The latest issue of Rolling Stone contains a poignant article about a person named Tomas Young, a veteran of the Iraq War, who is in such intense pain from various war injuries that next month, in May, he plans to unplug his feeding tube and die.  Although they understand, his wife and friends wish that he would not, that he would decide to live and continue to inspire them with his example of steadfastness in the face of immense hardship and pain.
     What would you tell Mr. Young?  Would you tell him to live?  Would you tell him to die?  It's hard to say.  His life is a living caldron of pain.  Regardless of how we view the nature of this life, that is, whether we believe it to be the only one or merely the beginning of another, we might say the same thing.  Why?  If we believe this life is the only one, then we might want Mr. Young to keep going, for he will never be "going" again.  It's his only shot at existence, pain and all.  But if we believe that this life is the ground of another one, then we might also want him to keep going, for the only reason that there is another life is that there is a God who gave us this life in the first place.  Either way, we are not our own.  We did not ask to be born.
     Eternal or not, life is an unspeakably fragile and precious gift.  Absent the love of God, however, all the pain of this life is just that:  pain without an explanation.  And then it's over.  Forever.
     It's probably too easy for me to say this, as I do not know the depth of his despair, but I hope that Tomas Young finds, before he goes, what life and God's love are really all about.

     Socrates, the almost mythical father of Greek philosophy (we only know about him from what his followers recorded about him), once told his listeners that the wisest person is the person who knows that he knows nothing.  In his terse and sardonic way, Socrates had things exactly right.  Consider these words from the book of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible (chapter three, verse eleven):  "God has set eternity into the human heart, yet so that no one can discover the work which God has done from beginning to the end."
     Socrates, like the writer of Ecclesiastes, understood that although we humans are made to discover and explore, we are equally unable to learn everything we want to know.  Our finitude redounds against it.  Socrates did not disparage exploration and questing, yet he was quick to advise that, in the end, it will not produce totality of explanation.  How can contingent creatures master the permanent?  We may acquire vast amounts of knowledge, not a bad thing, but until we realize our worldly limitations, we will not know that which is the most important knowledge of all, namely, that we will never know everything--and that because of this we really know nothing.
     And oddly enough, it is that which we cannot know that is most important.  To wit, if we, small as we are, in ourselves could know something, how important could it really be? It's important in its time and place, yes, but how important is it, really?  It's often what we do not, indeed, cannot, in ourselves, know, that proves to be the thing that we should most know.  We walk amidst contingencies and realities we cannot possibly fully comprehend.
     God, and life, are bigger than we can possibly imagine.  Why otherwise are we here?

     From the rather depressing but entirely sage observations of Sartre yesterday, we come to those of his, though unintended, progenitor, Soren Kierkegaard, today.  To wit, as Kierkegaard observed, "If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundations of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is significant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all--what then would life be but despair?"
     Kierkegaard's words are well put, and I think Sartre would agree with them.  Without eternity, life really is about despair.  It's great, but it ultimately has no point.  It's here, yes, it's good, yes, but we still do not know why it is here, why it happened, why it is here rather than not.  Why life?  Though we can live insisting that we do not need to know these things, to do so is not being fully honest about who we are.  We all want to know why we are here.  We're human.
     Put another way, we cannot be fully human without being fully committed to knowing what it is to be human.  Otherwise, we are asking questions about everything, but the most important thing:  why are we anything at all?
     And this is a question that "anything" cannot answer.  The only way that "what is" can explain why it is, is by using what it is to do so.  It's a circle, a circle without an explanation.
     So we ask this question:  is life really no more than Sartre's vision of a vast, bottomless passion?

     Jean Paul Sartre, the French existentialist, achieved lasting international fame in the early part of the twentieth century by suggesting that although humans are frightfully lonely creatures living in a thoroughly empty world, they are nonetheless responsible to live authentic lives.  Even if we have no meaning, we are still here, Sartre insisted, still here and living on this forgotten and forsaken planet and are therefore called to do the best we can with it.
     Sartre captured the heart of the human dilemma.  Even if we do not know why we are here, we nonetheless recognize that we are here and that, in most instances, we would rather be here than not.  Better to live in a meaningless world than to not live at all.  Better to live authentically than not.
     So every day becomes a grand adventure, a grand voyage of discovery, a journey into, as Sartre put it, the "new," the better, the next.  We go through life, living, breathing, delighting, challenging, basking, and enjoying, seemingly without end. It sounds very wonderful and entirely logical.
     On one hand, it is.  One day, however, life does end.  One day, it is over, never to return.  It's been fun, we think, it's been glorious, but now it's over.  Forever.
     Is that all we really want? 

