As I lay in my tent one night during my recent backpacking trip, listening, with more than a little trepidation, to the enormous thunderstorm raging outside, hoping I had staked down my tent sufficiently, hoping that the water pounding down would flow outside and not inside my shelter, waiting for the morning, I had much time to ponder the essence of faith.  Yes, I prayed for protection, and yes, I prayed for an end to the storm (spectacular though it was, with thunder rocking and lightning flashing, its intensity was a bit unnerving), but most of all I prayed that I might see a new face of the divine, a new dimension of what it means to believe in and know God.
     Those of us who believe in God usually cannot help but pray to him in times of challenge and distress (although given that these prayers come out of our understanding that we are in a relationship with him, we ought to be praying to him at all times, distress or not).  After all, we're only human.  Yet believing in God goes deeper than simply acknowledging relationship with him.  Believing in God means that we embrace and accept, however grudgingly, the vicissitudes of existence not because we necessarily enjoy them, but because we believe that they are occurring in a world that is neither random nor without purpose.  Believing in God means believing that purpose pervades the cosmos, purpose, which I hasten to add, is not always something we can fathom, comprehend, categorize, or grasp, yet purpose which we believe is always good, again, not necessarily good in the way that we might define good in this life, but purpose grounded in an absolutely good God.  We will not always understand it.
     Did I wonder about the goodness of God in the midst of this storm?  I certainly did.  Although the storm was remarkable for its power, it was also frightening:  what would happen as the night progressed?  Yet I always reminded myself that the reason I continued to believe in the goodness of God was that, in spite of everything I could, and could not, see, to do otherwise was to live in a totally meaningless world, a world devoid of value, purpose, or point, a world that, in the words of many an unbeliever, "just is"--and we "just are."
     Yet we all know that we are more than beings who "just are"; indeed, whenever we wonder about ourselves, in a big or small way, we implicitly accept that we are more than that.  Belief will not ameliorate all problems, as every believer knows, but belief gives us  purpose.  As the psalmist encourages, "Relax, and know that I am God" (Ps 46:10).
     Within a few hours, the rain had stopped, and I was able to get up, eat breakfast, take down my tent, and continue on my way.  And purpose reigned.

     Remember the "Occupy Wall Street" movement?  We have not heard much about it lately, but from what I can tell, its proponents and supporters continue to nurture it along, trying to sustain and promote the values they believe it was presenting.
     We likely have varying opinions on the Occupy Movement, and I will not try to take sides here.  I will say, however, that underlying this movement, as well as many of the protest movements currently erupting in Europe (and the Middle East) seems to be a pervasive sense of powerlessness.  Across the West, and many parts of the developing world as well, countless people feel as if they have lost control of their lives, that they no longer have a say in matters that affect their livelihoods, and that the politicians whom they believe ought to be helping them seem to ignore their plight.  They feel totally helpless.
     And perhaps they are.  The world, East and West, is moving at a pace that most people do not understand, driven by forces and directions few people fully grasp.  Many people are falling through the cracks, and many more people are awash in a grinding sense of physical and moral hopelessness.
     Regardless of what we think about the legitimacy of these feelings, we are safe to say that they are not going away any time soon.  People want a voice in the direction of their lives.  On the other hand, those who, at the moment--and only at the moment--possess power, must realize that they are only as powerful as God enables them to be (consider Jesus' words to Pilate that, "You only have power as my Father gave you"), and that despite the tremendous influence they may wield today, they are in the end very, very little people trying to shape a very, very big world.  Their time is frighteningly evanescent.
     Power is only as effectual as its ability to remember its true source.  Though we who are not powerful may feel at times as if we are hoping in nothing more than hope that the power structures will ever change, we can at the same time understand that hope would not be were there not a greater hope still.  There's more to power than meets the eye.
     Hope is only hope if there is a God.

