Today, we stand in the shadow of nothingness.  But nothingness is, as many existentialists have observed, is a path to somethingness, a somethingness that bequeaths a powerful newness, a newnesss of deeper life and richer meaning.
     Nowhere is this more true than on Easter Sunday.  In the absolute nothingness of Jesus' death, the Son of God abandoned by his Father, the greatest of all somethingnesses arose, a somethingness that eclipses all others, a somethingness that changed history, bent space, and permanently altered all our notions of meaning and time:  the resurrection.
     The resurrection is the greatest of somethingnesses because it is what only God can do, that is, to bring, from the fiercest and vilest nothingness of deaths, a life that will never now end.  It's nonsensical, its unbelievable, it's unfathomable, but it is entirely true:  how now can nothingess ever be the same?

     "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends."  So said Jesus, Jewish Messiah and, as he constantly made clear, the son of God, on the eve of his crucifixion.  Most of us know how Jesus would, in a few short hours, demonstrate his words in tangible form by dying on a Roman cross for, as he had long proclaimed he would do, all humanity, billions and billions of people, people who had already lived and died, people who were living, people who had not yet even been born.
     Not as many of us, however, know about Maximilian Kolbe who, in his own way, did exactly the same thing.
     Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish priest who was imprisoned at one of the most notorious of the German concentration camps, Auschwitz.  In an act of selfless sacrifice that will be remembered for many ages to come, Kolbe willingly came forward to serve the death sentence of another prisoner, one Franciszek Gajowniczek, whom he had not even met.  After two weeks of slow dehydration and starvation, Kolbe finally died when the guards injected him with carbolic acid.  Gajowniczek, who died in 1995, devoted the rest of his life to telling the world about Kolbe's incredible sacrifice.
     Kolbe surely exemplified Jesus' words.  He willingly and happily died for another human being. As did Jesus for us.  As the Christian world remembers Good Friday, that darkest yet most sacred day on the liturgical calendar, all of us should therefore ask, with joy, gratitude, and astonishment:  what kind of a God would do such a thing?

     Life is about remembering, really, remembering past in present, remembering the present as it becomes the future.  Memory holds our lives together; there's really nothing outside of it.  Yet in an odd sort of way, memory itself is outside of time.  As Marcel Proust put it in his masterpiece of reflection, In Search of Lost Time (sometimes translated as Remembrances of Thing Past), memory is "fragments of existence removed outside the realm of time."  If memory is outside time, however, where precisely is it?  It's here, but it's not here, either.
     Now think back to the beginning of all things, to a time when, depending on one's perspective on origins, there was either nothingness, an absolute blackness of darkness, or there was God.  And nothing else.  But where was either one?  They were there, but where?
     Like memory.  It's here, but where?  We perceive it, we experience it, we sense it, but we do not know "where" it is.  We just know that, in some way, it "is."
     Perhaps that is one reason why memory is so dear.  Memory reminds us that that on which we depend to make sense of our existence, that is, our sense of imagination, place, and time is as ephemeral, yet as real as we are.  It's beyond us, yet it's within us, too, fragments of what we once knew, and now, in an as yet not fully understandable way, know again.
     So existence.  It's here, it's there, but "where" is it here?  What's beyond its darkness?  Though it is difficult to say precisely, today, Maundy Thursday, we can say this:  it will never be darkness we cannot overcome.  Always, always, there is the love of God.

