A few days ago, my son left home to begin his third year of college.  It's a bittersweet moment.  Though I know that he wants dearly to return to his collegiate life--and I am happy for him to do so--I still will miss having him around.
     It's a funny balance, really, this powerful divide between wishing for freedom and desiring presence.  But it's part of being human.  We are free to do as we please, yet those whom we know are equally free to wish for our presence.  Freedom is integral to humanness, yes, but community is, too.  Our challenge is to find, over and over again, the best mix of the two.
     Larger picture, we can view existence and its meaning in this way as well.  The cosmos is free in ways we cannot possibly imagine--and we are caught up in its freedom--but we wish for stability and anchor, too.  Our lives are balancing acts of the two.
     As I ponder the absence of my son, I wonder as well about this delicate interplay of freedom and presence.  I also wonder about the nature of freedom itself and how integral it is to meaningful existence.  Most of all, I marvel that such things as freedom and presence exist, that we are here, here to be free, ensconced in the freedom of God.
    

     Can we change everything?  A famous line from Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa's novel The Leopard opines that, "everything needs to change, so everything will stay the same."
     At first glance, this statement seems one of contradiction.  If we change everything, how can anything be the same?  On the other hand, if we change everything, then, well, everything will, in the big picture, remain exactly the same.  If we wish for change, then, we must change what matters most while preserving what is less important--or what must always remain.
     Except for one thing:  spiritual conversion.  As William James observed in his famous study of conversion, Varieties of Religious Experience, people who undergo a spiritual conversion do indeed feel as if everything in them has changed, totally and unalterably.  If spiritual conversion is not total, if it does not change everything in a person, then, yes, everything will remain the same.
     If spiritual conversion is supernatural, this makes perfect sense.  If we try to change ourselves, by ourselves, we will indeed always be the same.  Nothing fundamental in us has really changed.  However, if God changes us, the entire picture shifts.  Yes, we will still be ourselves, but everything that is foundational and seminal in us has changed, engendered by transcendent exchange.
     Put another way, how can we change everything if we will always be temporal and material beings?  Only if we become beings shaped by another realm and presence, another plane of being, can we ever hope to be radically new.
     It takes what we are not to make us what we should really be.

     To follow up from yesterday, I'll remark at the outset that most people in the West, if not most of the rest of the world, have heard, in some form, the story of Adam and Eve.  And if anyone has not heard the story, they likely have heard, in other situations, numerous variations on its theme:  an explanation for how and why humanity struggles with guilt and moral ambiguity.
     Even if we do not believe that Adam and Eve are historical figures or that their story ever happened, we can still look at it as a metaphor for how we are to grapple with our moral angst.  By this, I mean that, considering our discussion yesterday, we are really left with two choices.  One, we assume the fact of God as a starting point for morality; or two, we assume that morality has no starting point other than its (unexplainable) existence.
     Here is where Adam and Eve come in.  In the story of Adam and Eve, we see a presence of opportunities to do, per divine dictum, either good or bad.  From day one, a moral structure, a structure encompassing both sides of moral choice, present.  A standard, a full standard and accounting of morality and moral choice exists.
     But to assume that morality is not established by divine dictum and presence leaves us wondering how we can possibly justify its existence.  How can we grasp moral choice if no reason for morality exists?  We say that Adam and Eve sinned precisely because morality existed.  Divine presence ensured its worth, validity, and reality.  Jettison divine presence if we will, yet doing so puts us in the uncomfortable position of insisting on the existence of something (morality) that we cannot explain with material explanations alone.  We are justifying something we cannot legitimately affirm.
     Sure, Adam and Eve may make a funny couple, but dust that is inherently moral is funnier (and odder) still.

     To follow up on our discussion yesterday, let's consider yet another observation on morality, this one from the great philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell.  Many years ago, Lord Russell made this assertion:

     "The point I am concerned with is that, if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, then you are then in this situation:  is that difference due to God's fiat or is it not?  If it is due to God's fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good."

