Do you enjoy ambiguity?  Most people do not.  Most of us like to understand things, to have a clear direction, to know that our world makes sense to us.
     Unfortunately, the world is far from black and white.  A creation of an infinite being as well as the experiential medium for finite beings, the world will never be completely clear to us.  Those who attempt to make it so, be it for religious, political, or other reasons, will invariably and inevitably stumble over the one thing they cannot change:  the unpredictability and "gray" of existence.  We will never fully lock up the world in the way that we think it should be.  We live with uncertainty and ambiguity every day; indeed, life cannot be any other way.
     So whether you pray for guidance and wisdom from God, or employ the forces of your native reason to find your way to wisdom and truth, remember that truth is just that, truth, something that, were it always and entirely clear, we would not even be asking about it.
     In its origins as well as in its effects, truth remains something beyond us.  We seek it, we live in it, we love it, but we will never own it entirely, for truth is something that, by its very nature, must come from beyond us.
     Pray, think, reason, and live, but above all, enjoy your ambiguity.  And rejoice that it is our ambiguity that tells us that the universe is anything but.

     As the academic year winds down across the U.S., indeed, across most of the Western world, and students and parents prepare for (or have already experienced) that often magical day when the student walks across the stage to receive her diploma, be it for high school, college, or a graduate degree, we cannot help but think about the complex wonder of human transition.  That we are creatures of time and change is clear, and that we measure our lives according to moments, big and small, is obvious, and it is good that we do.  It is good that we are creatures of passage and exchange.  Our lives are truly alive.
     It is also good that we come to this particular moment of transition, this graduation day with a sense of anticipation, that we look forward to the milestone it represents, that we find joy in the new phase of life if offers to us.  With each new point of passage, we learn new things, new dimensions of who we and life are, new paths of insight into the mystery of being human.
     For we do indeed walk in mystery, a mystery that although we experience its moments, is a mystery that remains forever elusive, the abiding and fleeting mystery of existence.  But we love it anyway.  We love life, and we love how it measures, affects, and transforms us.  We love life because it loves us:  it makes us human.
     And to be human, in all its fullness--material, spiritual, natural, and supernatural--is all that we are asked to do.

     What's time?  Some would say that time actually doesn't exist, that we and our lives are no more than a collection of experiences that are unattached to anything else.  Others would say that although we cannot touch or feel time in the sense that we can touch or feel a tree, we are nonetheless "attached" to and live in a medium, of some sort, which we experience as "time."
     Who's right?  On the one hand, both.  We cannot prove the existence of "time" other than to say that we are creatures of passage.  On the other hand, if we say that we are creatures of passage, then we must also say that "passage" is real, and that, like it or not, we live in moments which, if they are not attached to anything beyond themselves, leave us still trying to explain exactly where and what we are.  Are we ghosts?  Are we phantoms?  Are we dreaming?  And how would we know?  (Did you see the movie Inception?)
     Time exists only because we and the world do.  And we only exist because there is something, some sort of, to employ the findings of Einstein's theory of relativity, space-time continuum that, somehow, is here.  In other words, we would not be here unless there was "something" in which we can be "here."  How can we, finite as we are, create the fact of time and passage?
     Real time affirms a real reality and, most important, a reality that although we create it perceptually, we will never be able to create materially.
     Where will you go?

     Last month, Jeff Hanneman, a guitarist for the "heavy" metal band Slayer, one of the darkest of a decidedly dark genre of rock bands, passed away from a rare flesh eating disease.  He was 49.  Interestingly enough, in an interview he gave a few years before his death, he observed that despite the very dark lyrics he penned, he really didn't believe any of them.  He merely wanted to set minds pondering.  Judging from the size of Slayer's fan base, he clearly did.
     Though we may recoil from lyrics that describe the nether and demonic, we ironically also find them fascinating.  There is something in us that embraces what we most fear.
     This also rings true in some of the artwork of the later Romantic period, when artists like Goya produced some macabre images of the most chthonic situations one might imagine, those portraying, for instance, a group of witches feasting on a live and helpless human being.  Many of Goya's era found his works perversely appealing.
     Then, and now, why?  One option is to say, as theologian and political theorist Reinhold Niebuhr suggested, that we are creatures of light and darkness who are living in a light and dark world.  True enough, but why are we and the world this way?  Did we make ourselves this way?  Did we make the world this way?  And if not, who did?
     Although we can adduce all kinds of psychological theories to explain why we are this way, we cannot do so as easily when trying to explain why the world is so.  It seems that we must accept that the nature of reality is such that in it exists a darkness that our empirical observations cannot fully explain.  It seems that we cannot understand the natural reality without agreeing that part of it eludes explanation on the basis of what we perceive it to be.  That is, we need something else, something that is not what we know, to explain what we do know.  Parody if you like the fantasies of the dark and demonic, but then ask yourself this:  if darkness is unreal, why do we experience it?

