique way:  the "man" (Jesus) was the time.  Jesus was the kairos.  The hour, the time, had come, yes, but the only because the "man" had created it.
     Advent is a time unlike any other, for it creates, in history and time, eternality and destiny, eternality and destiny for you, eternality and destiny for me, embodied in the "man" whose "hour" is overwhelmingly his own.

     Can a story begin in the middle?  The New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield, who died in 1923 at the age of 31, was known for writing stories that did not seem to have a beginning.  They seemed to end before they began.  Their first words conveyed a narrative well underway, as if the reader was being let in on it after the fact, as if the reader needed to acquaint herself, on her own, with the details of how the plot arrived at this point.  The reader was suspended, caught between a beginning that never began and an end that did not seem to have a reason to be so.
     Emotionally brazen and intellectually bold, Mansfield startled many writers of her day with her innovative approach to story.  On the other hand, she may well have captured, more than her compatriots, how life really is.  Although our lives are stories in and of themselves, we who live them do not always know how the plot came to be what it is.  We plan, we act, we recall, we remember, but we do not always know how it all comes about.  More often than not, the context in which we live our days determines what happens, so that we often feel as if we have either stepped into a maelstrom of unexpected circumstances or various levels of bliss that we cannot always explain, a serendipity whose origins elude us.  Forward we travel, looking, thinking, but not always knowing where it is all going or what it all means.
     D. H. Lawrence, one of Mansfield's colleagues and best known for his risqué novel Women in Love, said after she died--far too young (she contracted tuberculosis)--that the dead still speak.  In a way, Lawrence was right.  They speak because although they are gone materially, their stories, truncated and confused and glorious though they may be, continue to flow, ebbing into a vast and seemingly endless sea of human adventure and endeavor, a sea whose beginning, middle, and end only have meaning because millennia ago a greater purpose brought them into being.
     Otherwise, middle, beginning, or end do not matter, do not matter at all, for no one, captives of finitude they be, knows how to know and understand what they are.

     Darkness is of course a necessary and natural part of living on this world.  Some of our darkness is natural, that is, the nighttime or the shorter days of winter.  Some is unnatural, for instance, the pains and sorrows of our lives or the various geological and meteorological disasters that afflict the human species.  Either way, we find it--or it finds us.
     In his The End of Night, author Paul Bogard describes his quest for "natural" darkness, a darkness that is away and apart from any semblance of artificial light.  He writes that in this era of ubiquitous and programmable light, such darkness is exceedingly difficult to find.  Most of us, I think, would agree.  We are overwhelmed with light.
     It's odd, isn't it?  We like the ease of light, artificial or not, but in our Western surplus of illumination we may be missing what is more fundamental to our experience.  If there were no darkness, what would it mean to have light?
     "God is light," the apostle John (1 John 1:5) writes, and in him "there is no darkness at all."  Perhaps we should not actively seek intellectual or emotional darkness, but perhaps we should also understand that without such darkness we would not know what light can and could be.  As the first three verses of Genesis note, in the beginning "darkness" was on the face of the deep, the earth--until (and only until) God "spoke" light.
     There's no darkness without light.

     At the suggestion of one of the moderators of the atheist discussion which, as you may recall, I attend once a month, I recently finished reading a book titled A Manual for Creating Atheists.  It's written by Peter Boghossian a professor of philosophy at Portland State University in Oregon.  Its objective is a rather unusual one.  In contrast to the countless books which Christians write offering advice and encouragement to those who wish to tell others about Jesus, A Manual aims to do the opposite.  It intends to provide helps to unbelievers to talk people of faith out of their faith.  We must eliminate, Boghossian says, the "virus" of faith.
     What thing that struck me about the book was a chapter in which the author writes very honestly about the lack of comfort, as he sees it, that unbelief provides in the face of death.  Although he asserts that ending one's faith opens one to what he calls the "wonder" of existence, what he terms, "the disposition of being comfortable with not knowing, uncertainty, a skeptical and scientific-minded attitude, and the genuine desire to know what's true," he acknowledges that such wonder often isn't enough when a person stands at the door of death.  Faith's greatest appeal, he says, may be "solace--comfort and peace of mind in impossibly difficult times," for as he puts it, "I don't know" what comfort "reality-based reasoning" offers to the ones on the brink of extinction.
     Indeed.  Those who insist that they live by "reality-based reasoning" and this only will indeed face the end of their existence looking at a very dark abyss, an unyielding maw of utter and permanent extinction.  Life may have been thoroughly rational, life may have been fun, but it has failed to answer for the one who has lived it why it even existed.  Why has anyone ever lived and why does anyone who has ever lived one day die?
     Is faith entirely delusional, a hollow but fully felt comfort?  Is the longing for immortality a psychological myth, a mere offshoot of finitude?  Or do we experience and pursue such things because there really is something else besides this material reality, because there really is something more than us in this universe?
     Put another way, do we want to critically think about our lives without really knowing what they mean, or do we want to critically think about our lives knowing that they do indeed have meaning, a meaning that, if it is to be viable, extends beyond the grave?

