What's moral?  In a classic example of what the author George Orwell might call "doublespeak," the long dead French politician Robespierre, most (in)famous for his role in the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, opined that, "The springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror:  virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless."
     According to Robespierre, without virtue, that is, moral excellence, terror, that is, actions intended to intimidate or frighten, is inutile.  It means nothing.  But wait:  how can we equate moral excellence with actions intended to frighten and harm?  On the other hand, how can we make, as Robespierre does in the next phrase, terror the upholder of moral excellence?  Again, we're conflating something that most of us would applaud (moral excellence) with actions that most of us would condemn (terror).
     Nonetheless, Robespierre has identified a problem that arises whenever anyone insists that her version of virtue, that is, moral excellence, deserves anything she does to implement and express it.  Repeatedly throughout history, people, religious or not, have used terror to achieve what they considered to be good and laudable goals.  So convinced are they of the righteousness of their perspective that they are ready and willing to do whatever they can, including terror, to implement and promote it.
     Underlying this problem is an even bigger one:  how do we decide what is truly "moral"?  For many of us, morality is relative.  Yet this leaves us with more questions than answers:  how do we balance competing moral claims?  For others, morality is defined by an absolute standard, something that is always binding and true.  But this can lead to the issue we posed earlier:  who decides what is binding and true?
     If we say that religion, transcendent religion, decides, we come to another problem:  every religion cannot be right at the same time.  So who is right?
     Well, one might say, God.  But who knows what God is really saying?
     Perhaps it is those who do not try to define God in their own image.  Perhaps it is those who do not try to make God the product of their baggage and imaginations.  Perhaps it it those who allow God to speak to them when they least want him to, when they have no idea what he will say, indeed, when they do not want God to say anything, when they are willing to admit to themselves that they are the products of mysteries beyond their comprehension.
     Perhaps it is those who are ready to be human beings, and only human beings, in an unfathomable yet, and this is the conundrum, clearly personal universe.
     There's always more to knowing than we can know.

     Earlier this week, I was talking with a friend about the truth claims of religion, particularly those of Christianity.  He told me that though he remained highly skeptical of the Christian message, he would be open to reading literature that discussed it without indicating any loyalty to or foundation in Christian dogma.
     As I reflected on his words, I realized that as much as I would like to think that such literature existed, I'd be hard pressed to produce any.  Although one can create marvelous literary works, fiction or not, that speak of the dimensions of Christianity without invoking it directly (J. R. R.. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is one example), it seems that it would be difficult, if not impossible, if one was deeply and seminally committed to the metaphysical assumptions of Christianity--or any religion for that matter--to create a work entirely devoid of them.  Religion tends to do that.  To genuinely experience it is to be totally committed to it.
     In truth, however, should not it be this way?  If the metaphysical is real and our experience of it is likewise (which, regardless of one's religious/spiritual convictions, I believe it is), then someone who has committed herself to it can hardly set it aside summarily, and certainly not categorically.
     Dogma may trouble, dogma may seem rigid, but if we who hold to any form of it routinely ignore it, we may as well not follow it at all.
     Indeed, if God exists, how could we not live differently than if he did not?

     On occasion, I am invited to preside at a wedding.  Doing so is a great honor and privilege.  As I prepare my remarks and ponder the weight of the coming moment, I am always struck by the power of love, the compelling power of love that seems to, at some point, draw all of us into its grip.  All of us have enjoyed, in some way, big or small, short or long, the experience of love.  It's part of being human.
     That's the point.  Although some of us may think we cannot live with love, we all must admit that we cannot live without it.  We all need love.
     Yet we do not need love solely because it is good for our survival as a species, although it does sustain us, and we do not need love solely because we are necessarily moral and emotional creatures, although that is certainly true.  We need love because in the absence of love we have no reason to be here.  If love did not exist, though we might exist, we would be nothing, really, nothing at all, even, oddly enough, as we existed.
     To wit, love needs love, and love wouldn't need love if love did not need to exist.
     But it does--because it must.  Why else would we necessarily be?