     From where does time come?  A recently released "heat" map that depicts the universe as it appeared only 370,000 years after the Big Bang, suggests that time began at the point at which space, buried in a sort of indefinable "nothingness," its potentiality nascently at hand, somehow burst forth, spreading the beginnings of the universe across the space it was creating.
     But this does not answer our question.  We're still left with understanding why anything, anything at all ever began to be.  More to the point, we did not create time, we cannot destroy time, we cannot control time.  We only experience it as a function of the space (another, as we pointed out above, mystery) we necessarily occupy.  We have no say about what it and the space which it intrinsically animates ultimately holds.  We are only here, living by perceptions and appearances, our vision clouded by who we are.  In other words, we live by faith, faith in the materiality of our world, faith in the passage of our times, faith in our presence.
     As more than one New Testament writer pointed out, however, living by faith involves more than exercising faith in what is visible.  It also encompasses faith is what is not.  Why?  We simply cannot know truth through appearances alone.
     What we can know about time's origins is that time is merely the outward expression of a greater mystery still, the fullness of whose purposes will ever lie beyond us.  It's not a mystery we can understand through mere appearances.
     On the other hand, it is through appearances that we can come to know it.  Embedded in existence is a fundamental rhythm, a natural flow, that is, things are born, things come to die, things are born in turn.  These are appearances in time, yes, but they are also appearances that communicate to us a most remarkable fact about the world:  it is born in time, it will die in time, but one day, thanks to that most profound of paradoxes--the resurrection appearance, in time, of Easter morning--it will be forever freed of time.
     And on that day, life will really begin.
     So marvel about time, and wonder about its origins; marvel even more, however, that one day time will no longer exist.  The mystery will be complete.

     Does religion need God?  In an excerpt from his soon to be published Religion Without God that appeared in the April 4 edition of The New York Review of Books, the late Ronald Dworkin observes that, among other things, "Human life cannot have any kind of meaning or value just because a loving god exists," and that "a god's existence can be shown to be either necessary or sufficient to justify a particular conviction of value only if some independent background principle explains why."
     Well, if Mr. Dworkin wants to say that meaning or value does not flow out of the fact of a loving god, then he cannot say that a god's existence will only justify value if an independent background principle explains why.  To the point, if there is no god, there is no basis for value, anyway, an eventuality to which any clear minded unbeliever would assent.  In the absence of a basis for value, there then cannot be an "independent background principle;" if such a thing existed, we would need to assume the fact of value, something that we have already seen that we cannot do without a God.  In short, there is no value without purpose, and there is no purpose, that is, purpose that is purpose greater than itself, without God.  We cannot have it both ways.  However, we assert value, we cannot realistically assert it with also asserting the fact of God.  In a blank universe, where else would we find it?
     Even more, and we may ponder this ever more closely this week of all weeks of the calendar year, even if we insist that value is the work of an empty universe (which it clearly cannot be), we are still left with just that, an empty universe, a universe without a heart.  How can we therefore fathom love, that most precious of all human experiences, if we have never been loved to begin with?
     Jesus had it right when, crucified, wracked with pain, and feeling utterly abandoned by the one he loved most, he cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34).  Jesus knew that a world without God is no world at all.
     So, too, is religion without God.  We'll never find our home.

     In terms of medical news, many of us, physician Robert Abramson, writing in a recently New York Times op-ed article, have grown accustomed to a "wait and see" attitude.  We go to the doctor, receive a potentially troubling diagnosis and are then told to come back in six months for a follow-up, to see whether it is really so.  We live for the future, the future that we hope will bring better news than the present.  But we really never know.
     Dr. Abramson is absolutely correct:  we really never know about the future.  His solution is to appreciate what we have in the here and now and allow it to "teach us to be present in" it.  Yet finite as we are, we still live in contingency, hanging in an epistemological abyss, never able to fully reconcile ourselves to our fate.  So we "wait and see."
     At the end of our lives, however, what will we be waiting to see?  The end?  Or more to the point, an absolute end?  If this is so, we will have lived even the most immensely full lives just and only to see them, one unavoidable day, end.  Is that really the sum of existence?  Is that it?
     Impossible:  our sense of purpose, our irrepressible sense of purpose, redounds against it.  Possibility must ever remain.  As the rebirthed natality of Easter shines ever more brightly this week, let us remind ourselves that in a universe of purpose even that most fearsome of possibilities, death, is but a new beginning.  One day, we will not "wait and see."  We will only "see."