     If you could take a test that would tell you whether or not you would develop a disease that would result in your death at age 60, would you take it?  According to a study published in the April issue of American Economic Review, although the law of marginal utility, the study points out, dictates that we should take the test, most people who were asked, it also noted, indicated they would rather not do it.  If one is twenty, would she really want to know that she will die at age 60?
     Well, the study suggested, if one knew, one could plan her life to enjoy it as much as she could before age sixty.  That seems logical, does it not?  On the other hand, would you really want to map your life like that?  Again, most people would prefer not to do so.
     Why?  In the end, we would rather not know.  In the end, we would rather, in a perverse sort of way, be surprised.  We would rather embrace life for what it is, an chaotic, joyous, and invigorating tangle of challenge and satisfaction, rather than what we would like to think it is not, set in stone from the day we are born.
     However, if the latter is true, what do we do with things like the afterlife and God?  Do not numerous psalms and other ancient writings insist that our days are ordained by God before we are even born?  Yes, they do.  But we ourselves do not know what our days will be.  We only know they will be infused with meaning, value, and purpose, precisely because there is a God.
     And regardless of whether we live a short or long life, or whether we know when we will die or not, that makes all the difference.

     William Browder, an American businessman who made an immense fortune in the early days of modern Russia's rush into capitalism, recently wrote in a column in BusinessWeek that, "My relationship with the world used to be about how much money I made or lost.  Now, it's more about humanity."
     How did Browder come to this conclusion?  Along the way to achieving his financial success, he worked with a Russian named Sergei Magnitsky who helped Mr. Browder ferret out an massive fraud which a number of people perpetuated on his company.  Unfortunately, for a number of reasons, all unjustified, Mr. Magnitsky later earned the ire of the Russian authorities and was arrested, tortured, and eventually died in prison, broken and forgotten by most of the country.  Mr. Browder has devoted his time since Magnitsky's death to bringing justice to his situation.
     Immense wealth, as Mr. Browder possesses, enables us to do many things.  We can use it to enrich our lives materially or we can dedicate it to helping others.  Though this is a cliché that has been oft repeated, we do well to mention it again:  in the end, it won't matter how much money we had.  What matters is what we did with it.
     After all, everything is a gift:  did we have anything to do with our being here?
    

     For those who follow horse racing, you may know that in the Preakness Derby that was run this past Saturday, the heavily favored Orb, the horse that won the Kentucky Derby, lost to another horse.  Much ink was subsequently spilled about why this happened, and much commentary was made that, once again, horse racing will not see a Triple Crown winner this year.
     In the grand picture, such ruminations and speculations seem rather trivial.  But to those who are directly involved in them, they are everything:  horse racing is an international phenomenon, one which stirs up millions upon millions of dollars annually across the globe.  Such millions do of course enable those who race horses to create jobs, of some kind, for those who do not.  They also enable them to research the very best ways to raise a horse to perform to its maximum capacities.
     The central point here, however, is not such things, but that, as Orb's owners learned, what we think and hope will happen often does not.  Life is like that.  We live in a bent and fallen world, one full of unpredictability and caprice.  This is our wonder and motivation, yet it is also our tragedy:  never knowing, fully, what will come next.
     How good it is to know, though, that the world's unpredictability merely serves to reinforce its utter dependency on predictability, that we who deem it to be unpredictable do so because we, whether we know it or not, are beings who understand the world in predictable ways.  We would not know unpredictability unless we were predictable beings, beings who were made in an ordered way.  If we were random beings, we wouldn't know that we were.
     In other words, we must realize that when we insist that we are random or beings we only do so because we are, in the end, anything but random.  We are ordered beings who think in ordered ways. it.  We indeed live in unpredictability, but we only know this because we function with predictability.  Randomness will never be able to say that it is such unless it is rooted in order.
     In his failure to win again, Orb reminds us of how much we must accept that, in the end, we live in an unpredictability that is, oddly enough, predictable.  Chaos theory?  Not really:  we wouldn't know chaos unless we knew order.  And we will not know order unless order, a purposeful and intelligible order, existed before we did.
     Or put another way, God.