     When the Who played on the Isle of Wight in 1970, they opened (at two o'clock in the morning) with a song called "Heaven and Hell."  It is a paean to judgment, hope, and immortality.  After describing heaven as a place where "you go if you've done nothing wrong" and hell as a place in the ground where "you grow horns and a tail and you carry a fork, and moan and wail," it goes on to wish, "Why can't we have eternal life, and never die?"
     Ah . . . as Nietzsche might have said, "human, all too human!"  What is about us, we human beings, we frail and fumbling bundles of muscle and bone that makes us long to live beyond this life, to live beyond what we will ever live in this reality?  Why do we wish so strongly to extend our lifespan?
     One obvious answer is that, from our vantage point on this planet, we do not see anything else.  We do not see anything beyond this present existence.  How could we?  We're finite.
     Another, perhaps less obvious answer is that somehow, some way we are looking for something, something that we sense we should have, something that, given who we are, we believe we should know.  We think in immaterial terms, we dream in eternal frameworks; why should we not experience such things firsthand?  Why should we not step into an experience our mind and heart seem to know, perhaps for no definable reason, should be?
     Though we can dismiss such longings as natural fears about material immortality, we cannot dismiss the reality that we dream them.  We cannot dismiss that we think about existences beyond our present one.  No one can honestly say that he or she has never, absolutely never done so.  No one.
     Chemicals do not explain everything.

     In a recent episode of the popular American network show The Mentalist, the primary "bad guy" is out to eliminate all witnesses to a crime he's committed.  One of these witnesses is an eight year old boy.  But this doesn't seem to bother the bad guy.  Not so for his helpers, however.  After bringing an accomplice (the "hit" man) to the boy's house, the bad guy tells him to go inside and dispatch him.  The hit man hesitates.  When the bad guy presses him, he tells him, "I can't kill a kid."
     It should not surprise us that even a hit man has morals, a sense of right and wrong, boundaries which even he will not cross.  We are moral animals.  Morality is part of us.  It's who we are.
     But why are we moral?  Science tells us that over millions of years we have learned that doing good is better than doing evil.  The latter ensures our survival, the former does not.
     Yet this doesn't tell us why we make moral choices.  It doesn't tell us why we are moral creatures, why, millions of years ago, one of our ancestors decided that there was such a thing as right and wrong.  It doesn't tell us why we have a conscience.  Bundles of neurons may make us work, but bundles of neurons do not make us moral.  We look in vain for the origin of something transcendent in the immanent.
     The material will never be moral unless something immaterial is moral first.

     Why, a song asked some years ago, pray?  Why pray to a God who already knows what will happen?  Won't everything happen the way he has planned, anyway?
     These questions do not have easy answers, if they even have answers at all.  But maybe they are missing the point.  When the psalmist says (Psalm 116), "I believed, therefore I spoke," he is not so much urging God to do something as he is affirming that despite any questions he may have about how God may be working in his situation, he still chooses to believe in him.  He still wants to be in relationship with him.  He still sees God as, in a way he cannot see at the moment, the ultimate and final answer.  He still understands that God is the only credible explanation for existence.
     Does this solve the writer's problem?  Materially, perhaps not.  Metaphysically, however, it more than does:  nothingness has never solved (or resolved) anything.
    

     At the beginning of Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World, his very clever novel about the history of philosophy, the philosophy teacher whom he uses to teach his readers about philosophy asks Sophie, the book's primary character, "Who are you?"
     It's a good question.  We identify ourselves with our name, our family, our work, and many other things, but these do not address the more basic question:  who are we?  We call ourselves human beings, but in fact what we are doing is using ourselves to name ourselves.  And we're back to square one.  To wit, how can we see if there is no window?
     Maybe that's why we need a God.

     At one point in the Moody Blues's song Question, we hear the singer say, "I'm looking for someone to change my life, I'm looking for a miracle in my life.  And if you could see what it's done to me to lose the love I knew could safely lead me to the land that I once knew, to learn as we grow old the secrets of our soul."
     Rock songs of course, as do most musical genres, talk often about love gained and love lost, a love that was once enjoyed but which is now gone, a love that had been the greatest joy of one's life now longer here.  The love which Question describes is no different.  To have it back, the song opines, to have it restored would be a miracle, a life altering miracle that would lead the one once so loved to a beautiful place of glory and repose, a place in which he would learn the secret of his soul.
     Anyone who has been (or is) in love will testify to its ability to take the lover and beloved to new depths of who they are, new insights into what most makes them tick.  It's like peeling an onion.  With each passing year, more layers display and unfold.  Hiddenness becomes visible, secrets are revealed, and life becomes progressively richer.  Love grows us beyond ourselves.
     This is precisely what God wants to do with his love for us.  He wants us to know it as the molder and restorer of our hearts, the healer of our souls, that which unpacks the secrets of everything we are.  Most importantly, however, he wants us to see it as the path to genuine destiny:  eternal fellowship with our creator.
     And to forever grow in the secrets of all that is.