     Trekking through the mountains of the American West recently (as I indicated I would be doing), specifically, California's Sierra Nevada, I had much time to think and ponder.  Mountains seem to do that to us.  Rising surreally out of the earth, easelessly piercing the sky with their sculpted tips and summits, standing majestically over the land around them, they make us think of bigger things, greater realities.  They make us wonder how life can be so simple yet so complex.  The innate purity of a mountain day, a day on which the sun is shining, the meadows sparkling, the lakes so unfathomably blue at times exceeds human imagination, moving us to wonder how such things can possibly be.  How can anything be so amazingly beautiful?
    For many, mountains make them think of God.  For others, mountains underscore the remarkable character of an uncreated universe, that from something entirely impersonal such marvel has sprung.  Yet what is perhaps most amazing about mountains is the notion of beauty that seems to inevitably accompany them.  From where does beauty come?  From where do we derive a value like beauty?
     The easy answer is to say that it is the fact of God, that it is the presence of God that ensures the fact of beauty in the world.  Though I cannot disagree with this, I would also say that the real essence (and lesson), that is, the "beauty" of beauty is that in a vast and unfathomable universe it exists.  Whether we say that beauty is relative or absolute, we all marvel that amidst all the wonder and bewilderments of the cosmos, beauty exists.
     Life has worth and meaning beyond what we can, in our individuated and truncated lives, possibly create:  beauty announces the fact of an open world.

     Have you seen "Man of Steel"?  I saw it for the first time last night and, despite being somewhat stunned by the immense amount of destruction that filled the final fight scenes (as did my wife, who wondered aloud, "Who's going to clean it up?"), found a couple of scenes worth thinking about.
     The first scene occurs toward the end of the movie.  Jor-El (Superman's father), tells the bad guy, General Zod, why he and his wife defied every social and political convention on Krypton to enable her to have a naturally born child (every other child is "developed" through a sophisticated and selective cloning process).  "We wanted," he said, "to invite chaos and confusion."
     Anyone who has raised a child knows full well that it frequently involves chaos and confusion (and many other things as well!).  Few parents, however, regret having their children, chaos, confusion, and all.
     So do most of us feel about existence.  Most of us would rather have life as it is, problems, difficulties, joys, and all, than a life in which nothing ever changes and everything is perfectly ordered.  Most of us would rather have the chaos.
      But chaos is hard.  Chaos means that we walk a tenuous line between ignorance and certainty, always trying to balance what we know with what we do not.  Chaos and not knowing can be frustrating, but knowing everything, at least in this life, takes living out of existence.  What would life be if we already knew, absolutely and fully, what it is?
     The other scene that struck me was when a young Clark, trying desperately to understand why he was so different from everyone else, asked his mother, "Did God do this to me?"  How many of us have asked this question, too?  How many of us have wondered about the activity or intentions of God in us?  Nearly everyone on this planet.  When we reach the end of our knowledge, we often want to ask the one whom we think sees beyond it.
     Yet as most of us know, when we ask, we do not always receive a reply.  But we ask anyway.  We're like the writer of Psalm 116, who told God, "I believe, therefore I spoke."  We believe even if we know we may not see.  We believe because we know that what we do see can only explain what it is, not necessarily what it means.
     As I close today, I say that because I will be backpacking for a while, trekking through the mountains of the American West, I will not be updating this blog for a couple of weeks.  Thanks for reading--and keep thinking!

     Across America and perhaps other parts of the West as well, people are talking about the recent verdict in the Trayvon Martin case.  As most of us know, George Zimmerman, the defendant, was acquitted on all charges.  Given that his judgment was rendered by a jury consisting of mostly white women, many commentators have raised the specter of racism, suggesting that, at its core, the verdict was driven by a pervasive and widespread sense of racism toward African-Americans.  Compounding the anguish is that the only person who witnessed events firsthand--the defendant--did not take the stand to tell his story.  All we have is circumstantial evidence.
     As President Obama urged, however, the jury has spoken, and whether we want to or not, we must live with the verdict.  But this is not my point today.  Overwhelmed as I am by the tragic nature of this situation, for there are no winners here, except perhaps the defense lawyers and the fees they will soon be collecting from Mr. Zimmerman, I see a deeper spiritual issue at work.  Underlying and significantly contributing to this tragedy is the belief, shared by many Americans and steadfastly encouraged by the National Rifle Association, that a person has every right to carry arms, of nearly any kind, and, if she considers herself threatened--or, according to the state of Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law, even if she does not--to use them, freely and without restraint.  For many people, too many of whom, sadly, believe in Jesus as the fountain and expression of God's love, this right extends to property as well.  They believe they have the right to maim or kill people who merely seem to be trying to steal their property, not necessarily do them bodily harm.
     Even a cursory view of the Bible tells us that everything we have, our lives, our liberty, our property, are gifts of God.  We did not appear on earth by our own efforts or design, and we do not earn money or acquire property simply because we are who we are.  We can only live and acquire because we are here, and we are only here because God exists.  Though we all love and treasure our person and property, we always need to remember that they are gifts, and the instant that we decide that they are not, we enter into a perverted humility from which there is no return.
     This is not to dismiss the pain of Trayvon Martin's death.  I feel terribly for his family.  He'll never return.  It is to say, however, that in the aftermath of the verdict America needs to look at itself, again, and ask itself what kind of a nation it wants to be:  a nation in which people feel blessed, empowered, and armed to offend and defend without restraint, always looking for trouble, or a nation in which people look to God to work together to build community and peace.
    