     As nearly everyone who pays any attention to the ups and downs of American longings knows, it appears that we have, after much waiting, a winner of the massive Powerball lottery (nearly $600 million) which has been making headlines for the past several days.  As the winner must claim his/her prize within sixty days, it seems that by the middle of the summer we will know who this person is.
     On the face of it, one might say that this person is fortunate.  On the face of it, it seems that this person is set, financially, for the rest of his/her life.  On the face of it, it seems that this person has achieved what countless Americans long for:  lasting material security.
     I suppose this person has.  I suggest, however, that this person will also gain a notoriety and attention which he/she might not welcome, a glare in the spotlight of American celebrity with which he/she may not be entirely prepared to deal.  Sociologists tell us of countless lottery winners whose lives fracture and fall apart within a year of their winning the big prize.  For a variety of reasons, these individuals cannot handle the responsibilities and headaches (yes, headaches) of suddenly coming into a massive sum of money.
     Not to say that we do not rejoice with the winners.  We are indeed happy for them.  Yet our happiness underscores a profound ill in American and, to an extent all, societies.  That ill is to make happiness contingent upon what we have.  Thousands of observers have of course said this before, but it bears mentioning again.  Money will never satisfy fully.  It buys dreams, it answers prayers, and it eases difficult times, but it will never completely address the fundamental longings of our hearts.  Money is material, and what is material cannot address, fully, the inescapable metaphysical questions and issues of human existence.  What is physical will never complete what is metaphysical, and what is finite will never complete what is eternal.
     Beyond this, I note that, sadly, a very small percentage of the money spent on lottery tickets actually goes to education, its ostensible purpose.  Moreover, I question whether the prospect of states raising money by encouraging people to spend money which they may not really have is entirely ethical.  Is it right to feed a questionable habit--not just gambling, but the ethos that money buys lasting happiness--to support the state?

     Is God on trial?  Is God on trial for the ills of the world?  To many people, he is.  In his God on Trial, award winning author and critic Eli Weisel speaks to this point, profoundly.  Although I read the book many years ago, I recently watched a movie version of it which, because it presents Weisel's words with pictures, struck me more powerfully than did the book.
     Weisel's depicts a conversation that a group of inmates at Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi concentration camp, had about, in light of the suffering and pain they were experiencing, the goodness of God.  It is of course an ageless dilemma:  if God is good and all powerful (omnipotent), why do people suffer?  As anyone who has studied this issue in some depth knows, there are no easy answers.
     At the trial, most of the inmates are critical of God for ignoring human suffering.  Though some speak up for God, their voices are drowned out by the dissenters.  At the close of the trial, however, one of the chief critics, who served as judge at the trial, offered a measured, and conclusive, response.  It is faith, he argues, it is the Jew's faith in God that is all on which they can draw in the face of suffering.  Nobody else, he says, has this resource.  Everyone else suffers, and even though the Jews do, too, they, he says, have faith in God, a faith that, despite everything else, provides, in some way, explanation.
     We may disagree with the judge's point, but we cannot deny the validity of his position:  in the end, regardless of what is going with us or the world, we can either believe in God or we cannot believe in God.  To do the former means we believe that, somehow, some way, the world has purpose, and that somehow, some way, whatever happens does, too. precisely because God is there--and nothing more.  The latter means that, whatever we think life may be, it, and we, have none.
     Which do you prefer?