     This is a mouthful.  Building on our human tendency to see the world in terms of right and wrong (however we define them), Lord Russell asks us, as did Plato, whether we believe that we define right and wrong in terms of God's dictums.  If we do, then we must ask ourselves this:  how does God know what is right and wrong?  And on what basis can we therefore say that God is good?  If God decides what is right and wrong, God becomes totally arbitrary.  What can we really know?
     Unless we assert that God is eternal and therefore the definer of all that exists, including morality, we cannot answer these questions rationally.  Apart from assuming God's aseity, we must say that good and evil and right and wrong are things independent of God and, clearly, preceded him.  To repeat, as a result, God becomes someone who simply flips a coin to decide what is right and wrong.  And we're back to square one.
     On the other hand, let us consider, again, the basis and origin of morality itself.  For this, we will turn, believe it or not, to the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.  More tomorrow.

     Once upon a time, Plato, in one of his dialogues (Euthyphro), asked this:  "Do actions become moral simply because they're dictated by God, or are they dictated by God because they are moral?"
     It's an interesting question.  For a theist, the first option would be true.  That is, the reason a theist holds anything to be moral is that God has decided and ordained that it should be moral.  Those who choose the second option, however, realize that they are relegating God to a much different position.  God does not decide what is moral; rather, someone else (presumably human beings) determines what is moral.  God simply affirms that someone's decision.  Belief in God persists, but it's viewed in an entirely different light.
     There is a third approach.  If one does not believe in God at all, she would say that the issue of God is not relevant here, that we, that is, we human beings, and only we human beings, decide what is moral.  We do not need God to agree with what we're doing.  He's not necessary.
     What seems to be missing in this equation, however, is consideration of the fact of morality itself.  What is morality?  Why do we insist that it exists?  Why are we moral beings?  Put another way, why, in a vast and largely impenetrable cosmic dust and plasma universe, do we think about right and wrong?
     If we say that from an evolutionary standpoint morality has proven beneficial to the human species, we still have not answered the question of how an impersonal universe would ever produce morally aware beings.  What could possibly be plasma's motivation for birthing morality?
     That, to me, is the most important question of all.

     Do you enjoy history?  Many schoolchildren do not.  Many do not enjoy memorizing names, places, and dates connected to times that, to them, seem too long ago, spending many hours listening to lengthy lectures about subjects that seem wholly foreign to their experience, or working on various essays about selected dimensions of a past that, to them, is not worth their time, so far removed they are, it seems, from the present year 2013.
     Maybe, however, this is the problem.  The past will never be the present.  But without the past, we would not have the present.  We cannot be creatures of the present without understanding the past, cannot be here without once being "there."  On the other hand, taken out of context or thrust into the present with no boundaries, much of the past can indeed seem irrelevant to the present moment.
     Consider our lives.  Are they not akin to a story?  Are they not like a narrative of moments, days, months, and years, a narrative that we weave, consciously or not, each passing second?  So it is with history.  Though those who lived many years before us do not know it now, what they did, how they spent their time each day, however long ago, laid the groundwork, in a number of ways, large and small, for how we spend our time today.  Everyone is important, everyone matters, everything counts.
     And that's the point.  Everything counts.  It is not history that we are after, but rather the stories that comprise it.  We are stories, eternally significant stories, in the making.  Viewed in a much larger picture, we are stories within other stories, stories of people, kingdoms and kings, stories within a grander narrative still, the narrative of creation, time, and eternity, the narrative of God.
     That, in the long run, is what history is all about.

     The final installment of Thinking About God . . .