     Last summer, my son and I backpacked through a portion of the Sierra Nevada, the massive mountain range that cuts through heart of California south of San Francisco.  The morning of the first full day of our trip, we rose extra early to prepare for what we expected to be a lengthy hike to the base of a pass which we intended to surmount the following day.  When we got out of our tent, the sun had not yet risen over the peaks below which we were camped.  The air was still cold, the lake basin by which we had pitched our tent still shrouded in shadow.  So we waited.
     For what did we wait?  We waited for the sunrise, the sun, that brilliant and life giving orb of light to rise over the peaks and bathe our camp in warmth and radiance.  As we waited, we packed up our camp, prepared breakfast, and got ready to go.
      Then it came.  Exploding atop the ridge, the sun burst, popping with rays of brilliance and wonder, its multiple filaments of splendor spreading over and across the waiting land.  We rejoiced:  the light had come.
     "For the people who walk in darkness," wrote the prophet Isaiah, "will see a great light (Isaiah 9:1)."  Isaiah speaks of Messiah, the one who would come to illuminate an Israel darkened by disappointment, abandonment, and sin.  He speaks of the Christ who would enlighten and save all those who longed for him.  He speaks of the light that would come.
     On the third Sunday of Advent, we remember this fact of Messiah's light, how, like the sun exploding over a frigid mountain ridge, Messiah--Jesus--has brought us light, the light of enlightenment, the light of hope and meaning that shines through the cold of an often Munchian (The Scream:  check my blog on Friday) existence.  It is the light of purpose, the light of meaning, the light that, if we embrace it, embrace it as fervently as we do the warmth of the sunrises, mountain or not, of our lives, will change our lives forever.
     Once we touch this light, we'll never be the same.

     As I continue to contemplate the many layers of Advent and the message it brings to the world, I have thought more than once about Edward Munch's The Scream.  Have you seen it?  Although I've been aware of this frightening piece of art for many years, I found myself thinking about it, as I've pondered Advent, in some new ways.
     

     A piece that has puzzled and cajoled people for decades, The Scream seems to exemplify the alienation that so often characterizes the inhabitants of the West.  Overwhelmed by a world that offers them everything but meaning, countless people in the developing world cry out for help, some help in making sense of what seems to be a pointless reality.  Affluence reigns, yes, but without any foundation other than the assumption that life is worth it, and this only because those who decide this have nowhere else to go.  If the world is a closed system and we are therefore born only to die, then life, however wonderful it may be, ends before it begins.  So we scream:  why must this be?
     Advent, in contrast, says that the world is far from closed.  It is in fact entirely transparent and open, open and streaming into a web of reality vastly larger than we can imagine, a web grounded in a transcendence that has spoken, a transcendence that has made itself known.  Life is more than itself.  And we are more than who we are.  Love is present, ascendant and true.
     So we scream not why must this be, but rather how can this--such wonder--be?

     "True storytellers do not know their own story," observes author James Carse in his Finite and Infinite Games, a curious and likeable meditation about, broadly speaking, how we see the world.  Otherwise, he opines, our lives cease to be tales and are reduced to mere explanations.
     Carse's observation reminds me of a line from the philosopher Richard Rorty, who died in 2005, that, "Explanation, not meaning is what is important."  Carse and Rorty could not be further apart.  As Rorty sees it, it is foolish to seek meaning in our lives; far more critical is that we learn how to live, to cope with this present reality.  Carse would say that although learning how to live is important, if that is all we do, we miss the most crucial point of existence:  the mystery of meaning that is always waiting for us to unfold as we wind our way through the pathways of our lives.  As he sees it, if we can explain all of our lives, we have not really lived; all we have done is exist.  The fullest life is the life whose end and meaning lie ever before the one who lives it, the life whose purpose is the reason we live it, the life whose story we will never know fully until it ends--and maybe not even then.
     Our lives are stories that we do not fully know, but they are stories that we tell.  We live best when we recognize that we are narratives, critically important narratives, but narratives all the same, working themselves out in an infinite story (metanarrative) of experience before an infinite God.  Our time is more than a measure of passage; it is a story with form, import, and purpose.  We mean far more than the dust to which we will one day go.

     Do machines make us who we are?  Judging from the manner in which we in the West are, in a manner of speaking, captives of the technology on which we depend, we might very well draw this conclusion.  We live with the world, we live with each other, we live with ourselves, but we live according to our machines.  Most of us love our machines, most of us appreciate our machines.  Even those of us who do not use machines, or at least try to minimize the use of them, still depend on products that, more often than not, are made by machines.
     Although I dearly wish for those in the developing world to enjoy the benefits of machines sooner rather than later, I also wish for them to do so aware of the ethos, the ethos that has ensnared the West in many debilitating conundrums of mind and heart, with which they come.  I encourage them, as well as us in the West, to ground themselves in things a machine cannot make so that they can, as I would wish for the West to do as well, continue to make them themselves, to keep them in their proper place, material products of a material reality.  There is a bigger picture.  If we sever our connection to the transcendent and immaterial, all we have left is our machines and ourselves, the living and nonliving side by side, unmediated, unconsidered, unknown.
     Machines are only as beneficial to the extent that the people who make them do so aware of and submitted to a presence that reminds them that regardless of what they
may think, they are not their own.

     Should we eat babies?  Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels, the delightful satirical tale of a man who travels to a land of very tiny people, a land of giants, and other places, may have thought so.  In his "A Modest Proposal," Swifts observed that perhaps the key to feeding the impoverished Irish of his day was to, as he saw it, eat their babies and subsequently sell their carcasses.
     Most of us would repel from such a suggestion today.  Why?  We believe it does not fit what we consider to be moral, that to kill and/or eat babies is always and everywhere wrong.  Besides, from a more practical standpoint, if the Irish were to kill their babies, there would soon be no one left to perpetuate the Irish people.
     But isn't that often how people tend to do morality?  We frequently made our moral choices on the basis of practicality, that is, what seems fair and what seems to work best at the time.  Although this method often works, it can lead to difficulties:  we are only moral to the extent that our cultural purview allows us to be.  Even if we agree that some things are always and everywhere immoral, morality inevitably becomes relativistic.  We are captives of ourselves.
     That's why the human race needs revelation.  As the writer of Proverbs 29:18 remarks, "Without vision, the people perish."  In other words, unless a larger, synoptic, and transcendent moral presence exists, we will always be little moral creatures pursuing our little moral dreams without never really knowing why we exercise morality in the first place.  We're acting in a dream, our vision large and real but never large--and real--enough.
     Otherwise, we may as well eat babies.