     Are we infinite?  The protagonists of the movie "Perks of Being a Wallflower" certainly thought so.  And why not?  Poised to graduate from high school, standing before college, they envisioned life as an adventure never to end.  The world lay before them.
     We love possibility.  We love potential.  We love limitlessness.  We love to think that we are born to find the fullest picture of existence that we can possibly find.  And we are.  We are made to look for the greatest possible thing, innately programmed to seek the greatest more.  We are birthed to know and believe the world is always waiting for us to find it.
     And why not?  We live in the world of an inexhaustible and infinite God.  He conceived it, he created it, he sanctified it.  And he made us to enjoy it and its nearly boundless potential.
     Our nations (despite the glory of today's American presidential inauguration) have limits, but God does not.  So enjoy.  Be infinite.  Be infinitely in love with the infinite God.  He's boundless.  And consider--and in this is the greatest mystery of all--he was once bounded, too.  Like us.
     Open your heart to the mystery of an incarnate God.

     Are you forgiven?  All of us are need of forgiveness, be it from our spouse, siblings, friends, colleagues, associates, or, for some of us, the world, for any and all ways that we have wronged them.
     Perhaps one of the most difficult planes of forgiveness is in war.  Can those who are maimed, injured, or tortured forgive those who inflicted such things on them?  Can those whose lives or property have been destroyed by others forgive them?  Can the people of a nation which another has conquered forgive it?
     Moreover, even if we manage to forgive, can we ever forget?  Memories linger a long time, a very long time, and pain runs deep.
     Yet there's something about forgiving, about coming to terms, about reconciling, in some fashion, with the source of our pain that enables us to let go of it, not necessarily physically--some pain will never cease--but morally.  It affirms our humanness.  We have suffered in inhumane ways, yes, but we continue to believe we--and our tormentors--are human.  We continue to believe we, and everyone else, is worth our pain.
     Is this hard?  It surely is.  Just ask God.

     Although we can interpret the currently very popular Life of Pi (the book or the movie) in a variety of ways, one thing that we might take away from it is that if we are to believe in God at all, we must accept something that, given earthly sensibilities and common logic, we might not necessarily be inclined to accept.
     But perhaps that's the point.  We will not believe in God unless we are willing to believe that, as philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his Tractatus, "The facts of the world are not the end of the matter."
     Or as the poet Emily Dickinson observed, "This world is not conclusion."  We have to believe that this life cannot possibly be without something (or, better, someone) else being there first.
     No one can produce herself.

     How do we believe?  Two ways.  We either believe by considering and affirming which rings most true to what we already believe, or we believe by considering which seems most consistent with how we understand reality.  Either way, however, we encounter a problem:  we may never believe anything other than what follows from what we have always believed.  We may never step outside what we had already decided is real and true.  We may never invest in mystery and the unknown.
     This we cannot do.  Think about all the discoveries that have been made, think about all the great lands that have been found.  Would any of these been made or found if people had not been willing to step outside of what they had always believed to be true?  Sure, these people stepped out on the basis of what they knew.  But they also knew they didn't know everything they wanted to.  But they stepped out anyway.  They invested in the unknown.
     As must we all.  No one has ever found what is most important by sticking to what she has always known.
     Take a step into the mystery, walk into the unknown.  Live by faith, faith in a God without whom mystery would be forever unknown.

     Writing in the magazine Utne recently, Nina Utne, wife of magazine founder Eric Utne (the word utne, by the way, is Norwegian for "far out" and, oddly enough, Hittite (the language of the Hittites, who lived in what is now modern Turkey) for "land"), observed that, "Love without risk isn't love at all," then goes on to say, "Our only safety lies in gratitude for the lives we share and for the miracle that we continue to love, against all odds."
     Ms. Utne's words reflect, I think, an aching truth about our world.  It is a good world, but it is a broken world.  Problems and perversion abound.  Too many of us are loathe to place our trust in anyone, anyone at all.  Even the ones we consider closest to us often, unfortunately, turn on us.  Love seems fleeting.
     Nonetheless, many of us find love, and we find it in many wonderful ways.  But we all have to give up something for it, have to let go of various degrees of personal security to embrace it fully.  It's not always safe, it's not always easy.  Yet the rewards are beyond telling.
     Why is love so risky?  Love is risky because the world is risky.  We live in a highly contingent reality; we love in acute awareness that it could all end at any moment.  So do we proceed, as did Bertrand Russell, to erect our lives upon a "scaffolding of unyielding despair"?  Or do we live acknowledging that the reason we are even able to love is that we live in a world created with abiding and lasting purpose?  We live affirming that the world is supposed to be here, and we are supposed to be here, as well, to live, to love, and to realize that we live and love because someone, someone who is love innate and incarnate, lives for and loves us.