     Faith apart from God is faith that, however strong and passionate it may be, is ultimately going nowhere.  It will never see everything because it has decided that "everything" is already there.  It has no room left for questions, for it thinks that there are no more answers to be found.
     We can't place limits on what we see.  As finite being, we have no business doing so.  We must admit that there may be more than meets the ear and eye, and perhaps the mind, too.  We must acknowledge that, as both Socrates and Confucius observed, when we think we know everything, we really know nothing, for we are saying that we know everything that we can possibly know.
     And this we cannot possibly do:  there is always more to know.
     Meaningful faith must therefore believe in something more.  It must assert the fact of a beyondedness, must invoke the idea of God.  It must agree with the reality of the living transcendent.  It has to.  Otherwise, it is a faith that is constantly devolving back to itself.  It’s going nowhere.
     In contrast, our call to faith is that of Abraham:  to believe in and trust God implicitly, to believe that he is always there, and to be continually confident that he is entirely trustworthy and deserving of our affection.  It is to believe that God is the ultimate “more.”
     Did he not send his only son to redeem and forgive us?
     Faith is the essential grounding of our experience.  Everything we do revolves upon it, and everything we have discussed in this book finds its beginning in it.  We base our perceptions of holiness on how we see, as we do the way we think about redemption.  Humility is beholden to how we see, as are love and resurrection.  How we see frames our world, and how we perceive holiness, humility, love, redemption, and resurrection flows out of our picture of the world.  Faith is the beginning and end of spirituality and all that comprises it.  It's the color of our desire, the painting of our perceptions and longings.  Faith aligns wish and truth.  It is central to how we grow, intrinsic to how we live.
     Faith eschews knowledge for trust, and rejects control to embrace dependency.  The openendedness of faith is its challenge and its strength.  And this challenge is great.  Although we find freedom in letting go, we often must steel ourselves at the prospect of giving up direction and security.  Similarly, while we may gain comfort from being able to trust, we do not consistently enjoy not always knowing or being able to dictate what will happen next.  Yet we must; we must give up what we think we can do for what we believe someone else can do better.
     Faith as it should be, that is, faith in a God who is living and active in the world, is faith born in relationship, a relationship with the creator of the universe.  It is a faith that grows in a way that is consistent with reality, a faith that recognizes the caprice of the finite and the loving necessity of the infinite.  It is a faith in which we grow into a fuller knowledge of who we are.
     Faith in God is an experience in which we participate not knowing, in this life, how it will turn out.  We cannot always see the end.  It's a walk into the darkness, yes, but one in which we know light, a greater light of purpose, is always present.  Although we cannot see, we believe that God can.  We choose to accept that God knows best, regardless of how things look or feel, either now or later, and move forward, confident and secure in his loving intentions and plans.
     In the end, we have two choices.  Either we spend our days striving for security, madly chasing every physical and financial dream of unity and happiness evermore, desperately trying to carve out a piece of paradise on earth, or we bravely step out and choose to recognize that we will never find these things, permanently, and instead give ourselves up to the oddly paradoxical insecurity of God.  It is insecurity because we don’t know all that will happen next (but, God or not, we wouldn’t anyway; after all, we are pitifully finite); yet it is also security, a security that amidst insecurity we experience a security greater still.  In letting go of supercilious hopes of brief and worldly security, we in fact embrace a security far more secure, a security not of the moment, but of eternity.
     As we still walk in temporality, however, such security seems as if it’s not.  But this is only the insecurity of our finitude perceptions.  If we extend ourselves beyond it, we see that it is the richest security of all.  We know that underneath it all is God.
     But isn't that how life is?  We never really know what lies ahead.  And we never will.  Faith is therefore the only logical way of life, the way that we sinful and dependent human beings must tread.  Either we can believe we know, or we can accept that we cannot, even as we believe that that one day we will.  Faith affirms that we are always and forever indebted to God.
     And without faith in God, we can't really live.

 

(Thinking About God, 2007, William E. Marsh)

     Many years ago, I listened to a speech given by the late Margaret Thatcher who, most of us know, as prime minister of Great Britain during the Eighties left a political and economic legacy that has been alternately lauded and reviled by critics of all stripes.  Mine is not to offer opinions on Mrs. Thatcher, but rather to think about a point to which she returned repeatedly during her speech, namely, the necessity of the rule of law.
     This observation must of course be taken in context.  Too many laws stifle; too little invite chaos.  Mrs. Thatcher's point was that people needed a rule of law to insure a reasonable degree of comity and order in their respective nations.  With this, it is hard to argue, although we can certainly debate about how intense or comprehensive a set of laws should be.
     The larger issue, however, is why we humans suppose we need laws.  If we say it is because we need order, then we must ask ourselves why we do.  Why are we creatures who desire order?  Why do we not prefer chaos?
     Laws ensure order (and, again, we can debate about how much order we need), but they only do so because we are creatures who desire order over chaos.  Why?  We live in an orderly universe, a universe that operates according to various physical laws.  The rule of law is built into the fabric of the cosmos.
     So why is there order when there was nothing to imagine it?