      "For the grace of God has appeared," writes the apostle Paul in the third chapter of his letter to Titus, "bringing salvation to all people" (Titus 2:11).  What is Paul saying?  Simply, that as we remember the second Sunday of Advent, we can come to understand more fully that in Jesus, God in the flesh (as we observed last week (John 1:14)), we see, in flesh and blood, concrete and visible expression of God's grace, physical manifestation and display of his truest posture toward us.  In Jesus we see the fullest possible picture of God's benevolence, his intentions to grant us favor and compassion.  Jesus' appearance tells us that, above all, God is gracious and loves us, and he provides us with a way to know him, fully and intimately.  Jesus is the grace of God.
      We grant each other grace every day, as we should.  Yet it is God's grace that enables us to see and do much more, to see and understand that amidst the frequent senselessness of reality and confusing vagaries of the world in which we live, there is hope, a hope that reality is more than what we see--but which frames and orders what we do.  Jesus' appearance tells us that whatever else we may think about God, what we ought to think most about him is this:  God is loving, God is gracious, and God is for us, for us today, for us tomorrow, for us forever.  All we need do is accept his invitation, his invitation of his son Jesus, to us.  God's extended the invitation; now he's waiting for us to reply.
     What else do we really need to do?

     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.
      As we continue to move towards Christmas, pondering, I hope, the remarkable fact (and paradox) of God becoming a human being, I encourage you to rejoice, not just because Christmas (or, if you prefer, the holidays) is near, but because we are indeed here.  Existence for us is a daily reality, one whose end we will never know, fully, regardless of how much we try to predict or dictate it, a beautiful and wonderful experience which we will only get to do once.  This life, this time, is the only existence we will ever have.
     Or is it?  If, as Genesis reminds us, God "created the heavens and earth," and if, as the gospels remind us, who God is and what he does are grounded in eternality, perhaps what we see now is merely a skein over what is ultimately real, and that temporality is therefore just that, temporary.  Our earthly existence is here, yes, but what is here now is far from being what is completely "here."
     Thankfulness says there's always more.  We cannot escape the teleological.

     There is a balance, the late Susan Sontag, the famous cultural critic, often said, between what is moral and what is aesthetic.  What does this mean?
     We usually see what is moral as that which is more right than wrong.  Morality is the examination of right and wrong and what actions constitute each one.  The aesthetic, on the other hand, has more to do with sensibility and feeling, what is more emotionally or artistically pleasing.  Morality is usually a function of the intellect; the aesthetic usually one of the feelings.  Neither, however, is solely its principal constituent.
     That's Sontag's point.  We cannot be moral unless we are aesthetic, for what is right and wrong is more than an intellectual exercise; it is a habit of the heart.  Not only must we believe in our mind that something is more right than wrong, we must also believe it in our heart.  Yet we cannot be aesthetic without being moral; otherwise, art and all of its expressions have no real meaning.
     Life is an aesthetic experience, full of feeling, rapture, and wonder.  Yet it is a highly moral enterprise, too, grounded in ideas of right and wrong, framed in a ethical posture.  Real life must be moral--and ground itself in the fact of a moral structure--if it is to have foundation for its aesthetic expression.
     So did the Jonathan Edwards, the great Puritan preacher, observe that in the end, it is our affections, the aesthetic of our fervor and passion for morality, truth, and God, that make life fully genuine and lasting.

     "The gospels," observes one of the characters in Carlene Bauer's Frances and Bernard, represent "God's faith in our imagination."  If I understand this remark correctly, I note that it says much about God's belief in our human capacities.  As you probably know, the gospels contain a number of first hand and eyewitness accounts of Jesus' short public life on this planet.  These accounts include birth and death and resurrection narratives, various signs and miracles, many sermons and teaching vignettes, and ordinary conversations.  As we read them, we are constantly being invited to ask ourselves one fundamental question:  who is this man Jesus?  In recounting these episodes and pictures of Jesus' life, the gospel writers are asking readers to look not just at the fact of what Jesus said and did, but at their significance and import as well.  Imagine, we are asked, if these stories are true?  Imagine, we are urged, if everything that Jesus said really is the truth, and that everything he did really did happen?  What we would then do?
     We have two choices.  We can reject, categorically, any thought that Jesus' words and deeds are in any way connected to a larger reality or purpose, and come away thinking that he was an extraordinary human being, but nothing more.  He was simply a person who had some good thoughts and stories.  Or we can stretch ourselves; we can reach outside the boundaries of our everyday form and imagination and ask, if Jesus is really who he said he was (that is, God), what does this mean?  What does this mean for how we see ourselves and our world?  What does it mean when everything we think we could have imagined is confronted by something we could never imagine we could have imagined?

     Have you been alone?  Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, is the story of a woman scientist who, due to an accident high above the Earth, finds herself adrift in space, alone, apart, utterly trapped in a vast and unyielding nothingness.  There is no air, no sound, no other human being.  No one knows where she is, no one can tell her where she is, no one can tell her where to go.  She is a person without a place, even, in a way, a person without a face.
     When, in 1972, I was backpacking through Alaska's Brooks Range, the dense and forbidding range of mountains that sweeps majestically across the northern stretches of the state, I was similarly alone.  Dropped off by helicopter by a high mountain lake, hundreds of miles from road, town, radio, and human being, I could have been on another planet.  No one knew where I was, and no one, except my parents, who were thousands of miles away in Southern California, cared.  However, I was still on planet Earth.  I was still in an environment with which I was familiar.  I was still connected to a home.
     Not so in space.  There is no home to be found.  And we wonder:  what is the real nature of home?  Consider, if you will for a moment, that enigmatic thing we call the love of God.  Admitting to the love of God is to bend the apparent and seen.  It is to say that something of profound value and joy lies in the midst of an empty universe, that the universe's darkness is far less powerful than its light.
     Gravity, or the lack of it therefore remains, yes, but the space in which it is acting is not wholly empty.  It's filled with a larger truth:  we 're always home.
     And reality becomes a real friend.

