In his recently released autobiography, Waging Heavy Peace, musician Neil Young at one point states that, "I love living."
     Indeed.  Don't we all?  We all love being alive, we all love having a life, we all love not being dead sooner than we would like.  We treasure existence.  As we should.
     As cosmologist Stephen Hawkings might say (though he would draw a very different conclusion than mine about its origins), it is a grand design in which we live, a remarkable schemata of form and being that we occupy, an amazing framework into which we are born.
     Precisely:  how could anything as wonderful as this have come about by accident, for no point, for no apparent reason?  Why else would we be here?  Who would know?  Who would imagine?
     What a gift of God.

     As winter wears on in the upper Midwest and snow lingers on the sleeping earth, I continue to enjoy walking and hiking through the silence it spreads across the land.  In the velvet stillness of winter, I see things that in warmer months I might not.
     So it was a few weeks ago as I was hiking through a stretch of forest not too far from my home that I came upon a rock, a large rock sitting serenely in the snow.  I knew the rock well.  Many years before, while my wife and I were hiking through the same forest with our daughter, we stopped at this rock.  We took a photograph of our daughter sitting on the rock, smiling, beaming in the sunlight of early summer.
     As I stood in the snow by the rock, I remembered that moment, remembered our daughter's smile, remembered the joy on our faces, the joy of the day, the joy of being a family, the joy of simply being alive to revel in such a wondrous existence.  And I realized that although I had felt in that moment, in an indescribable way, God's mystery and presence, I also realized that in the silence of the snow now before me I touched it more clearly.
     Sometimes God is silent, sometimes he is not.  Yet we hear him best when our landscapes are silent.  It's easy to think about God in the summer, in a season of abundance and plenty, but we see him more clearly when we're standing in the aphonia of a somnolent land.

     Can we ignore God?  Well, yes.  We can ignore God, we can conclude that he is not there and that we don't need to bother with him.  We can say that he is a word devoid of content.
     But what are we really saying?  Although we can ignore someone who absolutely doesn't exist, we cannot legitimately ignore someone whose existence remains, if we are honest, an open question.
     We can only ignore what has been proven to be absolutely false.  We cannot ignore what has never been proven to be patently and wholly false.  Also, we need to be mindful that
     Besides, the tools we use to prove anything true or false are nothing more than what we ourselves devise: we're only proving or falsifying our own limits.
     Ignorance, whether of God or anything else, in the end is no more than a function of what we already think we know.  It's never the final word.
     Are your eyes open?

     How does God comfort us?  How does a seemingly aloof and distant being reach down and touch us, reach down and move us to feel his care, mercy, and concern?  Johannes Sebastian Bach, one of the most remarkable and beloved musicians of all time (have you heard "Jesus, Joy of Desire"?), is famous for signing his music with the words "Soli Deo Gloria" (for the glory of God alone).  Why?  Bach believed fervently in the reality and comfort of God. 
     But Bach did not live without his share of troubles.  His first wife died very young.  Though he remarried and between his two wives fathered twenty children, he also saw nearly half of them die before reaching adulthood.  He dealt with court and ecclesiastical politics, he often had to compose his music at a frantic pace to please his patrons.  His life was not always easy.  Bach died at the age of sixty-five.
     Bach's music, however, speaks profoundly to his firm belief that God was, through it all, his comforter.  Numerous authors have pointed out that for Bach his faith was inextricable from his music, and that it was in his music, the melodies, the lyrics, the songs, that he felt God's comfort most deeply.  For Bach, God's comfort was not always something physically palpable, though at times it was, but something which nonetheless spoke profoundly to his--and not necessarily anyone else's--soul.
     As it is for us.  The psalmist tells us (Psalm 116) that if when in our hours of darkness we call to God, he will.  He will extend his comfort.  But he will do so in a way unique to our individual person, circumstances, and wiring.  And we will not miss it.
     When we believe in it, God's comfort is always exactly what we need.  Why?  Because God is there.