     How can we know what God is doing?  Whether we believe in God or not, we all, at some point in our lives, ask this question.  It's a good question, too.  Finite beings that we are, we all wonder what is going on in realms beyond us.  We all wonder how we can possibly understand what beings much bigger--in every way--than us are doing. 
     Some Jewish leaders in the first century A.D. had this problem, too.  Looking around at the rapidly growing popularity of Christianity and how it seemed to capture way too many, from their standpoint, hearts, they wondered aloud how they could stop it.  How could they suppress this, as they saw it, new heresy?
     As they argued, one of them, Gamaliel by name, made an insightful comment.  "Brothers," he said, "if this movement is not of God, it will die quickly.  We need not worry about it.  If it is of God, however, we will not be able to overthrow it, or else we may find ourselves fighting against God."
     Gamaliel understood the stakes at hand.  Although none of the Jews could have known at that point that Christianity would eventually spread across the entire planet, Gamaliel realized that if it is indeed of God, nothing they would do could possibly stop it.
     So it is with the activity of God.  We don't always know what it is, we don't always know what it means, but we do know this:  when God moves, nothing we do will stop it.
     The challenge of course is that we rarely know what God is doing until after he does it.  In the end, we will know.  For now, however, we live in the surprises of God.  And God's surprises are always good.
    

     What would it be like to live in a bubble?  I'm not talking about the bubble in which the so-called "bubble boy" of Houston lived for most of his life; his was for a medical reason.  I refer to the scenario portrayed in the current television series, based on a Stephen King novel, "The Dome."  "The Dome" presents life in a town which has been literally shut off from the rest of the world by a massive dome that, suddenly and unexpectedly, has descended upon it.  The "Dome's" boundaries are entirely impersonal and arbitrary:  families are split, commuters are cut off from their jobs, houses are sliced in two, and many law enforcement and fire safety resources are left outside.  It is, in a sense, a closed universe.
     In a closed universe, however, only those within it decide what is moral.  So far, aside from a few individual aberrances, the common good has prevailed.  It remains to be seen, though, how long this will last.  When people become a law unto themselves, values become entirely relative and, in a universe with no meaning other than that it is (which is a tautology), mean nothing at all.
     Ironically, however, such relativity then becomes the new absolute.  And we're back to square one.  In a closed universe, all we have is ourselves, and unless we are perfect (and this in itself is a statement of value that we, in a closed universe with no meaning other than itself, cannot legitimately make), we will never know what is absolutely true.
     If we are in a bubble, we hope that it is a bubble in a bigger bubble still.
    

     During my monthly atheist discussion group which I attended last night, we had, as we always do, a dialogue about faith.  I made the point that we all live by faith, that is, we all live with faith that certain things will always occur or will always be true.  For instance, we all assume that the sun will rise each morning, we all assume that when we get out of the bed in the morning there will be a floor for our feet, we all assume that when we eat we will be able to chew.
     Not so, one replied.  We do not live by faith; we live by reasonable expectations.  That is, we have a reasonable expectation that the sun will rise each morning, we have a reasonable expectation that when we open the refrigerator we will see food in it. 
     Maybe so.  But what's the difference?  Either way, we are living on the basis of assumptions, assumptions at which we arrive by using other assumptions, namely, our faith (or "reasonable expectations") in our ability to make assumptions.  We are all locked in tautologies.
     What to do?  In the end, each of us needs to decide not so much which tautology makes the most sense, but why we can imbibe in tautologies at all.  In other words, why is the universe reasonable?
     If we say it is because we have a reasonable expectation that it is, however, we have proved nothing at all.