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

      As Thanksgiving ends and most of us, at least in the West, proceed, ready or not, into the Christmas season (although many retailers, regrettably, opened for shopping on Thanksgiving Day), we do well to remember the essence of the moment before us.  It is not about shopping, it's not about supplying our loved ones with as many material goods as we can afford, it's not about draining out bank accounts to throw a lavish party, it's not about diverting every thought into an experience that in most households lasts barely an hour, if that, but rather it is to remember that, as Jesus put it in Mark 1:15, "The kingdom of God is at hand."
     Though we may cringe at the idea of a kingdom in the largely democratic West, we miss the point if we summarily dismiss Jesus' words.  He is not talking about a kingdom in the sense of knights and castles and hegemony but rather a kingdom of the heart, a kingdom that calls us to love, to care, to move ourselves toward inner transformation of mind, body, and soul, and be better citizens of the planet and the greater realities in which it sits.  Jesus' kingdom is not one of arrogance and might, not a kingdom of dogma and exclusivity, but a kingdom of welcome and grace, a kingdom of community, a kingdom of community rooted in a profound truth:  God, the ultimate and overwhelmingly real beginning and repository of existential meaning, the great and longed for Emmanuel, the Christ, is with us, with us now, tomorrow, next year, and forevermore.

      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 grace and ubiquity of God.

     A couple of weeks ago, the morning of November 17, a young man named Nicholas Mevoli attempted to break the existing record for free diving, that is, diving as far down as one could get without using any artificial aids or additional oxygen.
     The record was 70 meters; Mevoli was aiming for 72.  When he reached 69 meters, however, for reasons no one knows, he paused, seemed to hesitate, then continued down.  He made his way back to the surface safely.  However, once he removed his goggles, he began to cough up blood.  He died an hour and a half later.  It's a tragic story.
     What struck me most about this story was the achingly painful fact of a life lost so young for a relatively arcane reason, a life that was once infused with the most fervent of dreams, the most compelling of drives, now a life over, forever.  Many young lives are of course lost every moment of every day, most of them, unfortunately, from causes that are preventable, such as hunger, disease, and accidents.  Yet this lost life seems, at least to me, to take on a hue and shade of its own, a life, and a short one at that, spent pursuing a goal of which very few people in the world are aware, a life devoted to vision of which only a handful of humanity even cares about.  And now it's over.
     This is not to say that Mevoli's life was not important or valuable.  If God exists, it surely was.  We mourn his passing.  It is to say, however, that as the writer of Ecclesiastes 11 reminds us, seek adventure, seek challenge; yet remember this:  life is ultimately out of our hands.  We walk in a shadow we do not make.
     So I conclude:  thanks be to God for existential purpose--and for presenting himself in his son Jesus for us to see it.

     Reviewing Jeff Chu's recently published and favorably received Does Jesus Really Love Me?  A Gay Christian's Pilgrimage in Search of God in America, Lauren Sandler, a confirmed (and straight) atheist, writes, "[this book] lays bare a vast national offense:  valuing identity over experience, judgment over love."
     Ms. Sandler's first comment makes an intriguing point.  Do we construct our sense of self on the basis of an unchanging dynamic of person, or on the basis of our experience?  Or put another way, using more technical language, do we construct ourselves ontologically or existentially?
     In truth, it is both.  We are born with a certain set of genes and its attendant characteristics, but we become ourselves as what we inherit responds to what we experience.  We cannot completely escape the tendencies and mannerisms to which our genes incline us, but we also cannot totally evade our own capacities to shape or direct such things through the effects of what we encounter in our life experience.
     If I am understanding Ms. Sandler correctly, it is our experience that is more formative and significant in determining who we are.  She may well be right, in part; the "nature vs. nurture" argument will never be resolved fully.  What we can say, however, is that whether identity or experience are prime, our call is to love each person identity, experience, and all, unconditionally.  In the end, each person is a human being, made in God's image and imbued with nearly infinite worth and value.  There is purpose in why each person is here.

     Have you seen Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors?  Made in the Eighties, it's portrays a opthamologist who, late in his career, has an affair with another woman and, one day, this woman threatens to tell his wife.
     Alarmed beyond measure, the doctor becomes so desperate that he summons his brother, a man who has spent his life on the other side of the law, for advice.  When his brother mentions that this woman "can be gotten rid of," the doctor is aghast.  "How could we?"  he asks.
     A few nights later, however, he relents and tells his brother to go ahead with it.  I won't tell you how the story works out, but I share this much to make a few points about the way the doctor saw the world.  As he wrestles with his dilemma, he asks a rabbi (he is Jewish) friend of his for advice.
     You and I see the universe in very different ways, the rabbi replies.  You see it as cold, heartless, and indifferent, and I see it as pervaded with a moral structure, an unbending moral code.  Indeed, he adds, "I couldn't go on if I didn't believe that at the heart of the universe there is love and forgiveness."
     If you ever watch the movie, however, you will see how the doctor's worldview breaks down, badly.  On the one hand, he insists that the universe is without heart or meaning; but on the other hand, he insists with equal fervor that, at least initially, killing his mistress is absolutely wrong.  But in a meaningless world, how can he really make a moral judgment?  It's impossible.
     As the rabbi notes, morality can only exist if there is moral structure.  And there can only be moral structure if we have meaning.  For if we or the world have no reason to be here, nothing else does, either.