     Have you ever fasted?  Lent, whose second Sunday begins tomorrow, is a good time to fast.  Mystics the world over extol the virtues of fasting; it is not a practice native to just one religion.
     So why fast?  Simply, when we give up that to which we are normally accustomed, when we deprive ourselves of what we could easily have, we come to see anew that, really, our spirits are far more important than our bodies.  Our minds may lose clarity, our bodies will wear out, but our spirits will last, indeed, last forever.  Fasting reminds us that genuine insight is born of openness to things that we can only see when we let go of the obvious, and that attaining wisdom is a function not of bodily greatness, but of submitting and taking hold of things beyond.  Try it!

     How do we grasp the flaws of genuis?  Pablo Picasso, one of the twentieth century's most famous and innovative artists, is unfortunately equally known for how he mistreated some of the many women who passed through his life.  He was indeed a flawed genuis.
     Lest we be too hard on Picasso and without excusing his episodes of misogny, we ought to say that sometimes the ones who deconstruct our reality (as he did with his cubism and his techniques of printmaking) best are the ones who create the most profoundly.  In taking the world apart, they put it back together in new ways, ways that encourage all of us to embark on new journeys into the visions of our imagination.  We all grow into a deeper appreciation of what it means to be human.  When the artist wrestles with reality, we find incentive to wrestle with it, too.
     Not that reality, as it is presently constituted, is necessarily bad, for it is not, but that when we wrestle with reality, when we take apart what is, we often find what really is.  We come before the "why" of create, the "why" that lies beneath the surface of the "what" that is merely a cause, not an effect.  We learn that although we, like Picasso, are deeply flawed yet marvelous beings who live in a deeply broken yet vastly amazing world, we do so as creators, those who can make reality new, at least in our perceptions.  Yet we are only creators who create because we live in a universe pervaded by the omnipresent and mysterious creative genuis of God.
     As Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, pointed out many centuries ago, if the created purposes to create, the created ought to remember that she, too, is a flawed creation, a fractured genius living before a creator who causelessly and sovereignly creates.  Otherwise, all we have are effects.
     And without a cause, effects mean nothing.

     Did you see the meteorite?  The flurry of news reports and commentaries about the meteorite that exploded over the Siberian landscape recently stirred a range of feelings in us.  Some marveled at the power of the heavens, some gasped at the power of physical law; some were awestruck, some were dispassionate observers, some are still cleaning up the mess it brought.  All of us, however, I'd be willing to say, were intrigued by the arrival of something, something very unusual and dazzling from beyond this world.  Because we all wonder about what or who is beyond us and because we all wonder why these things happen in such seemingly random ways, we all found food for thought in what happened.  The world unpacked itself in a way that, at least in most of our lifetimes, it had not before.
     But maybe that's the nature of our lives.  Set against a graph, a linear graph of an endless journey from A (birth) to B (death), life seems futile.  It starts, it runs, it ends.  Infused with curved lines, slopes and tangents that slice through a straight line, however, life seems anything but futile.  Yes, it's a journey that ends, but it's also a journey to an end.
     The meteorite is a window, a window into the uncontrollable, something that gets us to see that life is never predictable, that life is a set of surprises, that life is more than its end, that, again, it has an end, an end that is, in truth, a beginning.
     As Psalm 19 reminds us, the heavens are "telling the glory [and wonder] of God."
     It's all a matter of opening our eyes.
    

     Is God foolish?  To some, yes:  God is a fool to think that we will believe in the story of Jesus, a fool to think that we will believe that a person who claimed to be God came to earth, lived, died, and rose from the dead.  As Paul writes in his first letter to the church at Rome (chapter one), to the Gentiles (meaning those in his audience who were not Jewish), the cross, that is, the unspeakably painful sacrifice that Jesus made for humanity, is "foolishness."
     Clearly, what some believe by faith, others will assert denies what is rational and real.  But maybe that's the point:  if God made perfect sense, if God fit neatly into what we believe reality to be, why would we need him anyway?  Why would we care?
     It is the "foolishness" of God that gets our attention.  It's the transcendence of God that stirs our hearts.  It's the "otherworldliness" of Jesus that moves us most.  Consider this:  do we really want to listen to and believe in someone who simply affirms everything we already think we know?