     What is the will of God?  As Christians around the world move closer to Passion Week, the universally agreed upon, I suspect, most intense portion of Lent, many have undoubtedly found occasion to read Jesus' words in the Garden of Gesthsemane, recorded in all three synoptic gospels--Matthew, Mark, and Luke--to God, namely, "Father, if it is possible, let this cup [his impending and certain crucifixion] pass from me; yet not as I will, but as you will," and asking themselves this question:  can I be this unreservedly committed, too?
     Did Jesus ask that his own will be fulfilled?  No.  He asked that God's will be fulfilled.  But this gets us no closer to answering our question:  what is the will of God?  The key is, I think, to picture God's will not as something to find but as something into which we come, something that we, if we strive earnestly to rid ourselves of all hopes and intentions of self and self-aggrandizement, will come to see.  God's will is often something we least expect to find, much less see, but that's its beauty:  we have nothing to do with its genesis or meaningfulness.  Finding God's will is more a function of our willingness to let go than of our ability to discern.  If we are looking, we may never see; but if we are simply willing, we probably will.
     Unlike us, Jesus knew all too well what God's specific will was for him.  And he wished that he could avoid it.  But that's not the point.  The point is that Jesus told God he accepted whatever would come.  As should we.  We wander in this world largely blind, really, confused and bewildered creatures who, through no choice of our own, found ourselves with sentient existence, found ourselves with lives of hopes, ambitions, passions, and dreams.  We do not know what will come next.
     And we never will.  We'll never see everything.  In his humanness, Jesus didn't, either.  But he submitted; he opened himself to what he couldn't know.  Then he knew.
     Jesus had to first tell God that he couldn't before he could.  And in this is the will of God.

      What is our conscience?  Modern psychiatry tells us that it is the seat of moral decision, that indefinable "presence" in us that helps us weigh and assess the factors in a given moral choice.  Aswe moderns would have it, our conscience is therefore something that we do not create, nor is it something that we can destroy; it just is, talking to us--taunting us, some might say--about  about our choices.
     Such is the Western way.  From the days of the Greeks, those harbingers of reason and rationality on which we base nearly all of our government and science, and their notion that the conscience, suneidasis, is that by which we understand the moral contingencies, good and bad, about existence, we look to ourselves as the basis for our moral decisions.
     Not that we shouldn't; after all, we are rational and reasonable creatures.  We have the ability and power to make choices about our lives.
     The Hebrews, perhaps the most thoughtful of the people of the ancient Near East, believed this, too.  But they believed something else as well.  They believed that we derive our moral knowledge ultimately not from our own subjective experience but from the revelation of God.  For the Hebrew, to be moral was to be in relationship with God, to make moral choices on the basis of the thoughts and ideas he revealed to them.  Relationship was the starting point for moral decision.
     The Hebrews had a point.  Although we in the West have been generally successful in coming to grips with our moral dilemmas on the basis of individual and corporate consensus, we continue to encounter issues for which there are no easy answers.  While being in relationship with God may not produce ready answers, for trust in God comes with ambiguities of its own, it does tell us that, fallen and limited beings that we are, we cannot legitimately trust ourselves, and ourselves only to make moral decisions.  If we do, we are making them on the basis of ourselves, and we are, to reiterate, limited beings.  We assert moral probity on the basis of our moral probity (just as science constructs its propositions on the basis of the rationality and order it assumes about itself), hardly a reasonable construct.
     Again, relying on revelation carries its share of difficulties.  Yet if we are to assert the presence of value, then we cannot do without revelation:  conscience is only rational if it understands that it is only so because the universe is meaningful, and that it receives--the revelation of a meaningful God.