     Earlier this year, I commented on a movie, God on Trial, based on a book by Elie Wiesel.  Today, I return to it, as a recent conversation I had about it brought one more thought to mind.  At one point in the movie, one of the Jewish inmates at Auschwitz makes the point that God is not good, but merely "on our side."  In other words, the only reason a Jew might say that God is good is because he has made them his covenant people and is therefore "for" them.  If God wasn't on their side, then perhaps he would not be good.
     The man makes a good point.  Is God not therefore on the side of those who do not believe in him?  Are those who do not believe in him simply doomed to lives of misery and pain?  If this is the case, and if God supposedly loves all of his creation, is he really in fact good after all?
     Let's look at this from another angle.  If there is no God, if there is really just you and me in a vast and insouciant universe, where do we get off asserting that anything is good or, for that matter, bad?  How can we know?  In an accidental and indifferent universe, we have no way to determine such things.  We can assert certain things are good, but we do so in a moral vacuum:  there's no reason why we cannot just as easily say that these things are bad.
     Whether God is good, however, does not matter nearly as much as whether he is there.  Indeed, if we experience any sort of goodness at all, we cannot say that God, if he indeed exists, is altogether bad.  But if God is not there, we cannot explain why we experience good or bad other than to say that they just happen and therefore mean nothing.  It's an exercise in epistemological futility.
     Better--and more logical, as we are reasoning beings--to say that God is there and is good than to say that he is not and not even know what good is.

     Does challenging one's faith undermine it?  Some would say so, others would say not.  During the atheist discussion group which I attend once a month, I made the point that I would rather see a person of faith challenged on what she believes, to be forced to work through why she believes what she believes, rather than live her life without really thinking about why she has faith.  That is one reason why, I added, I attend the group, to dialogue with and explore the other side.  We can often learn significant things from views with which we do not agree.
     "But doesn't this tend to subvert the cause of faith?" one person asked me.  To this, I said that if a person is reasonably grounded in the fundamentals of her faith, and has (or has had) meaningful objective as well as subjective experiences and evidences of her faith, she can only benefit from such stretching.  Whenever we are living in a box, be it one of faith or unbelief, we cannot see what's outside of it.  We do not know what else there is to know.  Better that we be exposed to what is beyond or outside of what we believe than to live our lives ignorant of what our faith really means.  If all we have is our faith in a world that only our faith has created, that is really all we will ever have, that is, faith that has no genuine credibility or foundation or staying power.
     Besides, if indeed God is ultimate truth, he ought to be able to withstand any challenge raised against him.  To paraphrase Augustine's famous observation that, "I believe that I may understand," I suggest, "Believe, but explore; explore, but believe."  A real faith need not fear the world, for the world is in truth the work of God.
     So, I concluded, if my faith cannot successfully surmount questions about its veracity, then it is not a faith worth having and, if this is the case, real truth remains to be found.  And truth, after all, in its purest form, is the most important thing.

     Have you heard of Kilian Jonet Burgada?  A native of Spain, Kilian is a remarkable ski mountaineer and long distance trail runner who, for the last couple of years, has been developing an enviable reputation for his ability to run, seemingly without any effort, mile upon mile through some of the most rugged terrain on the planet.  Those who compete with him find themselves awestruck at his capacity to keep going, hour after hour after hour, as they race along rock strewn trails at elevations routinely exceeding 10,000 feet.  Mountains are no obstacle for Kilian; in fact, he seems to do better on hills and dales than at sea level.
     It may come as no surprise that Kilian's VO2 max is an astounding 92, one of the highest on record.  His lungs have an extraordinary ability to utilize the oxygen they take in.  He rarely seems to even break a sweat.  He can probably outlast a wolf as it lops, day after day, through the mountain high country.
     Why am I talking about Kilian?  Simply to note that despite our spiritual brokenness and existential uncertainty, we humans are capable of extraordinary physical achievements.  Although we will never be as fast as a big cat or strong as a gorilla, we can do remarkable things with our bodies.  Moreover, unlike the other animals, we can also engage in the things of the spirit.  We are more than our bodies, yet we are more than our spirits.  We are both.
     And this, I suppose, is the ultimate wonder, that a being so physical can be so spiritual, that in the human being what we see is so inextricably wedded to and aligned with what we do not.  We, and the universe are more wonderful than what we can imagine, occupying reality physically even while we, through our spirits, wrestle with what is beyond it.

     “I think the image that we have put forward in a lot of ways has been a scary, mean, we want to tear down the walls, we want to do destructive things kind of image is what a lot of people have of us,” he said.  “I’m really excited to be able to come together and show that it’s not about destruction.  It’s about making things and making things better.”
     So said a "preacher" at a so-called "atheist" church in Los Angeles recently (more on this innovation later).  Many years ago, Joseph Schumpeter proposed the idea of "creative destruction," that sometimes we need to destroy, to destroy well, to create something better.  It’s not a new idea, really:  ask a farmer.  When a seed is planted, it is dead, but set into good soil, it grows into a beautiful plant or tree.  In many ways, death and destruction lie at the heart of reality.
     And that’s the paradox of existence.  We long for life, yet we know, in our deepest hearts, that sometimes life has to end before it can begin, that sometimes what is now and present must fade into what is past in order for time to move forward.  Death is painful, but death births as well.  Destruction undermines and eliminates, but it also enables emergence.
     So the larger question is this:  why would God create a world like this?  Why would a God of life put death and dying at the center of what will come?  If we read Genesis 1:2 closely, however, we see that in the beginning, there was chaos and darkness, and then, verse three tells us, there was light.
     If everything was always settled and perfect, the world, at least the world as we know it, might not really be.  It's a cause and effect universe; in order for something to happen, something else must happen first.  A closed space can only hold one thing at a time.  Only in eternity, when all accounts are settled and all striving ceases, will death end.  For it is only then that birth will no longer be required:  everything will be alive, always, together, without end.
     As the adage goes, all truth is God's truth.  My thanks to my atheist friends!