     How do we know we--or anyone else--is an alien?  Oddly enough, many people ask this question, wondering aloud whether we are really aliens in disguise or whether aliens are in fact running the earth.  People like to wonder about aliens.
     Consider the 2001 movie K-Pax.  This movie presents the earthly appearance of a person (name of "prot") who claimed to be from K-PAX, a planet with two suns in the constellation Lyra.  This person, played by Kevin Spacey, seems to know things about interplanetary travel and motion that even the brightest and most sophisticated astronomers do not, and produces, with little apparent effort, complex mathematical calculations describing such things.  Yet the psychiatrist, played by Jeff Bridges, who is treating him continues to believe that "prot" is merely wrestling with a trauma from his past and, given time, will "snap" out of his delusion.
     As the movie progresses, the psychiatrist discovers what he believes to be "prot's" real identity and concludes that he is very close to resolving the case.  Then, as he promised he would do, one morning "prot" appears to vanish in a beam of light, and taking, it seems, another patient with him.  But the body he apparently "used" remains.
     So really happened?  Was "prot" a visitor from another planet?  Did he just inhabit this other person's body to help him find himself?  And what about the other patient who disappeared?  We are left hanging.
     So, I thought, suppose someone who claimed to be, for instance, God appeared on earth.  Would we believe this person to be who he claimed to be?  What proof would we require?  What if this person did things that we would expect a God to do, like perform miracles and summon the forces of nature at will?  What if this person said things, things that seemed wiser than anything else we had heard before?  And what if this person disappeared without a trace, with no earthly explanation?  We might have to really think about whom that person really was.
     But like the people who knew "prot," in the end, we would need to settle for less than a full explanation.  We would always be wondering what really happened.  Whatever we decided, we'd need to do so without really knowing everything about it.  We'd need to exercise faith.
     For faith, like it or not, is the only way that we will ever settle the question of God:  if God is something we fully understand, what's the point?

     Do you commemorate Lent?  Unless you attend a liturgical church, you probably do not.  But we all can learn from the idea behind it.  Lent is a season of preparation, a time of penance and austerity that grounds the effusiveness of Easter and its celebration of Jesus' resurrection.  We all can learn from penance and contemplation, from taking time to withdraw from or let go of that to which we normally cling, from giving up that to which we are accustomed to regularly do so as to make ourselves open to new insights into what life means.  As most religions, not just Christianity, observe, it is often only when we give up that we receive, that when we relinquish that we really learn what existence is all about.  What will we learn from in constant abundance?
     Lent is a way to take ourselves into the real rawness and fragility of what it is to be human.  In Lent, we see afresh that being human is recognizing that we live in delicate balance between achievement and denouement, glory and brokenness, magnificence and tragedy.  It is a way to see that though we rejoice in the grace given us, we should grasp ever more powerfully the tremendous weight of its price.  Lent tells us that we have our abundance only because God gave up, for a season, his own.

     Who is a child of God?  As a working term, "children of God" gets bandied around quite a bit.  Politicians use it, preachers use it, social media uses it, a cult born in the fervor of the American Sixties called itself by that name (now it calls itself Family International).  Countless people either want to think that they are children of God or want to convince others that they are or one day can be such a person, a child of God.  Many, many people want to think that they are in a special familial relationship with their creator.
     And why not?  Knowing that one enjoys a unique bond with her creator, knowing that when everyone has abandoned oneself, God has not, that is, knowing that across the vast span of space and time oneself is the object of a special divine concern is a highly comforting prospect, an enduring source of solace on the often dark structures of life's playgrounds.  It offers a beacon of hope, a light in the fog of existence's challenges.
     Many will say, however, is that being a child of God is a state into which one does not enter voluntarily, but one into which one must be invited, that is, a condition that one does not possess merely by dint of being a human being.  Viewed through the analogy of a family, this makes sense:  no one can decide to whom she will be born.  Taken another way, however, it gives us pause:  setting aside that many people, unfortunately, never know their earthly father and mother, the rest of us cannot really say we are someone's child until we are aware of who our parents are, until we grasp the fact of our relationship with them.
     So it is, I suggest, with God.  If we wish to think we are children of God, we ought to know precisely whom this God is.  And to know precisely whom this God is, we must actively seek to know him.  We must ask him to talk to us, ask him to reveal himself to us.  We must ask him to unfold, on his terms, who he is (and can be) to us.  We cannot make God as he wish him to be and imagine that we are his child; rather, we must allow God to show himself to us as he actually is, then seek relationship with him.
     The good news here is that God dearly wants us to know him.  After all, that's why he gave us Jesus:  divinity's picture before us.  We need only to open the door.