     Why do we like music?  There are many reasons, of course, but one is likely that it takes us into places we would (could) not otherwise go, places of ethereality, transcendence, and imagination which we do not experience in the daily humdrum of our lives.  Music makes us weep, it makes us swoon, it makes us leap for joy.  It opens windows, windows into worlds we did not see.  Music reminds us of the limitlessness of the universe.
     For many, music makes us think of God.  In his biography of Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computer, author Walter Isaacson recounts an encounter between Jobs and the great cellist Yo Yo Ma.  Ma had come to Jobs's home to play, having been unable, due to other commitments, to play at Jobs's wedding a few years earlier.  He played a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach.  According to Isaacson, Jobs listened with tears in his eyes, and told Ma, "You playing is the best argument I've ever heard for the existence of God, because I really don't believe a human alone could do this."
     Jobs's response was perceptive.  We rightly laud artistic talent and creativity, yet we do them, and ourselves, a disservice if we suppose they exist solely through material accident or coalescence.  Can dust and plasma really birth personality and imagination?

     Over the weekend, I attended a family reunion.  We gathered, my siblings and I, along with our children (and two girlfriends), plus an aunt or two, to commune, remember, and celebrate.  Hanging over us, and if you read my entry on July 4, you already know, was the thought of our wonderful and recently departed mother, who has now been gone three years.
     To remember Mom, we placed a photo of her on the fireplace mantle and lit a couple of candles.  We also set a framed poem that we all feel aptly expresses her and her impact on our lives, along with a note that a tree has been planted in her honor in a Glacier National Park in Montana.  We did not want Mom to be forgotten.
     Aside from the girlfriends, everyone at the reunion has many memories of Mom.  If the children marry and have children, however, their offspring will have no physical memory of her, only stories and photographs.  They will not remember Mom in the way she is being remembered today.  Life will continue on without her.
     On the other hand, we, my siblings and I, can rejoice.  We can rejoice in God's goodness in giving her to us as our mother; we can rejoice that this goodness touched our children; we can rejoice that even in a thoroughly fractured world, we experienced, through Mom, nearly ninety years of wonderful blessings from God.  We have so much for which to be thankful, so much with which we can keep going, so much out of which to sustain and contribute to the wonder and health of the world.
     Most of all, I guess, we can rejoice that buried deep in the universe is the idea of love, that out of everything that God could have been, he is first and foremost love, and that out of this love we gave us life, life with our mother.  Love is not random.  It's always a gift.

    

     Yesterday was a day of memory, for me, for you, for the nations of the world.  And today is another day, another moment, another path through the existence to which we all cling so dearly.  Remember this day, remember this hour, for each one is wonderful, each one is precious, each one is firmly grounded in a fact, the fact of meaning, the transcendent meaning of a creator God.
     Why would we do anywhere else?

     In America, today is Independence Day.  Yet for me, it is also a day on which, three yeas ago, my mother died.  She was 88.  Mom had been strong and fit for most of her life, but in a moment of misfortune all too common to people her age, she took a fall at home, passed out, and woke up in the hospital.  Although she recovered quickly, the doctors determined that she should be sent to a nursing home for rehab.  Unfortunately, while she was at the nursing home, Mom developed pneumonia, and went back to the hospital.  After she had been at the hospital a week, the doctors informed us there was nothing more they could do, that the disease would not go away.  My siblings and I took her home, and she died about a week later.
     About a month after Mom's passing, we held a memorial service for her.  As Mom's firstborn, I spoke last.  I share my words below.