     Many of us know about King Tutankhamen, the "boy" pharaoh of the 18th dynasty of ancient Egypt.  The treasures of his tomb, unearthed at the city of Thebes in 1922, have made multiple circuits in museums around the world, amazing thousands of us with their dazzling array of material wonder.  We gasp at the opulence, we awe at the magnificence, we marvel at the thought of so much wealth in the hands of one who lived so long ago.
     Ironically, however, King Tut (as most of us call him) is not famous for who he was, a otherwise undistinguished son-in-law of the "heretic" pharaoh Akhenaten, nor is he famous for what he did, as militarily and politically he did very little, ascending to the throne at the age of twelve and dying six years later.  Indeed, all that King Tut is really remembered for, as many commentators have pointed out, is his treasure.  That's it.
    What about us?  Is our wealth that for which we wish to be most remembered?  Jesus tells the story, recorded in Luke 12, of a "certain" rich man who, because he had so much, so much that it astounded him, decides to build a host of storehouses to keep it.  And, he says to himself, "After I have built them, I will say to my soul, 'soul, you have many goods laid up for many years to come; take your ease; eat, drink, and be merry.'"
     Yet, Jesus says, that night, that very night the man died.
     Money is not bad (note that 1 Timothy 6 says not that money is evil, but that the love of money is evil), and money can do many good things, but well ought we wish to not be remembered for how much we have had of it.
     To wit:  make the memory of you just that:  you.

     In unexpectedly (and very happily) reconnecting last week with some old college friends, most of whom I had not seen in nearly (and I guess this dates me!) forty years, and hearing about their journeys, I was grateful to see that whatever wild and crazy things we had done in those heady times, we have as a whole landed on our feet, created and cultivated meaningful lives, and found a measure of equanimity with and solace in the wonders and contingencies of the universe.  It's all, as the phrase goes, good.
     And so it is.  As I reflected on this, I found myself struck, though in a profoundly new way, by the beginning of the second verse of the ninth chapter of Ecclesiastes, which reads, "There is one fate for all . . . "  In other words, we all will one day die.  It's inevitable.  Despite the wonder and glory of our lives, we are headed, sooner or later, toward their end.  We are marching toward death.
     Is this despressing?  Of course it is.  Who wants to contemplate one's death?  Yet the enormously sad truth is that one day our death will come.  And we will not be able to do a thing about it.  Our lives will be over.  Final chapter, end of story.
     Though the writer tries to temper this fearsome truth by encouraging, in subsequent verses, his readers to enjoy life with those they love (verse 9) and to do whatever their minds and hearts lead them to do (verse 10), he always returns to the ineluctable point:  one day it will all end.
     Consider, however, this:  regardless of whether the world has leapt randomly forth as one actuality of an infinite number of possibilities or was fashioned as the conscious and deliberate actuality of an infinite God, its end must logically be shrouded in infinite possibilities as well.  If this is so, then why would there not be a resurrection?  Why would there not be an afterlife, a life in which we would go on living, albeit in different form, indefinitely and forever?  Why would not this life, the product of infinite possibility, also be the ground of infinite possibilities of infinite duration?  Anything is possible.
     Even, I dare say, God.  If God is there--and we have no good reason to think he is not--life cannot be other than eternal.
     Rejoice.

     To follow up on my observations of yesterday, I will note that contrary to what author Susan Jacoby insists, not all people who believe in God--and this, I should note, is a massively diverse group of people who do not deserve to be lumped into a single entity--focus on the next life only.  In fact, only a few do.  To insist that atheists are the only people who consider this life important overlooks that most people who believe in what I assume Ms. Jacoby means the "Christian" God believe that this same God pronounced the world good and that for this reason they should care for it and its people.  I'd like to think that regardless of our religious (or lack of) loyalities, we can all agree that for all its foibles, and irrespective of what we believe about what might be beyond it, the world remains, comprises, and encompasses the primary medium of human experience and responsibility.
     It's everyone's planet, everyone's vision:  we're all in this together.