     Is God explanation for pain?  Or he is simply solace?  After interviewing many evangelical Christians, sociologist T. H. Luhrman (who, by her own account, is not a Christian) concludes that, by and large, the latter is more true.  In time of tragedy and pain, most evangelicals, or at least the ones she interviewed, do not necessarily look to God to explain why such tragedy has happened but rather to affirm their conviction that he is with them as they endure it.  God is their comfort, their balm, their hope.  He is that on which they lean for safe journey through the pain.
     Luhrman's findings seem logical:  in the end, humans are creatures not so much of the mind as of the heart.  On the other hand, I suggest that although God can indeed provide comfort in pain, the reason that he can be experienced as such is that, in the very big picture, he is also its explanation.  He is solace precisely because he is explanation, that dimension of mental assent that undergirds the decisions and choices of the heart.  Indeed, if all God is, is solace, he is no more than an emotional crutch, a projection of a distraught heart.
     Of course, as every evangelical Christian (and perhaps countless other people as well) knows, God may not make his explanation known, not today, not tomorrow, maybe never, at least in this life.  That's one of the continuing frustrations of finitude.  But if we believe in an ordered universe--which I wager that most of us do--we are also saying that, though we might not like to admit it, all things will ultimately make sense.
       Why otherwise bother with God?

     Maybe, just maybe, spring has finally come to the northern regions of the world.  Maybe, just maybe, the privations of winter are winding down and giving way to the abundance of spring.  It will and it must:  God, and the balance and tilt of the Earth guarantee it.  Spring will come.
     And when it does, we rejoice.  We rejoice in the newness, we rejoice in the verdancy, we rejoice in the appearance of new life.  We rejoice in the power of the earth to, once again, rejuvenate and revive itself for our joy and wonder.  It's like a resurrection.
     The writer of Proverbs 27 observes that, "When the grass disappears, the new growth is seen."  Winter can be hard, winter can be harsh, and winter can be long, very long, rife with dissolution and vanishing, departure and hopelessness.  Even in the most tropical regions of the world, however, though spring, fall, and winter do not occur in the way they do in northern regions, "grass" nonetheless disappears.  Things die, things go away, things change.  And newness comes.  It's the rhythm of existence, the song of life.
     While we may not enjoy winter, personal, meteorological, or otherwise, we walk in winters, small and large, every day, for in winters is the stuff of living, the glorious and aching mess of being alive, the raw material with which God fashions, in ways we rarely foresee, our springs.
     As the apostle Paul puts it in his first letter to the church at Corinth, the seed that falls to the ground cannot germinate unless it, now detached from its moorings, slips into the ground--no longer seen--and dies.  A seed's death is the winter that brings spring.
     Rejoice in the disappearance, rejoice in the newness.  Rejoice in a world that has both.

     "Seek peace, and pursue it," says the psalmist (Psalm 34).  As America and the Western world continue to reel from the recent bombing attacks in Boston, and the surviving suspect in the bombings continues to struggle for life, it becomes ever more important for us to strive to maintain peace among ourselves.  Leading Muslim leaders across the West have openly denounced the attacks and made very clear that they reject the brand of Islam which the bombers appear to have been practicing.  Theirs (the leaders) is an Islam of peace and comity, an Islam which seeks to get along and to take its rightful place among the great religions of the world.  Theirs is a perspective which we all must remember, one that views America as a place open to all manner of religion, a place where people are free to practice whatsoever religion--or lack thereof--they choose (so long as such practice does not descend into violence).  They love Allah as much as Christians love God.
     Besides, Christians who believe all Muslims are violent individuals need look no further than Christians who shoot and kill doctors who do abortions to see hypocrisies--horrific hypocrisies--of their own.  Every religion has its extremists.  Every religion has its excesses.  Every religion is populated with people who are decidedly less than perfect.  No one stands alone in righteousness.
     As Jesus admonished long ago, "Do not judge, lest you yourself be judged."