     "Life is all a sublet anyway, of course.  We don't fully own even the bodies we live in; we can't stop them from changing."  So writes Bonnie Friedman in a recent issue of Utne Reader, thinking about the nature of change.  So true.  On the one hand, we may feel helpless against the progress of time and aging, powerless to halt our demise; on the other hand, we may feel comforted and, I suppose, innervated that, try as we might, we will not be complete in this existence, for this tells us that when all is said and done, existence will never be anything we control.  We're no more than wayfarers and sojourners, sailors on a voyage of, as poet Rainer Rilke put it, a life that is "incomprehensible."
     And that's the point.  If life really is incomprehensible, why do we try so hard to think we'll ever understand it?  We try because we think and know we can; we try because we, consciously or not, believe this life to be more than a "sublet."  We try because we believe that life is more than what we see.  Life will always be this way, for life, like everything in it, is not of its own making.
     So does the psalmist say, "It is you, Lord, who has made us, not we ourselves" (Psalm 100).

     As the much awaited film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby nears its release, a good deal is being written about it and Fitzgerald.  In particular, much effort is being spent connecting the ethos Fitzgerald was portraying in The Great Gatsby to the present day.
     When I think of Fitzgerald, I think also of Ernest Hemmingway, that other memorable chronicler of American emptiness and ennui who, like Fitzgerald, died far too young (although he lived over fifteen years longer than Fitzgerald).  A visit to Hemmingway's grave in Ketchum, Idaho, finds one looking at a fascinating assortment of bottles of various alcoholic beverages and coins of varying denominations, all stacked or strewn across the tombstone set toward the rear of the grassy expanses of the cemetery.  Both Fitzgerald and Hemmingway lived passionately, lived to live for the moment, for the present experience, believing that it, and only it, is the measure of what is true.  So did Fitzgerald close out The Gatsby, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
     Whatever else we may think about Fitzgerald or Hemmingway's viewpoints on life, we cannot deny that Fitzgerald hit the hammer on the nail with these words.  If we do not move on, if we do not constantly strive to break through to the new, the next moment, we become, yes, victims of the past, the past that will never end, precisely because we never allow it to begin.
     It is today, it is now, it is the present moment that is the ground of everything else we know and do.  Don't overlook it, for it is the heart of all truth, the felt presence of God.

     Is the universe, as Bertrand Russell once contends, "Just there"?  Or is it, as philosopher John Leslie suggested, a universe "worth knowing" more than one that is not worth knowing at all?  If we are honest, I think we would say that we like to believe both.  We are thankful the universe is "there" (for we live in it), and yet we are also thankful that it is a universe that is worth knowing, that there is a reason it's here.  If we had only the former, we might wonder what is the point of it all, but if we had only the latter, we might be puzzled as to how that which is worth knowing ever got to the point where it is something worth knowing.  For if we believe that existence and worth are nothing more than cosmic jokes, we look in vain for who is telling such jokes:  in a useless universe, we would be both.

     Sometimes we need what we can't explain to explain what we already think we can.  Otherwise, it's a very big box.

     In the modern art wing at the Art Institute of Chicago hangs a painting that is, literally, entirely black.  An over 100 foot square of canvas painted in nothing more--and nothing less--than black.  Some might say that this is not art, but nonsense.  Others might opine that while it may be the work of an artist, it is not art on the scale of a Degas or Picasso.  But some will say that it is indeed art.  Why?  We could cite a number of reasons, but one way to think about an entirely black canvas is to say that it, in its own way, is representing the nature of existence.  Existence is a mystery, indeed, a mystery that, though it overflows with brightness and light, is ultimately beyond comprehension.  Yet before existence ever was (or ever "existed"), there was a greater mystery still.  There was emptiness, there was nothingness, there was the utter darkness of a total lack of "somethingness."  In the artist's picture of black, we see the darkness of our own origins.  Not necessarily darkness in an physical sense, but an epistemological one:  how do we know why we are here?
     Maybe that's why the black canvas:  in the end, we're captives of mystery.  Ah, but what an exciting one.  Just think:  without a sense of mystery, we would not know that we are not everything that is.