     Does an atheist, as author Susan Jacoby claims, have the upper hand in dealing with theodicy, the so-called "problem of evil" (that is, if God is omnipotent and omni-good, why does he [appear] to allow or make people suffer?)?  Well, yes.  If there is no God, then, well, there is no problem.  We do not need to wonder why God does not seem to be doing anything about our or others' pain.  He's not there.
     Hence, when we consider, as I did a couple of days ago, the children dying from winter cold in various refugee camps in Afghanistan, we do not need to think about why God did not appear to care about them.  He's not an issue.
     Fair (and true) enough.  On the other hand, if we insist that God has nothing to do with anything, including pain, we devolve the dilemma back to a highly untenable starting point:  ourselves.  Not that we are not capable and good, and not that we cannot find meaning in this world without thinking about God, but if we make ourselves the beginning, end, and sum of existence, we reduce the universe to a very small point. 
     For many of us, this very small point is more than enough.  Life is, life was, life happens, and that's all there is to it.  We're born, we live, we enjoy, we age, we die.  What more do we need?  We can explain everything we need to know to live.  As Richard Rorty remarked, "Explanation, not truth is the important thing."
     Maybe so.  But this leaves us with virtually no way to understand misfortune and tragedy except to say that it happens.  What does this solve?  Virtually nothing.
     Sure, invoking God's presence renders tragedy immeasurably more complicated.  On the other hand, however, it does more than restate the obvious.  It elevates our thinking to a higher plane, a plane that we did not make or invent, and presents a hope which originates apart from and frames beyond who we, in ourselves, are.  It sets tragedy in context, an eternal and infinite context, one that, regardless of what we suppose our origins to be, must exist.
     And this makes all the difference.  Otherwise, we're drowning in a sea of ourselves.

     As the Deep Ecology movement (and many others, including the oft maligned but highly perceptive chaos theory) observed, all of existence, that is, every part of the planet and the universe in which it sits, is interconnected and, in a myriad of ways, dependent on each other.  Everything is flowing, to draw a page from the ancient notion of the Great Chain of Being, as one vast experience of "beingness," a river of interlinked and symbiotic animate and inanimate exchange.
     It's a wonderful idea, really, lauding the relatedness of all things.  Yet it also daily presents us with some intricate tangles of decision making.  For instance, I read recently about how, due to various Western governments' demands that its consumers increase their use of biofuels and so reduce their use of fossil fuels, some farmers in Central America are allotting increasing amounts of land to grow the crops to provide the basis for such fuels.  While this sounds good on paper--giving a boost to these nations' economies--what has happened is that only a few (landed and established) farming families are benefiting.  In addition, as these few well connected farmers take more and more land to grow the necessary crops, other farmers, the forgetten and impoverished ones, are having great difficulty in finding land to grow food for their families.  People are starving. 
     And what seems like a good thing for the West, that is, reducing dependency on nonrenewable fossil fuels, is, ironically, doing bad things in the lives of others.
     It's a good world--didn't God say so in Genesis?--but it's a profoundly interconnected world.  And justice is complicated.
     Maybe that's why we need God.

     When I read about little children dying from winter cold in the refugee camps in northern Afghanistan, I weep.  Most of them are too young to even know why they were born.  And now they are dead.
     Yet driven by a range of agendas, political and military machinations continue apace, their outcomes often determining the fates of these little ones, these little ones who have no inkling of the larger forces that are shaping their destiny.  All they know is that they are bitterly and horribly cold.
     How great the disparity.  When I backpack during the winter, dealing with temperatures that are often well below zero, I surround myself with the finest insulation my money allows me to buy.  Yet I'm backpacking in these temperatures not because I need to, but because I can.  I have a choice.
     Not so these little ones.  They had no choice as to where they were born, they had no choice as to whether they will eat.  They are simply here.  And all too soon, they will not be here.  It's tragic.
     Well, some of us may say, this is simply the result of sin.  It's a broken world, and bad things happen.  Evil reigns.
     Maybe so (and these are immense thoughts and questions), but the disparity remains horrific.  Pray for yourself, pray for the planet.  Pray for the human heart.