     It's raining today, raining steadily, gradually and inexorably melting away all the snow, exposing the beginnings of spring, offering a glimpse of the greatness to come, reminding us of the inexhaustibility of the created order, the possibility of possibility, the presence of form, and perhaps most importantly, the fact of purpose.  Do we really live in a blind universe, a universe with no reason to be here, no reason to exist other than, perhaps, that it is simply the best of all possible universes that could have existed?  If that is true, than we really have no explanation for why we are here other than that we are here, which, in truth, is no explanation at all (of course, in a world with no purpose, we cannot even speak of truth as truth, anyway).
     In the final hours of his life, Jesus, as his disciple John records it in the seventeenth chapter of his gospel account, spent a great deal of time praying and talking to God.  At one point he says, "Father [meaning God], I wish for my followers to see the glory which you have given me, for you loved me before the foundation of the world" (John 17:24).
     With a few words, Jesus captures the heart of the issue.  Because love--God the Father's eternal love--existed before the world came to be, those of us who inhabit this world can know that we are here because someone--not a mere something and surely not an inchoate nothingness--wished for us to be here.  There is a reason, a reason beyond that we just happened to exist, that we are here.
     And that's really what God wants for us to know as we approach the denouement of the Lenten season:  he loves us.  God loves us.  God is why we are here.  God is why we have Jesus, God is why we have forgiveness, God is why we are human.
     And Jesus is why we know God.

      Poor Anna Karenina, my mother used to say, poor Anna Karenina.  The tragic figure of Leo Tolstoy's towering nineteenth century novel of imperial Russia, Anna Karenina, wife of one of Russia's most influential politicians, made a fateful decision to yield to her impulses and consort with the dashing young general Vronsky, with immense consequences.  A child was born, the couple tried to live together, yet everywhere Anna went she was rejected by the society in which she had once traveled with such joy and aplomb.  No one wanted to mix with an adulterer.  For those who have not read the novel, I won't spoil it by disclosing the ending, other than to say that it was not a happy one.
     The eighth chapter of John's gospel presents a story, not found, as many New Testament scholars point out, in every New Testament manuscript but extant in enough to validate its inclusion in the biblical corpus, in which a woman has been caught in adultery.  As the woman's accusers prepared to throw stones at the woman (the prescribed punishment for adulterers in those times), they asked Jesus what they should do.  After waiting a few minutes, Jesus replied, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."  Freshly reminded of their own perfidy, the woman's accusers, one by one, dropped their stones and left.
     Jesus then turned to the woman and asked her, "Did no one condemn you?"  "No one," Lord, she replied.
     So Jesus said, "I do not condemn you, either.  Go.  From now on sin no more."
     We all know Anna Kareninas in our lives.  We all know people who, for various reasons, have given into their baser impulses and plunged themselves into a life of ignominy and sin.  Even if we disagree with what they did, however, we cannot stop loving them.  We cannot pretend that there is a place where God's love is not present.  We cannot pretend that there is someone without absolutely any purpose.  And we cannot ignore the fact of our own sin.
     Did Jesus overlook what the woman did?  No, he did not.  But he was willing to give her a another chance.  We should, too.  We should be willing to give everyone another chance.  We should be willing to believe in the enduring love of God.

     Why do things begin?  The obvious answer is, of course, that if things never begin, things that are here, us included, would not be here.  Things had to begin in order that things could be.  Conversely, however, if things did not begin, things would not end.
     Yet why must things end?  Why can not things begin and never end?  Maybe the seeming impossibility of this possibility accounts for in part why we finite beings have so much trouble grasping the notion of eternity.  We expect beginnings, we expect endings.  But we do not expect beginnings without endings.  Nor do we expect endings without beginnings.  Comprehending a condition with neither beginning nor end leaves us gasping for breath:  how can such a thing be?
     "Abandon all hope those who enter," reads, according to the narrator of Dante's Inferno portion of his Divine Comedy, a sign above Hell.  Though we may recoil at the horror of a juncture totally devoid of hope, we may recoil even more at the deeper truth that it implies:  a beginning without an end.  We of course wish for the brightest moments in our lives to continue indefinitely, but the darkest, well, we would wish that their time is short.  Yet we cannot have it both ways.  If the best has no end, the worst must, too.  If an eternity exists, it must exist in every way.
     Perhaps some find this frightening, perhaps some find it ludicrous.  As we draw ever closer to the final denouement of Lent, however, it makes perfect sense.  Why else would an eternal God have spoken, in the person of Jesus, to finite beings if eternity did not exist in every way?  Time cannot pop out of nothing, and space cannot emerge from emptiness.
     In the hourglass of eternity, things not eternal must begin.  They also must end.  Yet eternity must always remain, moral structure and all, boggling our senses and imaginations, yet underscoring for us that without it, nothing else can really begin.  Why else are we here?