     After dealing with a glitch on my computer's network, I write and publish once more . . . to ask this question:  is there purpose?  In a debate that appeared on public television recently, Lawrence Kraus, author of A Universe from Nothing, and Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine, squared off against Dinesh D'Souza, author of What's So Great About Christianity?, and Ian Hopkins, a professor of nuclear physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, over this question:  does science refute God?
     In case you're wondering, according to audience vote, Kraus and Shermer won.  But that's not the point here.  The larger issue is a statement that Kraus made toward the close of the debate.  He stated that to ask why is to suggest purpose, that is, to ask why is to assume or imply that purpose exists.  To this, he is absolutely right.  When we ask why, about anything, we are assuming that either we, the object of our question, the world, or one or all of these things has purpose, that it has a point.  What if, he then asked, there is no purpose?
     Unfortunately, Kraus contradicts himself.  Assuming that there is no purpose ironically assumes in turn that there is.  Why else would we ask?  Why would we ask about purpose if there was none to begin with?
     We wouldn't ask if we did think it necessary to do so.  But we ask anyway.  Why?  Clearly, if there is a reason we ask, it didn't come from us.  It's hard to explain why we ask about purpose when we insist that there is none to ask about.  So why are we here?  In ourselves, we will never know.  But we nonetheless think to ask.  Hence, the question actually becomes this:  how can there not be purpose?

     Where is God?  In the aftermath of the recent bombings in Boston, countless people have asked this question--and countless people have tried to answer it.  Two answers come very easily; one, God was never there, anyway; and two, God has always been here, regardless.
     Emotionally, neither answer is wholly satisfactory.  If God was never there to begin with, we have nowhere to go but ourselves to find hope and meaning in this tragedy.  For many of us, this works, though we are always left wondering:  why?  Why this?  Why now?  Yes, the world is unpredictable, yes, life is capricious; yet this doesn't necessarily make accepting things any easier.
     On the other hand, if God has always been here, we have somewhere else to go, beyond ourselves, for hope and meaning.  But if we do this, we are still left with the same question:  why?  Why, God?  Why, now?  What were you thinking?
     Unfortunately, we will never know, at least in this life.  As I write today, three people are now dead and many more are maimed for life.  Why?
     I struggle with this as much as anyone.  Though I can say that we live in a fallen and bent world, and though I can say that, in Jesus, God took on all the world's suffering, past, present, and future, redeeming it for all time, I am still left wondering:  why?
     Hard as it is, what I finally will do is trust, trust God.  Trust God that the world and its foibles are larger than I think, trust God that he is bigger than I imagine, trust God that, as Ecclesiastes puts it, God is heaven and I am on earth, trust God that his wisdom exceeds my own:  trust God that he is God.
     Is this easy?  Definitely not.  As philosopher Soren Kierkegaard observed, however, if faith is humanly possible and understandable, it would not ask us to do impossible things.
     Take a step into the unknown.

     How can something be present as well as absent?  Consider the observation of writer Robert Nozick that, "We don't need to choose between presence and absence."  Although it may difficult to know precisely what Nozick means (he has written extensively on nothing and nothingness), if we set it into the framework of our question, we come to some intriguing conclusions.
     Clearly, from any rational standpoint, we all experience presence.  We all experience being "here," we all experience exchange with other things that are "here" as well.  We may not be able to "prove" whether anything is here, for we would be using what we assume to prove what we also assume in turn.  But we know that we have some sort of experience of, as the philosopher Martin Heidegger put it, beingness.
     Yet with equal clarity, we can assert that we all experience absence.  We all experience a loss of presence, in some form, in the course of our lives.  Privation is intrinsic to existence.  But can we experience both presence and absence simultaneously?
     Think about memory.  We remember, as presence, yet we do not see such memory, as presence.  Physically, it is no longer with us.  But we sense its presence, absent yet present.  And we go on.
     Now think about faith.  If we believe in something, whatever it may be, we believe in its fact, its presence, now or future.  We believe in it even if it is now absent.
     In an old parable that recounts the tale of a person's journey--his life journey--with God, the author pictures a pilgrim walking along a long and lonely beach, land spreading out endlessly, oceans spilling into infinity, and wondering about whether God is with him, for he does not seem to really know.  He can't see him.
     At journey's end, after the passage of death, the pilgrim comes face to face with God, and asks God, "Where were you?"
     "Ah, my child," God replies, "I was with you all the time.  Did you not see my footsteps?"
     "No, Lord," the pilgrim answered.  "Where were they?"
     "In every moment of your life, child," God responds.  "You just didn't see them."