More from Thinking About God . . . .

   The faith that transforms and changes is a total faith.  It emboldens us to push ourselves a little farther, maybe a little faster each day, always pushing us into the different and unknown.  It has to.  A transforming faith is a faith that marches forth bravely, goes forth almost recklessly, aggressively unfolding the unseen, boldly uncovering the deeper currents, fearlessly poking behind and beneath the skein of our lives and perceptions, regardless of what is out there.  It’s a faith that takes us well beyond where we ever expected to go.
     A faith that transforms will also make us willing to give up anything to experience what it shows us, to relinquish all that we thought we wanted or knew to embrace something far more meaningful.  We will find a faith that transforms the most compelling thing we have known, something that we will want more and more of each day.  Although life will laugh at us, we will laugh right back.  We know that we can see between the lines, and we know that we are part of a hope that transcends the visible future, that overwhelms the presently seen.
     Because faith laughs on the door of what we know, and because it challenges what we do know, we do it fullest justice when we allow it to let us see what we did not think we could see, or know.  Faith is a door into the uncharted undulations of our experience, those parts of our world that we didn't know about or did not care to explore.  It penetrates the forgotten corners of our arrogance and misery, pries open our long locked cupboards of opacity and myopia.  Transforming faith overturns everything we know.
     Though faith is a way of seeing, unless it allows its user to see (or at least have evidence for) all that is out there, it becomes a faith that is not fully consistent with what is real and true.  It becomes a faith that refuses to believe or does not comprehend what it sees, a faith that sees only what it wants to believe or see.
     For this reason, faith must be open to all possibilities if it is to be honest with its reality.  If faith is a way of seeing and the life changes that come from that seeing, then it must be shaped in a way that it can see all that there is to see.  Faith is shortchanged when we let our biases and partialities limit its scope.  Its effectualness is a function of the openness which those who experience it grant it.  Genuinely transformative faith is only possible when it is grounded in a proper sense of what is real.  Real faith is faith in what is most real.
     That in which we place our faith must explain the world.  It must explain why the world is the way it is, why we are here, and where we are going.  It must therefore be transcendent, that is, it must have a vantage point on the world that we who are living in the world might not necessarily have.  The world cannot explain itself.  Our faith must be able to look beyond us.  We cannot exercise faith in a meaningful way unless we acknowledge that it points to a presence or somethingness rooted in something greater, bigger, and more insightful and morally powerful than we. 
     And faith must be connected to a real reality.  It must trust in something that is genuinely real and true.  Otherwise, it means nothing.
     True faith must be faith in God.  Why?  Anything else is simply faith in the next best thing.  Outside of God, nothing is really real, and only faith that directs itself, in humility and trust, toward God, is real.  We all exercise faith in various people and things:  parents, friends, employers, real estate, sun and snow; but we all know that these are fleeting phenomena that, although wonderful in themselves, do not last.  They are not things in which we can safely place our deepest beliefs.  But God is.  God is transcendent, God is holy, God is undying love, and God is eternal.  And God has made himself known, in space and time, in Jesus, and promises redemption and freedom to all who call on him.  Faith in God is faith that is rooted in history, anchored in eternity, set into and committed to a sure promise and a comprehensive picture of reality.
    

(Thinking About God, 2007, William E. Marsh)