     Can you forgive?  In 1 Corinthians 13, the apostle Paul writes, "Love bears all things, believes all things, endures all things."  Regardless of how we feel about a person or a wrong act which that person may have committed, we are to bear, we are to believe.  We are to believe in kindness, we are to believe in the worth of our fellow human being, we are to believe in God.
     As we must:  it is God's presence that makes forgiveness possible.  If God did not exist, forgiveness could not exist, either.  Without God, as even one who does not believe readily points out, we live in an utterly amoral universe:  there's no way to know real right, there's no way to know real wrong.  Neither love nor hate mean anything, anything at all.  We don't even know what pain and hurt are.  How can we define, much less know them other than our own subjective experience?
     Indeed--and ironically--when we forgive, when we let go of our resentment and anger, when we step out of our pain, when we decide that we can move on, we in fact affirm the reality of something bigger than we, the fact of a larger force in the universe, a greater presence in the cosmos.  We affirm the reality of God.
     And a love greater than we can possibly imagine.
    

    Watching my nearly nineteen year old cat the other day, I wondered, for the umpteenth time, what he is thinking as he ambles about the house.  Does he know he's old?  Does he know he's a cat?  Does he know he's here--or what "here" means?
     Hard to say, I guess.  But I doubt whether he has any idea of what it means to be old, and I doubt whether he knows he's a cat, and although I believe he knows he is "here," it is probably not in the same sense that you and I know that we are "here."
     On the other hand, how do we know we're "here"?  We only know we're here because we are not anywhere else.
     But how would we know?
     Only as we are in "something" can we think that we are in "something" in turn.  Put another way, if somethingness wasn't here, how could anything else be?
     But only a "someone" would know to do that--like God.
    

     Perhaps few people have been so convinced of the greatness of humanity (and the absence of God) as the twentieth century anarchist Emma Goldman, whose fiery speeches and voluminous literary output spurred on countless movements to set workers and, in truth, all humanity free, free from its oppressive bosses, free from its restrictive governments, free from its social conventions and, most importantly, free from religion.
     An unrepentant atheist, Ms. Goldman once wrote in The Philosophy of Atheism, which she published in 1916, that, "Atheism in its negation of gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty," and that, "Under the lash of the Theistic idea, this earth has served no other purpose than as a temporary station to test man's capacity for immolation to the will of God."
     On the one hand, it's not difficult to disagree with Ms. Goldman.  Wrongly interpreted, religion does tend to reduce our existence on this earth to a way station, a stepping stone to something much greater but which, absent a direct vision or attestation, cannot be fully proven.  In addition, religion, as it has sometimes been interpreted, tends to denigrate the human being, claiming that humans are little more than the spittle of the divine.  Also, needless to say, religion has, alas, been responsible for countless pain and wars throughout history.
     On the other hand, rightly interpreted, religion has brought immense joy and happiness and meaning to millions, perhaps billions of human beings.  It has also provided many answers to ultimate questions.  Religion has brought hope.  While this of course doesn't make religion true, it certainly proves its worth in the human experience.  Religion is not wholly without merit.
     Ms. Goldman asserts that atheism is the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty.  Countless adherents of religion would assert this about religion, too.  But we can't have it both ways.  If humanity is solely material, how can it have eternal longings?
     It's hard to escape eternity.