     Much has been written about the enormous oil boom currently happening in, of all places, the wild and remote state of North Dakota, where thousands of people, mostly men, are working literally day and night to extract oil from massive beds of shale for shipment not just to the U.S. but all over the world.  One wonders what the state will do when the boom, as all booms do, end, but at the moment it is enjoying the massive revenues pouring into its tax coffers and appreciates the distinction of being one of the few states in America in which unemployment is virtually nonexistent.
     Prior to the boom, North Dakota was dying, abandoned, as it were, by the rest of the country, its farms shrinking and disappearing, its young people leaving, its towns, one by one, closing.  It was facing the final onslaught of the rugged prairies out of which it had come, descending into the proverbial rabbit hole for all time.
     As one writer observed recently, the current boom is a case of a vision outpacing its delusions.  North Dakota chases a dream that, like the dream of Southern California, a dream made possible only by exporting tremendous amounts of water from outside the state, may in the end prove to be built on little more than the sinking sand out of which it has come.  But that, I suppose, is the nature of dream.  We dream because the vision it provides is better than facing the delusion that is never far behind it.
     On the other hand, that's why we dream:  we tend to see the future more clearly than we see the past, for just as the past grounds the future, it is the future that explains the past, a past that, if it did not have a future, would be a spirit without a home.
     It's hard to live without a dream; it's even harder to live without a reason to dream.
     That's why we appreciate redemption:  it's a constant promise that what will come will be better than what has been--and that has been is the backbone of what will be.

     "The man is dead; what more do you want?"  So said, in the 1971 movie, Jesus, a Roman soldier to Zerah, one of the members of the Jewish Sanhedrin, in response to Zerah's request that in light of rumors that Jesus would rise again, a guard be placed at Jesus' tomb.  In other words, as the soldier saw it, Zerah and his compatriots had already accomplished their mission, which was to kill Jesus.  Why do they now want to guard his tomb?
     I might say much the same to those who are either criticizing the funeral home that is caring for the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the deceased Boston Marathon bomber, or the cemetery that "dares" provide a place for his body to be buried.  What do these people want?  Mr. Tsarnaev committed a horrible deed, yes, but now he is dead.  He will never harm anyone again.  And, believe it or not, he is as much a human being, a human being created in God's image, as anyone else on this planet, no different from or better than, in this regard, you and me.  He deserves to be treated with the dignity that comes with how he was made.  His actions do not negate the fact of his origins.
     Let the man be.  We are not his destiny.  That is the province of God.

     Yesterday, May 5, was the 200th anniversary of the birthday of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (whom I mentioned in a post last week).  I suspect we will be reading much about Kierkegaard in the coming year, and I do not wish, at this point, to add to the pile.  I would, however, like to make this observation.  One of Kierkegaard's most enduring legacies is his idea, which we must understand in its context, that subjectivity is truth.  In other words, what we feel can be just as important as what we know or believe.
     Although our feelings are of course often a less than reliable guide to what is true, Kierkegaard's point is that unless truth, that is, some point of religious or scientific dogma, can be subjectively experienced, it means little.  We cannot function on intellect alone.  We need to be subjective to be whole human beings.  And we need to understand that this subjectivity is, in many ways, the "truth" that makes us truly human.  Without it, we'd never fall in love, we'd never be happy, we'd never be sad, we'd never be anything other than an absent mind.
     Again, subjectivity does not always yield truth, but truth cannot be known apart from it.  As Karl Barth, one of the twentieth century's towering giants of Christian theology, once remarked, "After all I have written, after all I have studied, this one thing, and only this one thing I know:  'Jesus loves me, for the Bible tells me so.'"
     Enjoy your emotions, enjoy your feelings; enjoy that these make you human, and enjoy that these are what enable you to fully know the truth of God.