     A few days ago, I had the good fortune to meet up with an old friend who happened to be in town enroute to another destination.  Next month, I learned, she is traveling to Spain to "continue" her camino to Santiago de Compostela.  It is one of the oldest pilgrimages in Europe.  "I am a pilgrim," she told me.
     "What do you hope to find," I asked her.  "What do you hope to hear?"
     "Some words from the Spirit around us," she replied.  "But I have to listen."
     Such words are well put.  We will not hear God (or, as she put it, the "Spirit") unless we listen, unless we set aside ourselves, our activities, our ambitions and plans, really, everything we are to hear him.  God is indeed everywhere, but we will not hear him unless everywhere we are we make room for him.  The first step in hearing is to listen.
     I know that my friend will find much in her pilgrimage, but I also am convinced that every one of us, whether we travel far or near, will find God in equally formative ways.  God speaks to us where we are at, and he speaks to us in ways uniquely shaped to us and our individual sensibilities.  After all, God wants us to hear him.  Why would he be silent? Why would he not want to communicate with us?  History overflows with pictures of God interacting with his human creation, even recording that at one point he went so far as to become a human (while remaining God) himself.
     So we open our hearts, empty our minds, and we listen.  We listen to what we cannot hear unless we are really hearing.  We listen for what is there, if only we really look.
     So well does God know the human heart.  Enjoy your journey.

     As some of you may know, Matthew Warren, son of well known evangelical pastor Rick Warren, perhaps most famous for his book The Purpose Driven Life, took his life last week.  According to a statement released by his father, Matthew had long suffered from depression and various other mental ailments.  Though I've not lost a child and can in no way approach the depth of the Warrens' sorrow, when I got the news of Matthew's passing, I found myself wondering, again, at the meaning of faith.  Rev. Warren reports that his son died, as would any evangelical Christian, believing that he was going to heaven, secure in the knowledge that eternity was real and true.  But as we all know, we do not see eternity; it is not something we can take off a shelf and hold and touch, like a cell phone.  But the Christian believes it anyway.  Why?  Though the reasons are legion, perhaps one of the most significant is that, considering the historical and philosophical alternatives, faith in eternity seems far more logical than faith in its absence.  What is time if there is not eternity?
     So while faith is indeed belief, it is equally the logic of belief; it's believing the logical to be true.  Enjoy the truth, Matthew Warren.

     "Go where you wanna go, do what you wanna do," sang the Fifth Dimension many years ago, capturing the heart of the generation, the counterculture of the American Sixties, for whom it was playing its music.  It's a call for freedom, freedom, as those of us who experienced that tumultuous era, of the profoundest kind.
     It's a grand vision, a vision of limits gone.  Oddly enough, however, given the parameters of this existence, we are only as free as our person, abilities, and circumstances allow us to be.  Even if we lived several lifetimes, and even if we had unlimited resources, we would likely not go everywhere we want to go, or do everything we want to do.  Things happen, things change, things become, and things go away, usually in ways that we will never be able to fully control.  Well should we wish to go everywhere we want to go and do everything we want to do, yet well we should realize our place on this planet.
     It is a sense of place that constitutes the ultimate picture of humility.  We understand our person, we understand our limits, we understand our place.  We understand that we walk as contingent beings in a contingent universe.  Though we need not be depressed about this--this is just the way it is--we need equally to recognize that as long as time and space exist, this will not change.
    Real freedom is realizing that there is just not time, and there is just not space, but that there must necessarily be time beyond time, and space beyond space (for how otherwise would anything be?), that over and beyond there is eternity, eternity in which one day freedom will be profoundly and irretrievably complete.
     Thanks, Fifth Dimension, for allowing us to see what freedom can be.

     You may know the story of Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's oft duplicated, in various forms, parable about the enticements and hazards of questing for knowledge beyond human ken.  Wishing to know more than the material, the intimate secrets of the hiddenness of the universe, Goethe ends up making a pact with the Devil (here presented as Mephistopheles) in which he will receive such knowledge in return for an eternity of serving the Devil in hell.  For anyone who believes in an afterlife, this of course may strike her as a difficult bargain:  eternal insight in return for eternal damnation.
     We all have a bit of Faust in us.  We all long to know more than what we know today, and most of us long to know that which, though we are loathe to admit it, we will never know.  We spend our lives knocking on the door of eternity, wandering about this earth, as a Gypsy proverb puts it, "our hearts full of wonder and our souls deep with dreams."  We long to know more.
     Such longing is thoroughly human and, viewed with humility, fully fits who we should be.  We are born to wonder and wander.  Too many of us, however, wander in a circle, a circle of our human frailty and folly, a circle that forgets it is but a circle within a greater presence.  Otherwise, it would have absolutely nowhere to be.
     Faust was acutely aware that he was a circle within others.  He knew there was something more to be known.  Yet he forgot that we can only know what is beyond us if we in turn recognize that it cannot be known unless it makes itself so.  It's only knowable when we ourselves are known, known by that which governs and guides the reality of our existence.  Otherwise, we're shouting in the dark.