     What is the price of life?  For some, it is death.  " . . . Somewhere up here, in that vast wilderness of ice and rock, were two still forms.  Yesterday, with all the vigour and will of perfect manhood, they were playing a great game--their life's desire.  Today, it is over, and they had gone, without their ever knowing the beginnings of decay.  Could any man desire a better end?"
     So opined, as recorded in Wade Davis's masterful Into the Silence, his chronicle of the early twentieth century British Empire's attempts to climb Mt. Everest, one of the members of the nation's 1924 expedition to the mountain, thinking about his fellow climbers George Mallory and Sandy Irvine, who earlier that day had evidently perished high up on the slopes of the peak.  Perhaps best known from his famous retort, when asked why he climbed a mountain, "Because it is there," George Mallory was Britain's finest climber of the era, lithe, competent, visionary, and utterly fearless.  Everest was his life long dream, the goal that drove all others.  He lived to climb it.
     He also died, living to climb it.  Yet as his companion observed, Mallory died in his prime, died, as his companion put it, "playing a great game--[his] life's desire . . . without ever knowing the beginnings of decay."  Mallory died before life could die with him.  Though death became, as it does all of us, his final master, it came before it could undermine the sense of life so dear to him.
     Some us are like Mallory.  We want to die before, as the Who put it in My Generation, we "get old," to die in the midst of a rich and fulfilling life, prior to bodily decay.  Others of us want to live as long as we can, regardless.  Yet if there is nothing after this life, either choice falls into an unspeakable nothingness:  it matters, but does it, really?  We come, we go, our desires a game that's over.
     Maybe life's decay--or its early demise--tells us that life is more than life itself.  Maybe life's decay, its essential rhythm of birth and death, speaks to a richer truth:  life cannot be life unless there is a greater life beyond it.  Where would it be?
     Otherwise, yes, the price of life is death--and death.  And who really thinks he or she can live with that?

     What's in a voice?  Plenty:  our voice defines and expresses who we are.  Never has this been more true in the life of Jack Kerouac, the American author most famous for his existentialist travel classics On the Road and Big Sur.  Author Joyce Johnson, who at one point in her life had a relationship with Kerouac, titled her newly released biography of her long ago friend The Voice is All.  Using careful and well informed research, Ms. Johnson paints a memorable portrait of Kerouac as a person who struggled to find his voice, his muse, his authorial vision, the unfolding of the contents of his thought, the numerous twists of his life, relationships, and longings.  And as anyone who has read his travel classics knows, he succeeded brilliantly.
     As expressive beings, we are born with the capacity--and desire--to give voice to what we think, consider, and feel, to make concrete the innards of our person.  We all want to, in some way, to announce ourselves; we all want to, in some way, to make ourselves known, to give voice to who we in ourselves are, our unique manifestation of being amidst a vast and nebulous sea of human beingness.
     And why not?  Each of us is wonderful, special, and unique.  There is no one, absolutely no one, who is exactly like us.  And there is no one, absolutely no one, whose voice, whose expression of life's wonder is precisely like our own.  The universe is ours to know, the universe is ours to share.  It speaks, and so must we.  Otherwise, we're nothing.
     Imagine a voiceless universe, a universe with no reason to speak:  who would give it speech?
     To wit:  only one from whom all things come.
    

     Is belief in God simply "emotional reality?"  In a book (Unapologetic:  Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Emotional Sense), he published recently, author Francis Spufford observes that for all of its seeming intellectual conundrums (and any honest Christian will admit that there are many), Christianity remains, for many people, a way of addressing the fundamental emotional needs of human beings.  Only Christianity, he suggests, gives people an affirming way to come to grips with their questions about meaning and longing.  Why?  Because it recognizes that although we human beings are creatures who think with rationality and reason, we are also thoroughly emotional beings.  We think, we emote and, significantly, it is often in those emotions that we see the limitations of our reason.
     So did the European Romantics observe in the dawning years of the nineteenth century, so did the German theologian Frederick Schleiermacher note as the century drew to a close.  We worship reason, but we cannot escape our emotions.
     Imbedded in the Greek word often translated as spiritual or spirituality is the root logiki, denoting, among other things, reasonablness.  Spirituality is reasonable.  Spirituality is reasonable because it understands that people are rational as well as emotional beings.  It speaks to the fullness of what it means to be human.
     Hence, though some may claim that spirituality, particularly Christian spirituality, forces people beyond the boundaries of reason, it is in fact viewing reason as it ought to be viewed.  People long for the spiritual and the beyond because their reason tells them that this existence, with all its intimations of transcendence and eternity, cannot be all there is.
     We can argue about whether Christianity is the most true religion (though I have every reason to believe that it is), but we cannot dispute the necessity of spirituality in the human experience.
     Enjoy your fullness.