     You may have heard about the Florida sinkhole that, a couple of weeks ago and without any warning, opened and sucked a totally unsuspecting person named Jeff Bush into the earth, never to return.  Though Jeff's brother tried desperately to save him, he could not.  In the space of a few minutes, Jeff vanished forever.
     Why, life?  What does it really mean, what does it really mean to be born, then die in the space of a bare moment, never to be seen again?  In a universe of nothingness, birthed and vanquished in absolute nothing, emerging and disappearing in pervasive stillness, birth and death are as evanescent as the wind, if we can even speak of such, questions and concepts beyond answer.
     Unless there is a God.

     Late last week, one of rock's guitar greats, Alvin Lee of Ten Years After, passed away at the age of 68.  As one who watched Alvin perform in his heyday, the glory days of rock, the late Sixties and early Seventies, I was saddened greatly, saddened that we would no longer hear Alvin play.  He was a marvel.  But now he's gone.
     In their album Cricklewood Green, Ten Years After did a song called "Circles."  It's a tale of life's circularity and fleetingness, of the pleasure of success, the joy of accomplishment, yet the corresponding emptiness of it all:  we're all going to die, anyway.
     Yes, we are all going to die, for that is part of being human.  And yes, while we are here, we will, we hope, find pleasure, experience joy, enjoy success.  Morbid as it sounds, however, Alvin's right:  in the end, it really means nothing, nothing really at all.
     But if life is a series of circles, why does it have beginnings?  Why does it have ends?  Beginnings cannot start on their own, and ends cannot come without beginnings.  And neither can be unless the circles of existence themselves begin.  Yet how can the circles begin--and end--unless something without beginning starts them and spins them, shaping them, turning them with purpose, hope, and meaning?
     Farewell, Alvin.  May we all come to see that our circles do not need to end, that beginning and end are present as well as presence, that beyond and below it all is a love, a passionate and eternal divine love that holds us all, here, there, today, tomorrow, forever.  All we need do is open our eyes.

     Do we live in an empty universe?  Is the universe really without a heart?  Norwegian poet Karl Ove Knausgaard may think so.  In his poem, God's Light Snow, he portrays the northern lights, that visually remarkable phenomenon of the Arctic which his land knows so well,  as conveying " . . . a sense of being at the very edge of the world and looking out at the endless, empty universe through which we are all careening."
     For the poet, the northern lights point us to the edge of the world, the end of the starscape, the terminus of what can be known, only to remind us that despite our material engagements, we are doing no more than careening through an empty universe, that however astonishing the lights may be, in the end they are mere snippets of flash and wonder astride an otherwise pointless existence.  We may want to look beyond them, but we cannot really do so, for there is nothing to see.  Vacuity reigns.
     If emptiness is the undertow of existence, then why do we see so much hope in it?  Do we really strive to grasp at the edge of what we know just to see that it means nothing?  Are we satisfied with this?  If the universe were really empty and we simply careening through it, we live forever in contradiction, wondering and marveling when we really have no right or cause to do so.
     It's hard to have heart in an empty universe.  It's hard to have heart without a God.