     Before I share another portion of Thinking About God, I take time to reflect on the historical context of hearing and seeing.  Many scholars believe that, in their view, it was the ancient Semitic peoples, the Assyrians and Hebrews, who made hearing their primary sense, whereas it was the Greeks, the Indo-Europeans, who made their primary sense seeing.  While we could discuss at length the many cultural implications of this thesis, I'd like to focus on what it means for our ability to sense things we cannot audibly hear or visibly see, things like, say, God.
     We all know that some animals see and hear far more acutely than human beings.  And we also know that we tend to see and hear what we want to see and hear, and that what we see and hear is conditioned by what is in our brains, our specific cultural and neuronal contexts.  Rarely will we all see and hear exactly the same thing.  Witness the variety of responses to a particular work of art or certain musical piece:  everyone has a different reaction.
     So it is with how we might see and hear God.  Some claim that those who see or hear God do so because of what is already in their brains.  They really haven't seen or heard anything.  Others might suggest that, no, those who see and hear God do so because they really do see and hear, in some way, God.  God is as real as anything else they see or hear.
     Rarely, however, can those who claim to see or hear God produce any tangible evidence that they do.  On the basis of how their seeing and hearing God has changed or affected them, they believe that they have.  It becomes the testimony of their experience.
     What does all this have to do with the historical context of hearing and seeing?  Simply, whether we make our primary sense hearing or seeing doesn't matter as much as what we decide that we can hear or see.  And maybe that's why, when Jesus appeared on earth, the gospel of John describes him as the "Word became flesh."  For this spoke to the Semitics, who relied on hearing, that is, the word, that which is spoken.  And it spoke to the Greeks, the Indo-Europeans, for it was the visible flesh and blood person of Christ now before them.
     But unless people believed what they heard or saw, they would not see or hear anything.  Unless people determined beforehand that they would put no boundaries on what they could hear or see, they would do neither.
     How about you?

     More from Thinking About God . . .

     Trust puts feet to faith.  If we can't trust, we can't have faith.  Trust empowers faith; it makes faith blossom and grow.  When we trust, we let what faith opens us to see nourish richer perceptions of life and spirit in us.

     In addition, when we trust, we let go.  We let go of our fear of what we don't know, our fear of what we can't understand, let go of thinking that unless we have all the facts we cannot be comfortable with where we are.  Even though we do not fully understand, and even though we do not completely see, we are content and unafraid.  We decide that we don't need to know everything in order to move ahead.  We give up control, relinquish our anxieties and fears.  We begin to activate our faith.
     Faith as trust also involves relationship.  When we trust in a way of seeing, we establish a relationship with it.  When Abraham trusted in how God saw the world, he entered into a new relationship with God.  He would not see God as a bucket of empty promises.  God was really real, really real in a profoundly new way.  When we trust how our faith sees, we create a relationship with a part of reality we did not have before, establish an intimacy with it that we did not previously possess.  We have a new relationship with what is true.
     "As iron sharpens iron," the Hebrew book of Proverbs says, "so one person sharpens another."  Being in a relationship changes those who participate in it.        And how much the more with the trust relationship of faith!  When we put our trust in how our faith sees, we change.  We open our hearts to something else, someone new.  We enlarge our perceptions, broaden our ken.  We go beyond the moment, step past the line of visible evidence, walk a path of fresh openness to what someone else, not us, determines what is true.
     When we trust, faith becomes more than how and what we see.  It becomes the way we live.  The faith that Abraham had in God became the center of his life, the foundation of all his decisions, the prism through which he thought and acted and understood himself and the world.  His faith became the guiding light of his life, the basis for his most profound meaningfulness and understanding.
     When faith defines how we live, faith becomes that which makes us who we are.  When I was in high school, I knew a girl who practiced what she called chanting.  "Every day I chant," she told me.  "I chant for good grades, good friends, happiness.  When I get older, I'll chant for other things, like a good husband and a big house.  I really believe it works."
     Monica's faith in chanting shaped how she saw and interacted with the world.  It grounded everything she did.  Chanting was her life.  It made her who she was.  When everyone else was out partying, Monica stayed home, chanting, chanting before her altar, her faith shaping her into a person very different from the rest of us.
     In January of 1956 a group of Huaroani (or Auca) Indians in the jungles of Ecuador ambushed and killed five American missionaries who for several months had been attempting to evangelize them.  Though the news reverberated throughout the secular press of the Western world, those in the know, particularly the wives and children (along with one unborn) whom the missionaries left behind, were not surprised.  The Aucas had a longstanding distrust of outsiders and a well-earned reputation for savagery.  The five men knew they were treading on thin water.
     Some years before he died, one of the missionaries, Jim Elliot, wrote in his journal, "No man is a fool who gives up what he cannot keep for what he cannot lose."[2]
     Mr. Elliot knew in whom he believed.  He knew in whom his faith rested.  He knew he believed in a real God.  And it was this faith that made him who he was; it fueled and guided everything that he did.  Because he unhesitatingly trusted in this real God, Mr. Elliot was willing to risk his life to bring the gospel of Jesus in which he believed to a tribe of Indians deep in the Ecuadorian jungle.  His faith in God was his life.  Just as Monica allowed her faith in chanting to transform her and define how she lived, so did Jim Elliot's faith transform him and determine the course of his life.  He went forth without fear, completely confident in what his faith had shown and built into him.
     Mr. Elliot had a relationship of trust with God that transcended the facts of his situation.  He trusted in God more than he trusted in himself.  His faith was the definitive shaper of his reality.