     In religion, we see a curious (and necessary) mix of inward piety and outward engagement.  Those who would be religious seek inner peace and wholeness, yet in most instances believe that out of this inner union comes action to live out, in sacrificial fashion, the precepts which enable this union.  Those who are not religious, however, likely believe a similar schema, that inner centering results in external activity on behalf of the world in which they live.
     Who's right?  Both, really:  we should all use our inner wholeness to better the planet.  So why be religious, religious, that is, in a transcendent sense?  Only that to ignore the transcendent is to ignore that we cannot possibly live in a vacuum, alone and apart, for we would be living in a world without an anchor, without a place, a world--if we can even speak of it as such--emptied of all genuine and realistic sense and imagination, deprived, as it were, of possibility itself.  How would we know where or what we are?  Existentialism notwithstanding, possibility in a meaningless world is no possibility at all.  There would be no reason to make it better.
     We may disagree on the nature of religion, and we may differ on the gradations of religion, but it seems that if we wish to believe we live in a meaningful world, we cannot do without the transcendent.  It's hard to establish place when there is none to find.

     "Be who you really are."  So urged Lao Tzu, the founder and principal exponent of Taoism (or Daoism), the influential philosophy of balance and oneness that originated in the Zhou dynasty of China past.  Taoism is probably most famous for its diagram of Yin and Yang, that intriguing swirl of dark and light set into a circle.
     Lao's encouragement raises interesting questions.  Do any of us know who we really are?  Sure, we know our name, and sure, we know where we live, and sure, we know, usually, what we are doing on a given day or point in time, but if we are forced to sit down and ask ourselves, really, who we are, we may have a problem.  If we say that we are human beings, we are doing so on the basis of our previous understanding that we are indeed human beings, simply affirming what we have already decided is binding and true.  We only know on the basis of what we know.
     On the other hand, we may nurture a vision for self-improvement or a certain vocational aspiration.  We may wish to be something other than what we, in terms of our character or activities, are today.  In most instances, we likely are doing so because we believe that when we attain this change in character or activity, we will be a different (maybe a better, maybe a more fulfilled) person.  And it will be this, we believe, that represents who we really are, the person, given all possibilities, we most ought to be.
     Underlying both ideas, that is, the circularity of our humanness and our desire for improvement, is that whatever we believe or aspire to, we do so in a vacuum, a vacuum of finitude and humanness.  In the end, we are measuring everything by ourselves, a prospect which doesn't take into account all parameters and possibilities, principally the metaphysical, in which we walk.  It is only in the latter that we can understand who we are, because it is only in the latter that finitude finds its full explanation.  A circle only explains itself.

     Why do people try to do "good"?  Some do it because they fear God's judgment.  Others do it because they believe it is just the "right" thing to do.  Still others do it because they simply love to do it. 
     However laudable--or not--these motives may be, perhaps they are missing a far more crucial point:  what is "good"?  Put another way, how do we, imperfect as we are, define perfection?  How do we, not consistently inclined to do the "right" thing, know what that "right" thing is?
     We love good, we love right, and we admire those who, in our eyes, do it.  And we should.  If the universe is indeed empty, however, how would we know, either way, what these mean?
     The full story has yet to be told . . .

     In an amusing passage from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, his highly creative account of Alice's journey into the rabbit hole,  she tells the King, "I see nobody on the road," to which the King replied, "I only wish I had such eyes.  To be able to see Nobody!"
     In his own bemused way, the King was making an interesting point.  How can we "see" nobody?  For if we could "see" nobody, would we see anything at all?  And what would this make us?
     As I was noting yesterday, it's all about how we "see."  We choose what we want to see, really, our perception dependent on what is already in our mind.  The larger issue, however, is this:  why do we have minds at all?
     It's puzzling, for we can only decide this question on the basis of the mind that we are using to answer it.  We have no way to know, in truth--and we only that there is truth on the basis of the truths that we assume--what we are doing.
     Yet we are here, anyway.  Why?  Oddly enough, we'll never be able to tell ourselves.