     Toward the beginning of Confessions, his famous memoir about his journey to the Christian faith, Augustine says this.  "You [that is, God] had then conceded to me that, should I have demonstrated that there was something above our spirits you would have recognized that such is God, if there was nothing found above that.  And I, accepting your admission, said that it were enough to make that demonstration.  Because, if there is something more excellent, that something is God, and if there is not, then already that same truth is God.  Both in the one case and the other, therefore, you cannot deny that God exists."
     What is Augustine saying?  Whether we say there is nothing greater than us, or whether we say that there is not something greater than us, we end up affirming the same thing:  there is a greater truth than we, a truth that we, though we think we define it, we only do so on the basis of the fact of ourselves, which becomes in itself, our ultimate truth.  We cannot live without a--the--truth.
     So ask yourself:  is it really us?

     As Lent continues apace and spring continues to surface, rejoice.  Rejoice in the wondrous blend of privation and plenty through which God shapes us, his creation, rejoice in those remarkable twists of unfathomability and clarity that come from believing in the splendor of an intelligence more vast than the widest sea.
     Rejoice in the inevitability and mystery of being human, rejoice in remembering God's picture of its perfection, for us, in us, in Jesus, God's son.  It's a marvelous world.

     With its steadfast assertion of the duty of every human being to live to the absolute fullness of her capacities, Ayn Rand's Fountainhead has encouraged countless people to maximally invest themselves in the story of their own existence.  Rand calls it "the virtue of selfishness," not selfishness in the sense of keeping one's toys from another, but selfishness that focuses foremost on developing oneself to her most complete.
     From this comes a famous idea, best summed up as, "I'll die for you but I won't live for you."  On the face of it, this seems a worthy way to view one's relationship with one's fellow human beings:  be ready to sacrifice oneself for others, but understand that everyone must live her own life, and that to the fullest.
     As far as we know, Rand went to her grave not believing in God.  Ironically, however, this thought provides an interesting twist to the Christian message.  Through Jesus, God, Christianity tells us, died for humanity's sins, taking on himself the penalty of humanity's guilt and wrongdoing so that he might grant people new life.  But in order to do that, God had to first live as a human being, to live as every human lives.  He had to live before he could die.
     Although we should be willing to die for our loved ones, and although we should live fully aware of each person's responsibility to be herself, we should also strive to live for each other, for the good of the humanity community, the welfare of the planet, its past, its present, its future.  Like God, we should live--and die--for the greatness (despite all our faults, flaws, and sin, but that's the point) of who we, beings with eternal purpose and meaning, are.
     We're in this together.

     Snowshoeing stories, redux . . . as I continue to spend some of my free time snowshoeing through the forests of the upper Midwest, moving quietly through the lingering stillness of winter, I am always struck by the unabashed freedom of the trail, the openendedness of trekking through the world as it most is, untouched by human building or appurtenance, alone, unscathed by mechanical noise and sound, pristine and apart.  I could snowshoe for days, really, each morning waking to the receding brumal darkness, the ever present challenge of snow and cold, breaking camp and moving on once again, stepping into new horizons and visions of natural wonder.  It is a feeling of eternality.
     Then I catch myself, reminding myself that this world is far from eternal.  But we still think about eternity, don't we?  We still tend to frame life in terms of eternity.  And it's hard for me to see how this wonder and longing is stimulated by things purely chemical:  how can the material produce thoughts of something which it is clearly not?  Does a rock ponder its lifetime?
     It's difficult to see how we material beings think about the immaterial without there being something in us that leads us to do so, something that is, well, immaterial and eternal, a necessarily personal eternal.  It's difficult to see how we come to ponder the eternal unless there is an eternal that is speaking itself to us.
     So psalmist says:  "The heavens are telling of the glory of God" (Psalm 19).