     "Nothing ever becomes real," observed the poet John Keats, "till it is experienced."  Keats likely did not mean that nothing is physically real until one experiences it; rather, he meant that in terms of actually coming to know something, one must experience it, experience it directly, to really know it.  For instance, we can know about a distant mountain, say, Mt. Everest, high and lofty in the remote stretches of the Himalayas.  In fact, we can know a great deal about it; Everest has been climbed and studied extensively.  But we cannot really say that we know Everest unless we have hiked to its base and clambered about its slopes, perhaps its summit.  Or we can say that we know about a certain person, that is, we know who that person is and perhaps what that person does, but not know that person on a personal level, who that person is as a person interacting with us.  We must experience that person directly (it of course goes without saying that even if we do this, we still may not know this person, but that is another discussion) to know her as really real.
     So why is this important?  We who are finite walk in a patina of ignorance about what we cannot touch, hear, or see.  We walk in an astounding world, yet a world which we, despite our best scientific efforts, still do not fully understand.  And if we are honest with ourselves, we walk thinking, at least one point, why is all of this here?  Why am I here?  Some of us then point to a god, some of us point to what we might call the fact of human wonder, some of us point to our inability to know anything with absolute certainty.
     Whichever option we choose, however, we are ultimately saying that that which we imagine--or do not imagine--will only be real to us if we allow it to be so. We cannot prove it beyond all doubt.  If we are religious, we will say that we believe it to be real because we believe that it is the speech or communication of God, a physically (in a metaphysical sense) real God.  If we are not religious, we may say that it is simply a fluctuation of a normal human longing for meaning.  It's not physically real.  In both cases, we believe that because we have experienced it, it is real, real, however, depending on our sensibilities, in imagination or reality.
     If nothing is there, however, do we really experience it?  Faith is believing that a felt experience of the beyond is only real because there is in fact a "beyond" that creates it.  Why pretend otherwise?

     What are the limits of human creativity?  Today, from many standpoints, we might say that they are indefinite.  Until relatively recently, however, people in the West believed that they, of all the peoples on the earth, had developed the most valid pictures of human culture, the most true expressions of human growth and creativity.
     Thomas McEvilley, a long time professor of anthropology and cultural critic who died earlier this year, changed all that.  Using a great deal of research and study, he proved that contrary to prevailing Western conceptions, people in other parts of the world, indeed, peoples across the globe, were, in their own way, equally innovative and creative, and their cultural constructions therefore equally valid, even if they may have been radically different in their starting and ending points than those of the West.  The people of the West needed to change, as it were, the way they see.  They had to learn to look at cultures in a different way, not necessarily through their own preconceptions of what might be valid or true.
     Although there are limits to looking at cultures in this way, that is, most of us will likely draw a line at endorsing or accepting the validity of a culture whose chief value is murder, McEvilley's point remains true:  human creativity is not limited to the peoples of the West.
     For a person who is already convinced of the inexhaustibility of God, that God has no limits in how he gifts and endows the human being, this thesis makes perfect sense.  If humans--all humans--are created in the image of God, vested with gifts and talents of generativity and reflection and self-perception, why would humans--all humans--not be immensely creative, their cultures uniformly reflecting an innate capacity to grow and create?
     Because God exists, there are no limits to what people--all people--can, within the compass of their finite capacities and geographic limitations, do.  Humanity is a testimony to the presence of God.

     I recently received a letter from a friend of mine, a friend who unfortunately is at present incarcerated in a state prison for a tragic episode of excessive drinking.  Along with his letter, my friend enclosed a newspaper clipping he had found that described a trip to the Grand Canyon, that fully spectacular national park in northern Arizona.  What struck me about my friend's thoughtfulness is that even though he has been imprisoned for nearly ten years, never seeing much of anything besides the walls of his jail cell, the corridors of the exercise yard, and a general meeting room, he nonetheless thrilled at the beauty of a place that he will not be able to see for a long, long time to come.  There is something, I thought, about the splendor of the untrammeled world, about the sublimity of natural places that never fails to move the human psyche and imagination.
     We can of course ascribe a variety of causes for this, but I would like to point the discussion towards the metaphysical.  I suggest that the reason we swoon at photos and thoughts of such places is that not only are our brains bent to do so, but that the nature of the universe is such that we cannot do otherwise.  If God has indeed created the universe, if God has indeed created all the natural wonders of the world--and us along with them--then it seems that we, purposeful beings that we are, would naturally and inevitably be moved by the splendor of a purposeful world.  We who were made with purpose, to pursue purpose, would naturally look to other things of purpose to do so.  We find wonder in natural beauty because we are beings who are made to marvel and delight in the purpose before us.
     Although my friend is in prison, he remains, as we all are, a creature of purpose, a creature of profound purpose who cannot help but find purpose and wonder in a purposeful and wondrous world.  Why, really, would we look for purpose unless we had a reason to do so?