     In words that seem to be quoted with increasing frequency these days, the poet William Yeats once observed in his Second Coming that when, "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood dimmed tide is loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned."
     We may think that because we live in reasonably accomodating human communities on planet Earth, and that because these communities, and the planet itself, seem, despite various ups and downs, to keep going, that a center indeed remains.  There is a starting point, there is a goal, there is an end.
     And I suppose there is:  us.  But where are we?  And where did we come from?  And where are we going.  Most important, how do we know we are the center?
     We don't.  We only know we are here.  And absent a creator, we do not know why we are here.  We assert a center without any evidence that there is one.
     And anarchy, some good, some bad, ensues as the human adventure continues apace, rumbling and roaming on its merry way.  Does the world have a center?  Indeed, it does.  But most of us have forgotten what it is.  Most of us have forgotten that we cannot be the center unless a center is already present.
     Too many of us have forgotten that a center is nowhere unless someone, someone who is not us, we who have no center, decides and ensures there is one.
     Otherwise, we're whistling in the dark.
    

     Now that the U.S. President and Congress have agreed to a deal regarding, among other things, individual taxation rates (while failing to resolve even larger issues surrounding America's spending), we can once more ask ourselves, wherever we are, how are we really to view our money?  Sure, we earn our money, and sure we rightly regard as it as our own money and no one else's, but are we really correct in thinking we can see ourselves as wholly autonomous agents in regard to our money?
     Hardly.  We would not be able to earn money if we had not been born on this planet, and we would not have been born on this planet unless it (and of course our parents) existed, and this planet would not exist unless it, somehow, some way, came into existence (whether we believe in creation or evolution as the source of the planet's origin begs the point:  either way, we had no part in birthing it).  We cannot claim, in any way, that we are living and earning money solely because we decided that we could.
     Big picture, our existence and our money are gifts, gifts of a life that we did not contemplate nor create, a life that, regardless of how we think it came about, is nonetheless something that we in no way contributed to it coming into being.  We ought therefore to earn and use our money being acutely aware that we had no part, seminally and ultimately, in enabling the conditions that occasioned it.  We are wanderers on a planet we did not make, sojourners on an earth into which we had no part in determining whether we would come.
     Life is a gift, our money is a gift.  Whether we have a little money or a lot of money, we should note that it is, really, a gift.  We earned it, yes, but we certainly didn't earn the world--nor our innate abilities and capacities--in which we make it.
     So what are we to do?  In a word, give.  It's a hurting world.  After all, what is a gift but something to give away?

     As the New Year progresses, we often find ourselves waiting.  We wait for signs, we wait for checks, we wait for work, we wait for admission, we wait for adventure, we wait for romance.  And much more.
     In his famous play Waiting for Godot, playwright Samuel Beckett tells the story of two people, Vladimir and Estragon, who wait for a person named Godot who, in true absurdist fashion, never comes.  Though Beckett's play has been subject to a variety of interpretations, one of them seems to center around futility, the futility of existence.  What if we wait all our lives for something that never comes?  What have our lives been for?
     Waiting for something that, eventually, comes can be hard, but waiting for something that never comes is vastly more so.  Yes, we will wait for things all our lives.  That is the nature of living in a broken and finite world pervaded as it is by an air of infinitude.  But if we wait for something that never comes, and if we make that something the most important thing in our lives (particularly if we know that it will never come), we indeed drown ourselves in futility.
     On the other hand, if we do not wait--ever--we may miss the point.  Implicit in waiting is hope, and implicit in hope is the stuff of existence.  As the apostle Paul asks in the eighth chapter of his letter to the church at Rome, " . . . for who hopes for what he already sees?  But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it."  Why?  Because we know and believe it is there.  It is our hope that drives us forward.
     So we wait, and we hope, the world before us and, we trust, never against us.  But we do not really know for sure that we can.
     Unless there's a God.

     It's a new day, a new month, a new year.  It's a time of resolution, aspiration, goal, vision, and intention, a time that our hearts, even if only for a moment, spur us to new heights 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, it 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.
     Rejoice.   Yet rejoice most fully in God.  As the New Year dawns, realize that it is in God that we will experience the fullness of life, that it is in God that we will see the ultimate picture of existence.  It is in God that we will see the highest vision of what we can be, that is, saved, renewed, and set free, morally, epistemologically, culturally, and more.  It's all part of our creator's endless wonder for us, all part of the magnificent promise he embodied, in his son Jesus, for our world.
     Happy New Year.