     "On behalf of Bob, Ellen, and Kathleen, I want to thank you, again, for coming out this afternoon and sharing your thoughts, plaudits, and memories of Mom.  We are indeed grateful that you are here, and greatly appreciate your words, spoken and not.  You have given us wonderful remembrances which we will treasure for many years to come.
     "All of you who spoke shared how Mom had, in some way, touched your life.  You spoke of her effect, her impact, the cumulative weight of Mom’s lasting imprint on your life experience. 
     "In this vein, I share a small part of an ancient Hebrew prayer, a portion of one of the psalms.  Translated from the Hebrew, it reads, 'Oh Lord, give permanence to the work of our hands; yes, Lord, give permanence to the work of our hands.'
     "Like all of us, Mom, I think, wished to leave something permanent behind when she left this life, something of herself, her thoughts, dreams, and convictions that would live beyond her, something that would outlast her, something that would indelibly and permanently endure in the lives of those whom she would no longer see.
     "Your words and testimonials attest amply to this, to the permanence of the work of Mom’s hands, the perduring character and expression and memory of her many years of service, adventure, encouragement, and kindness that we all valued and enjoyed, and that we will all long remember.  Mom’s flourishing touched us all, touched us all with a grace of lasting beauty and rich significance.  She was wonderful and amazing, and she will not be forgotten:  permanent indeed is the work of her hands.
     "And we are forever grateful."

     Indeed:  thanks be to God for our mothers.  Have a good day.

     An old but amusing movie, the Beatles' "Yellow Submarine" leaves the viewer wondering exactly which way the world is aligned, that is, precisely how do we view ourselves in this often bewildering reality?
     This comes through with particular force in the sequence of the Nowhere Man, here pictured as a little blue genie (jinni) who, though he is "here," eventually finds himself "nowhere" as the horizon and framework of his world gradually and inexorably shrink into nothingness.
     In a way, as the Beatles point out in the song, we're all like the Nowhere Man.  We all, as they note, tend to "see what we want to see," and we all, as they suggest, do not always "know where we're going to."  Like the little blue genie, we interact with the world, our reality, on the basis of our view of it, which of course is perfectly normal:  what other view would we use?  And like the genie, we do not always know exactly where we are going, that although we certainly develop various life paths and trajectories, we never fully know where they will take us.  The caprice of the world prevents us from doing so.
     Granted, we cannot see everything, and granted, we cannot understand everything.  However, if we steadfastly insist on constructing our world without any outside input, fresh information, or new insights, we will indeed, figuratively speaking, fade away, vanishing into the groundless parameters of our finite minds.  We really will be nowhere.
     Even those of us who are sure about what they believe should realize that the only thing we can really be certain of is that we believe it.  On the other hand, we cannot really believe anything unless there is a reason why we can.
     We are somewhere, yes, but without a reason for this "somewhere," we are in fact nowhere, just seeing what we want to see and never sure where we are going because there is in fact nowhere to go other than the horizons of our finite and etiologically unexplainable minds.  And who wants to live like that?

    At one point in "Cloud Atlas," which I talked about yesterday, too, the Prescient remarks that some people have a "hunger for more."  How very true.  Without this hunger for more, humanity would not be.  People are born to seek more, to strive beyond the moment, to look into things they do not know.  It is the hunger for more that drives humanity forward, that impels people to experiment and explore, that births new worlds.
     Yet as nearly everyone in the movie eventually learned, it is this very hunger for more that brings humanity into conflict, conflict with the world, conflict with itself.  It thrusts humanity into worlds it cannot always control, propels them into conditions with which it cannot always cope.  It grows and develops even as it undermines and pulls down.
     On the other hand, unless we hunger, we will not eat.  For those in the movie who pursued their hunger, their hunger for more, though they may have experienced difficulty and hardship, in the end, they found a far richer meaning.  They had no regrets.
     It's a good analogy of faith.  By its very nature, faith is a hunger for more, a hunger that, like any hunger, assumes that there is a more to be found.  That there is more to be found is a assumption that all of us make, regardless of how we frame the substance of our faith (and let's be honest:  we all live by some type of faith).
     So given that we all live by faith, the question all of us must ask is this:  is that in which we have faith sufficient to satisfy every hunger we have?
     Just having the hunger is not enough.