     How much do you really see?  In John's account of Jesus' resurrection, he recounts that after hearing, on Easter morning, that Jesus was no longer in the tomb, he and Peter ran to the place together.  They both saw the grave clothes, they both saw the head cloth.  But only John, so he writes, "saw and believed."
     So it is for us.  Although we can adduce ample historical and textual evidence for the resurrection, in the end, if we are to accept it as true, we need to not merely "see" it, but "believe" it as well.  We need to "see" the deeper meaning behind the evidence, the greater fact of what had happened.  Otherwise, it's just an intriguing story.
     That's Easter faith.  It's faith in what happened, yes, but, even more, faith in what that which has happened really means.  You may have read countless arguments for and justifications of the resurrection.  I certainly have.  Yet all those contentions do not mean a thing unless we are willing to believe the far more profound truth they contain, the truth that the evidence serves to not so much prove as to simply affirm:  Jesus, Jesus the man, Jesus the God, rose from the dead.
     A miracle?  Of course it is:  why else should we believe it?

     Maybe you have siblings, maybe you do not.  If you do, I hope you have good memories of them.  At one point in his Tintern Abbey (ii, 115-122), William Wordsworth speaks profoundly of his sister Dorothy, saying that in her voice he catches "the language of my former heart, and read my former pleasures in the shooting lights of thy wild eyes."  For him, Dorothy captures a past of joy and wonder, a time of tangled wildness and steady openness to the maw of existence.  She represents for him, "What I was once," a picture of a past now gone.
     I do not see my siblings a lot--geography prevents it--but when I do, in addition to enjoying being with each other, I always join them in revisiting our mutual memories, our shared past.  We laugh, we cry, we marvel at how life has been.  We see in each other our childhood, our parents, our aunts and uncles, our families together, the whole lilting span of our existence.  We know our lives again.
     I enjoy all my siblings, but I suppose it is with my youngest sister that I experience Wordsworth's words most poignantly, for it is in her that I most remember adventures together and how we once wandered through various unknowns, alone, wending the shoals of things unseen, and finding things that we could see, together.  She carries for me the greatest weight of "the language of my former heart."
     The past is of course now gone, but the present is ever before us, still wild, still raw, still untamed, for it is as contingent as ever, as inchoate as it has ever been.  So I think to myself about what ties it together.  Love for my little sister, of course, but a love that I frame in a greater love still, a love in which past and present and future come together, a love that transcends space and time, a love in which I hope that one day we, she and I will know everything again, forever.
     The love of God.

     April 1.  In many parts of the world, it's April's Fools Day.  But it's also the birthday of one of the greatest of the Romantic pianists:  Sergei Rachmaninoff.  Born in Russia later emigrating to America, and becoming an American citizen shortly before his death in 1943, Rachmaninoff composed some of the richest music ever written for the piano, blending intense and mournful melody with powerful and intricate chords and keyboard movements, capturing and expressing the deepest spirit of the Romantics.  His playing took his audiences into the fullness of their emotional imaginations; they left amazed.
     Romanticism speaks of emotion, sense, and imagination; the heights, and the depths of the full gamut of humanness, taking us to the peaks of ecstasy, dragging us through the nadirs of tragedy.  It is life.  Rachmaninoff gave us a glimpse of a human being struggling with what it is to be alive on this planet, what it is to experience, what it is to know, what it is to be a personal being, alive, emoting, and real as anything can possibly be.  His piano touched us all.
     One of Rachmaninoff's closest associates was another Russian pianist, the incomparable Vladimir Horowitz.  In 1987, Horowitz returned to Soviet Russia to perform, the first time he had been back since he had emigrated many years before.  He, too, made his audience swoon with the force and potency of his piano, demonstrating to us once more that however intellectual we may suppose ourselves to be, we are, in the end, creatures of heart and imagination.  We live as sensual beings.
     So it is as we, romantic and emotional creatures that we are, we who delight in the poignant melodies of the Romantics, we who today bask in the light of Easter, we realize that even if we do not believe in the resurrection as a miracle of God, we can surely believe in the notion of resurrection as a miracle (for it surely is!) and, dare I say, even essential and therefore entirely meaningful measure of the wonder of existence:  wouldn't we, creatures of complex mind as well as passionate heart, all like to live again?