     Who has seen Frankenstein (the original one?  Starring the unforgettable Boris Karlof in one of the most famous movies of Hollywood's so-called Golden Era, Frankenstein is a portrayal of an experiment gone awry, a vain but misguided attempt to create life in a lab with, as the human portagonist puts it, "my own hands."
     Though the movie is decidedly different from Mary Shelley's nineteenth century fascinating gothic novel, both novel and movie ask a critical question:  what is life?  What is this existence we experience, this free flowing rush of unrequested consciousness, this all too brief moment of physical form and mental sentience?  What, really, is it?  And how can we know it?
     These are immense and timeless questions, yes, and movie and novel attempt to come to grips with them, weaving their plots around the implications of a humanity who is capable of making itself.  What if we can create our own lives?  What have we accomplished?
     We will have demonstrated that we can indeed make life.  But we will have also demonstrated that we are far from the creators we imagine ourselves to be.  We have life, but we still have not really defined it, or answered why it exists.
     How can one who has been created create, much less, apart from a creator's help, understand that from which he came?

     How are we spirit?  In his classic work Matter and Memory, French philosopher Henri Bergson suggests that memory is the key.  In order for us to to fully understand memory, he suggests, we must turn to the realm of spirit, the etereal and beyond, the realm that we instinctively know is there, but which we cannot see or hear in the present moment.  Why?  Memory, he notes, is something that we experience, but cannot aurally see; we know it, but we do not materially perceive it.  Like spirit.
     Subsequent research on memory (Bergson published his book in 1910) has demonstrated that memory is indeed much more than meets the eye, but such research still cannot decide how we experience it.
     To wit, when we step into the fleeting transcendence of memory--and we all do--we see that our brains work in ways that we cannot always fully comprehend, that maybe, just maybe we need more than our cerebral folds to understand who we are.
     Enter spirit.

     "We can be heroes, we can be heroes," sings David Bowie, "we can be heroes just for one day."  As I watched Bowie sing this song many years ago, I watched his audience, too:  everyone in the crowd seemed to be singing along with him, the entirety of their being expressing his or her wish that, for just one day, he or she could be a hero, and swim, as Bowie puts it, "like the dophins [through the sea]."
     It is a thoroughly human dream:  we all want to be heroes, we all want to take hold of a destiny, we all want to be free, free to make the world for us, free to capture our life wonder.  And so we should.  We are made for destiny, we are made for vision.  We are made to be, as Bowie offers once more, "kings and queens."
     Not kings and queens in a literal sense, of course, but kings and queens of humanness, the kings and queens we were created, in God's image, to be:  kings and queens, heroes of the world, the most heroic dolphins of the sea.
     Seize the moment, be a hero, and swim in the ocean, but be mindful of the moment, for it is only God's heroics, his loving and selfless sacrificial work and eternal presence in Jesus, that enabled it to be.
     Every hero needs a home.

     For those of us who struggle with balancing the idea of human free will and divine causation, that is, how can we say we choose if, as some Protestant traditions hold, God has ordained all things anyway?, perhaps we can, though realizing that we will never resolve it fully, look at this way.  If we insist that we exercise free will in a universe devoid of divine causation, a universe in which everyone is "free" to function in any way that he "chooses," we bump into two problems.  One, what does it mean to be free in a universe that is supposedly already free?  Two, and this is occasioned by the first, if the universe is entirely devoid of any element of external origin, guidance, or order, how, we must ask, if we continue, as must do, to insist that it is subject to a rhythm of cause and effect, did it ever come to be a place subject to such in the first place?
     How did "cause" emerge when there was none there?