     Pray for the people of the Philippines.  Pray that they will get help, pray that they will get surcease and relief from the horrific effects of the typhoon that swept through their country last week.  The damage this storm wrought is terrifying; photos do not communicate the enormity of the carnage it visited upon thousands and thousands of people.
     In the face of such devastation, whether you are religious or not does not matter, really.  We are all human beings.  When one of us suffers, we all suffer.  We all are called to care for one another.  It is our obligation and, indeed, destiny as well.  What else would we do?
     In the wake of such tragedy, many of us who believe in God probably wonder why we believe in God.  Why, God, we might ask, did you not prevent this from happening?  Why are you allowing these innocent people to suffer such misery? What is the point?
     These are exceedingly difficult questions.  There are no easy answers.  One thing, however, is this:  if God did not exist, if the world is random, we, and everyone affected by the storm, would have absolutely no point.  We would be accidents caught in an accident.  We would care, yes, but if the world has no point, why would we, as many an unbeliever has pointed out, logically, bother?  Yes, faith is hard, yes, faith is challenging; yet without faith, trying to make sense of this disaster is an even more formidable task than without it.  True, the question of God—theodicy—remains, but if we discard this question, we encounter a bigger one still:  in the face of meaningless upheaval on a meaningless planet, how can we justify our existence?

     In one of his many essays, the English writer C. S. Lewis, who died nearly fifty years ago, November 22, 1963 (the same day, I might add, that John Kennedy and Aldous Huxley died as well), pondered the meaning of the German word Sehnsucht.  Although Sehnsucht is generally translated as a longing or wishing viscerally for something, Lewis chose to describe it as a “inconsolable longing” for “we know not what.”
     At first glance, we might wonder how we can long for something we “know not what.”  On the other hand, I suspect all of us have found ourselves, at one point or another in our lives, wishing for something, something intangible, something unimaginable, maybe even something unspeakable, yet something we feel that we must have, something we believe we cannot live without—but we do not always know why.  We may not be able to describe it fully, we may not be able to define it completely, but we know—we sense—that we long for and want it.  It’s mysterious, it’s elusive, but it’s real, too.
     Some, including Lewis, called this longing a longing for God.  Others, those who perhaps do not share Lewis’s Christian sentiments, would call it our natural human bent, our natural human inclination to know more than what we know at the moment.  Maybe, in their own way, both sides are right.  Unless we long, we are not really human.  But unless we long for something beyond ourselves, we are not human, either.  If we never longed for anything beyond ourselves, we would be complete.  But we all know that we are deeply fractured and damaged beings.  We are far from complete.  And we cannot, try as we might, put ourselves together completely.  Impermanence cannot make itself permanent.
     Only what is permanent can satisfy the longing of what is not.

     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.

 Are you waiting?  We all wait.  We wait for this, we wait for that; we wait for the mail, we wait for a date, we wait for a check, we wait for, really, almost anything.  In so many ways, life is about waiting.
     What if, however, we wait and wait and wait and never get that for which we are waiting?  What if we wait for nothing?  Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot tells a story of two people who wait for someone, Godot, a person whom they perceive to be a type of savior, at a bus stop, talking, visiting, prognosticating--and the person never comes.  It's a wait that does nothing more than wait:  we are left with no resolution.  The story has no ending.  The world is beyond prediction and incapable of certainty; it's a world devoid of any structure or rhythm or meaning, other than what it is in itself.  And we do not even know why it's here.
     And what, some may ask, is wrong with a world like this?  Should it be anything else?
     Maybe not.  But if it is not anything else, we still need to know how we are to live in it, a world without certainty, meaning, hope, or point.  We will want to know what it means.
     Morever, we will forever ask this:  why is there a conundrum if the world has no point?

     Can we believe and not believe?  At first glance, this seems an impossibility, a paradox in the making.  If we look closer, however, we see that, in truth, this dichotomy expresses the essence of faith.
     Mark's gospel (chapter nine) describes an encounter between Jesus and a certain man whose son, sadly, had been suffering from demonic possession almost from the day he was born.  How this happened, we are not told, only that it had caused the boy and his father enormous hardship and pain.  Hearing that Jesus, whose reputation as an healer of extraordinary powers had by this time reached across the breadth of northern Israel, was in town, the boy's father approached him and asked for help.  If you can help, Jesus, if you can help in any way, the father said, please do so.
     "If I can help?" Jesus replied, wondering whether the father knew to whom he was speaking, namely, the eternal God come in the flesh as a human being.  "I can help you," he said, "if you believe."
     Flustered but entirely honest, the man responded, "I believe, Lord; help my unbelief."
     What are we to make of this?  The father believed, but he did not believe.  If the father had believed without any reservation at all, would he have needed faith, of any kind?  Faith is of course believing, as the writer of Hebrews 11 reminds us, in the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.  The father believed in the basic fact of Jesus' divinity, or else he would not have asked him to heal his son.  And he had had eyewitness testimony of Jesus healing other people.  He believed the substance, he believed the evidence, but he didn't believe that such things could happen to him.  He had reached the boundaries of what he imagined faith to be.
     Jesus burst those boundaries.  He demonstrated to the father that faith is to believe, yes, but it is also believing in unbelief, and that in the face of faith, unbelief is entirely present, for it is the ground and impetus of faith.  We believe because we do not believe, because we understand that we in fact do not believe precisely because we do.

     What is an end?  The novelist Angela Carter, who died, tragically, of cancer in 1992 at the age of 52, is well known for her reluctance, in her many works of fiction, to avoid bringing things to an end.  She wished for, as she put it in many a letter to her friends, to "avoid a close."
     Contemplating the circumstances of a world without an end, however, is an almost insuperably difficult task.  Our finite minds stumble over the idea of endlessness, an eternity.  Try as we might, we cannot fully wrap our minds around the notion that something could continue indefinitely, never to stop, never to end, but rather to simply keep going, forever and forever.  Eventually, everything must come to an end.
     On the other hand, avoiding or refusing an end underscores the nature of the possibility that resides in all of us.  We are born to look beyond the moment, to keep striving after the next thing, the next possibility, the next horizon.
     Fair enough.  But if we continually refuse an end, we in truth deny the nature of who we are, that is, that we are finite and limited beings who really know very little about our world or ourselves.  Ends are endemic to reality.
     Yet if this is in fact the case, we are left with a reality with an unexplainable beginning but a reality which will nonetheless come to an end.  If there are to be no ends, there must also be no beginning.  There must be eternity, not just one in our minds, but one that is implicit in our reality.
     And eternity cannot rise out of nothing, for it always is, and nothing can always be unless it cannot be otherwise, like God, eternal and forever present, present to you, to me, to the entire span of humanity, the divine before us, living, breathing, the embodiment of all that can possibly be true.