    Writing toward the end of his short life, the medieval theologian Boethius, most famous for his Consolation of Philosophy, observed of his reading audience that they "have forgotten [their] true nature."  They have forgotten, he claims, who they really are.  Although Boethius wanted his audience to pursue the good, the beatific vision of heaven and God, they had instead, he lamented, chosen to seek after the impermanent and transient, the evanescent things of this present world.  In short, they had missed the point of why they are here.  They were to live in the here and now, yes, but to live it for what it really is, the existence through which they would obtain, one day, eternal life.  They had forgotten their real destiny.
     Boethius' words beg the question:  who are we, really?  In an interesting new book called The Space Between, author Eric Jacobsen observes that, bottom line, we are creatures of community.  We are made to be in communion with other human beings.  But he also notes that we are more than that, for if we constitute ourselves solely on the basis of our social relations, we still do not know who we really are.  To know who we are, we need to be who we are as we are, as we are as individuals in community.  Communities without individuals are no more than cults.
     Yet Boethius is on the mark.  While it is true that we often find ourselves and individual completion in community, it is equally true that unless we participate in this community as people who are pursuing more than the evanescence of ourselves, we will find ourselves creating a spiral of fellowship and activity that, however fun it may be, in the end, misses the real point:  humanity is only fully complete in the God-filled eternity beyond it.

     Do miracles really happen?  It depends on what we mean by miracle.  For most of us, a miracle is an event that seems so totally amazing, so totally wonderful that we feel as if we cannot explain how or why it happened.  We're in awe.
     But we might not be willing to attribute it to God.
     For those of us who are religious or harbor religious sensibilities, however, a miracle, that is, an event beyond belief, is a work of God.  When a loved one suddenly recovers from a life threatening illness, so suddenly that it leaves even the doctors puzzling, or when, as a pair of missionaries once related to me, some people who broke into their home somehow failed to see them even though they were standing behind a glass door, we conclude that this is something that only God could do.
     Not that I would dispute that God could behind these things, but I observe that more often than not we believe these to be miracles because we believe in God.  If we didn't believe in God, we probably would not call them miracles.  Hence, at some point, our perceptions become subjective.
     Or do they?  One of the great gurus of Sikkhism once noted that, "The greatest miracle of all is the name of God.  The 'True Name' is the miracle of miracles.  I know of no other miracles."
     The guru had a point.  If we believe that God is the greatest miracle, that the name and fact of God is the most wondrous thing of all, then we have every reason to conclude that the extraordinary events of this life have an extraordinary origin.  We have every reason to suppose that they are of God.
     And why not?  Without the fact of God, we would have no perception of extraordinary, no measure of content or wonder, for nothing would mean anything, anyway.  Miracles affirm the presence of hope, confirm the fact of meaning, establish the idea of a living and active and loving God.  And that, as the guru wisely noted, is indeed the greatest miracle of all.

 

     Imagine a world without sacrifice.  Imagine a world in which no one, absolutely no one gave up even a second of her energy, money, or time for another human being.  Imagine how that be.  Would it not be a very dark world?  Would it not be a world in which you probably would not want to live?
     As you go forth today, ask yourself this:  why do I live, even for a second, for another human being?  Then ask yourself this:  why would anyone do the same for me?
     We really are more than chemicals.
     Now:  ask yourself why.

     "So you think you can tell Heaven from Hell?" asked the British rock band Pink Floyd many years ago, for, it continues, "we're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year . . . "
     We are all happy we are here.  But if we're all in a fish bowl, swimming but really going nowhere, moving along but never being able to stop, living because to do otherwise is to die, how do we indeed assess the value of anything we do?  We're trapped in a world of our making, happy, but not knowing why we are here, not knowing what it all means, much less being able to conceive or fathom the existence or difference between heaven and hell.
     Yet we all wonder.  We all wonder, at one point in our lives, what might be beyond us.  But we won't get any answers in a fish bowl.  We will only learn the limits of our limits.  We will only know if we can somehow, like the protagonists in Plato's famous allegory of the Cave, break out of our limits, topple our boundaries.  Then we will see, really see the nature of the beyond about which we all wonder.
     What will we see?  While we may well see whatever we are expecting to see, if we have really broken out of everything we know, we will, logically, see something that we do not expect to see, possibly something that defies and exceeds all our expectations.
     Why else would we look?  Revelation, that is, transcending material and information we previously did not know, will only appear to those who believe they have exhausted every other limit of knowing.  We won't see unless we decide we will.