     "Morning has broken," so the ancient Gaelic hymn goes, and, it continues, all that is created emerges, shining, rejoicing and, as the stanza draws to a close, it notes that it is all springing "fresh from the Word."
     Old words, yes, but unalterably seminal and true.  The "Word" to which the song refers is the Word of God which, the first chapter of Genesis tells us, spoke the cosmos into existence, a deed enshrined in words with which many of us are aware, "And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light."  Speech lies at the foundations of the universe.  Speech created the world, speech shaped and molded the world; speech made us who we are.
     And it did so, as the medieval Christian mystic Thomas a Kempis notes in his Meditations, with Prayers, on the Life and Loving-Kindness of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, "without any labour."  Speech is the ultimate and unaided power of genesis and being.     If speech connotes meaning, that is, because speech indicates the fact of a conscious and meaningful presence of being, we can say that if speech created the world, meaning is woven into every corner of the cosmos.  Whatever else we may conclude about ourselves or our existence, we may therefore take heart that, over and above all else, we, as beings of this cosmos, are meaningful.     And so is the universe.
  

     I recently heard someone describe the questing (and questing, I might add, is the natural and inevitable bent of every one of us, as we continually seek new ways of framing and understanding our existence) human being as a perforated self.  Only a perforated self, he said, is a being who is open to new input and ideas, and only a perforated self is a being who presents herself to the world and, by extension, he said, God, as one who is willing to be changed by what is not just around her, but over her as well.  A perforated self, he said, is a person ready to really see.
    So what does it mean to really see?  Simply, it is to understand that we do not wander as lonely and autonomous individuals in a cold and insensate universe.  She will see that because there is a God, we are in a world infused with possibility, a world that, because it is not random, is a world with intentional potential and purpose.
     (By the way, yes, the existentialists agreed that we are lonely and responsible, but as they did not acknowledge the presence of God, they left us with no way out of this frightening impasse other than to make choices which, in a random and meaningless universe, really have no point, no point at all.)
     The perforated self will see that in order to learn from this world we must be receptive to what it has to say.  And the world will only have something to say if it has been spoken.  Can nothingness, a somethingess devoid of speech, really create a speaking world?

     Over the weekend, I attended a conference on the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.  Who was Soren Kierkegaard?  He was a Danish philosopher, a Christian, who put forth some intriguing and, for their time, radical views of what it meant to live in a genuinely religious manner.  In contrast to relying on religious dogma, although he recognized its value, Kierkegaard emphasized that true religion is experiential, that we ultimately come into a religious experience with our hearts and not our heads alone.  We discover God not through doctrine (although it is important) but through faith, faith in the reality and value of the divine.
     Whatever else you may think of Kierkegaard's thesis, you should acknowledge that he has a point.  Although we need to be convinced of the historical and intellectual credibility of a religion if we are to invest in or commit ourselves to it, in the end, we come to a religion as a matter of our heart.  We need to feel its truth, not just know it in our brains.  It has to be a story, not a textbook, if we are to really believe it is for us.  For instance, the Hebrews who responded to the Ten Commandments or the Muslims who assented to the truth of the Qur'an did not do so because of the words these documents contained, although these words are important to those who follow them, but rather because they trusted in the God of love and compassion whom they believed had spoken them.
     At its best, religion is not a set of rules we follow, but a relationship we enjoy with a personal and loving divine.  God is not a law; he is a living being.
     Why should we believe a piece of stone?

     Well, it's birthday time again, and so I, as I always do, take time to ponder my life, the flow of my existence on this planet.  The older I get, the more there is to ponder, not because those who are younger have less to think about, but that I have more years over which to ruminate.
      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!
     Yet when 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), I also see existence, all of it, as a prayer to the encompassing presence of God.
     And yes, life is 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 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.
     Enjoy your years!

     Yesterday, many Americans, and probably many more people around the world, celebrated Halloween.  Most of us know the story of Halloween.  It's a night traditionally viewed as a time when the ghouls, ghosts, and other macabre creatures escape their chthonic dungeons and roam freely across the earth, fomenting fright, horror, and panic.  Today, it is a day exceeded only by Christmas in the amount of money American consumers spend on it.
     However much one may wonder about Halloween's flirtation with the forces of darkness, we can observe that it is a night that might lead us to think about how we really see the world.  Do we see it as ruled by light or do we see it as ruled by darkness?  The tragedies of life seem to point to the latter; the joys, the former.  
     I suspect we all would like to say that light dominates.  And why not?  No one wants to walk in darkness.  In a fractured world, however, we will always have both.  How good it is to know, then, that ultimately, despite darkness's inroads into our experience, light will prevail, for it is the first thing God made. 

     Many years ago, I was an avid reader of D. C. comic books.  In particular, I enjoyed Batman.  A person with no innate superpowers, Batman was nonetheless amazingly effective at fighting crime. With his innate intelligence, technology, and ability to think quickly, Batman vanquished every foe that came before him.  Sometimes he struggled, other times he cruised.  But he always won.
     The world of D.C. comics is surprisingly materialistic, namely, that there is, at least when I read them, no discussion about metaphysical issues.  We live and act on this earth and nothing more.  There is a measure of eternity in some of the punishments meted out to enemies of Superman, and there are inklings of justice beyond the grave in some of the various superheroes' words.  But on the whole, there is little talk of anything other than this existence.  We are what we are, superhero or not, and that is all.
     Justice, then, was how the winners defined it.  And because the winners were always, after a fashion, good, that was enough.  A powerful natural theology prevailed, really, making what was good the logical outcome of a conflict between good and evil.  Good had to win, well, because it was good.  And the values of what was good usually resonated with readers:  who would not want for an evil criminal to be apprehended and brought to justice?
     I wonder, however, and I in no way intend for this to be a criticism of D.C. comic books, as I loved them as much as anyone, what our world would really be like if superheroes were our saviors, saviors even more powerful than the forces of our sundry military forces, saviors more powerful than those of the world's religions.  In the absence of a transcendent God, the superheroes would be it!
     Yet we're still on square one, stuck on the question of origin:  where did the superheroes come from?!

     In a few weeks, America will remember the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, otherwise known as JFK, the 35th president of the United States.  Baby boomers around the world remember that day well.  It produced an event that was singularly shocking and improbable:  how could this happen?  But it did, and America would never not be the same.
     Although JFK's name is just a memory today, America's desire to remember it says volumes about the human being.  What we remember is a function of what we desire, really, the fruit of what we, out of the countless experiences that flood through our lives every day, find most formative, striking, and significant.  Some may want to remember the day as a reminder of an era of exploration and challenge now long gone; others may want to remember it because it set them on a new trajectory for their lives.  And on and on.
     If we dig deeper, however, what we see most is the idea that remembering a name remembers a memory, and remembering a memory moves, if it is sufficiently purposeful and important, the farthest reaches of our mind and soul.  It makes us who we are.
     So we remember JFK.  But we also marvel at the fact of memory itself, that we are creatures who recall and remember, that we are beings who long and desire, and who remember that we do.  It's true in politics, and it's true in religion:  we remember what we most desire.  Rightly does the prophet Isaiah say of God, "Your name, even your memory is the desire of our souls."
    

     Recently, I read, again, about the life of the Mongol chieftain Genghis Khan.  Although I was appalled at the bloodshed and carnage he unleashed upon the world, I was equally struck by the extent to which he enabled the Renaissance in western Europe.  By controlling and making safe passage between Europe and Asia, the great Khan, wittingly or not, sparked a flow and exchange of information and ideas that helped Europe to restore and revive itself in the latter centuries of the Middle Ages.  Were it not for the Khan's decimating conquests, his storied ability to level entire civilizations in the course of a day, the vast stretches of land between Europe and Asia would have remained impassable for many more centuries.  Europe would not have encountered and learned from the cultures of the Orient nearly as soon as it had and would not have thought to engage in exploration across the Atlantic when it did.  The world would have been a very different place.
     How ironic it is, then, that one of history's most violent individuals laid the groundwork for the birth of one of history's most brilliant eras.  We human beings try so hard to grasp what time and events mean and where everything is going, but our context and purview are so very small.  We rarely know how our actions will affect the generations that follow us.  Moreover, we rarely know when or how what we consider despicable turns out to enable something grander than we can imagine.
     But the life of finitude is like that.  We never know.  What we do know, however, is that reasons only exist when life itself has one. 

     Perhaps you read it, too.  I'm referring to an obituary about Erich Priebke, a Nazi who was convicted of ordering the execution of 335 men and boys at the Ardeatine Caves in Italy in 1944.  Mr. Priebke was 100 years old.
     Is this justice, one might ask?  Is it fair that someone guilty of committing such a heinous crime lives to be 100 while countless other perfectly good individuals, famous and not, die much younger?  Is it right that a Nazi prison guard should outlive even the survivors of those he killed?
     No, it does not seem right or fair that such a thing would happen.  On the face of it, one would be hard pressed to find anyone who would disagree that Priebke's crime was horrific.  Almost all of us would agree that his conduct exceeded every boundary of human thought and decency.
     Ironically, however, if we were to follow postmodernity's insistence that truth is always relative, we would, as the philosopher Richard Rorty, himself no friend of religion, pointed out, have no basis to say whether Priebke's action was evil or not.  Absent some sort of absolute standard, we have no way to know.
     Rorty is quite right.  Moreover, we still face a conundrum, that is, why did Priebke live so long and others did not?  Sure, things happen, and sure, some people seem to have good luck and others less so.  If existence halts at death, however, we watch Priebke go to his grave (if he ever finds one:  no one seems to want to bury him), guilty beyond a doubt, but outliving almost everyone who brought him to justice.  And what happens to him now?  Absolutely nothing.  In a very real sense, he's forever free.
     If there are absolutes, however, we have hope that Priebke's actions will reverberate beyond his earthly grave, that standards that we, relativistic creatures that we are, cannot possibly devise, prevail, now and into eternity.
     The song is just beginning.

     "The most fundamental phenomenon of the universe is relationship," famous and influential scientist Jonas Salk once said, for, he continued, the human being is a being who seeks to relate.
     We cannot really argue with Dr. Salk's observation.  We all appreciate relationships, and, unless we are hermits, we all enjoy connecting with our fellow human beings.  Have you ever wondered, however, why this is?  Evolution would say that it is because relationship proved to be humanly advantageous.  Religion would say that it is due to God having made people this way.  Who's right?
     It's a terribly big question, but we can perhaps break it up this way.  If we say that we relate because we want to, we must still explain why we want to; that is, what is in us that causes us to desire relationship?  Is it simply random chance that we developed various chemical and neuronal capacities to connect and relate?  How would initial chaos develop these longings?  On the other hand, if we say that we relate because we were made to do so, we must of course explain why God wished for us to be this way.  We'd need to explain the mind of God, no easy task.
     But which is easier?  To explain the presence of a mind or the fact of a nothingness from which mind has come?  It's difficult to see how relationship originated in nothingness, yet it is difficult to see how God, alone in himself, could create such a thing.  How would he know to do so?
     Consider this:  we would only know and believe he could if God knew first.