     (Thinking About God:  Meditations on a Considered Life, 2007, William E. Marsh)

---

     From Thinking About God, continued . . .

     Cardinal Luciani created a world for himself in which God was the center of meaning.  This world was his reality.  How did he create it?  By believing in God.  Faith for Cardinal Luciani was to believe in God and construct a portrait of a world that is guided and given meaning by this God.  The cardinal "saw" (perhaps a better term is "sensed") God in his experience, then used what he "saw" to make his painting of the world.  His faith in God was his way of seeing, of looking at the world, his way of building his perception of what was real and true.  It circumscribed and controlled his view of reality.
     Conversely, Rob Hall made a world in which he was the determinant of what was real and true.  He saw through the lens of who he thought he was.  And, it seems (although we will never know for sure), he continued to believe this perception of the world until he died.  Though faith is belief, it is belief that comes out of how we see.
     But faith doesn't just see.  It looks at what it sees.  And it thinks about what it sees.  Faith knows that merely seeing is not enough.  It knows that in order to see—really see—it needs to look into and examine what it sees.  Faith looks at what is there, then looks for something more, something that is less than obvious, something that might enhance or explain what is.  It knows that what is apparent is not always all there is to be seen, or what is most important.  Faith reads between the lines, studies the fine print.  It ponders the inchoate, the undivulged, the unrevealed.  It is a seeing that tries to see even when there seems to be nothing to be seen, a seeing that understands that what we see is dependent on how we see—and what we do not, as well.
     Faith is always trying to expand the boundaries of what we think we know.  It is always seeking to see more.  Faith believes that it will always see because it believes there is always more to be seen.
     In the account of Jesus' resurrection in the gospel of John, we read that when Peter and John came to the tomb on Easter morning, although they both saw the empty tomb, they didn't "see" it in the same way.  Peter, the account says, "beheld" the discarded grave cloth, whereas John "saw" them and, the passage records, believed.  The writer uses a different Greek word to describe how each apostle "saw."  Peter and John saw the same thing, but only one understood what he saw.  He was the one who could really "see."
     A faith that sees, however, is not enough.  We must be able to trust what we see.
     Abraham, the father of the Jewish people, was seventy-five years old, Genesis 12 tells us, when God called him to go forth from Haran (a city in northeastern Syria) into Palestine.  "I will make you a great nation," God told him, "and I will bless you and make your name great."
     Though he probably wondered how at seventy-five years of age he would ever give birth to a great nation, Abraham went anyway.  He believed in God and trusted that the way God saw the world and his life was worthwhile, good, and true.
     Some years later, God spoke to Abraham again, and assured him, again, that he would father a child, an offspring from whom millions of people would eventually come.  Abraham looked at himself, then at Sarah.  But he took God at his word.  Against all earthly logic, Abraham trusted God.  But that’s the way of faith:  choosing to see when we cannot.
     Many years hence, when Abraham was ninety-nine years old, God sent three angels to tell him that he and his wife Sarah should expect a child the next year.  Abraham would be one hundred; Sarah would be ninety.  Sarah laughed, but, again, Abraham trusted the way that God saw the world.
     The next year, just as God had promised, Isaac was born.  Abraham had the faith that saw even when it could not.  He believed without seeing.  So deep was his faith in God that he was willing to believe Him even when there was no reason to, because for him there was in fact every reason to.  Abraham believed that God would deliver.  He was willing to go with God without any evidence that what God had promised him would come about, because he trusted the way that God told him to see.

     (More tomorrow . . . )

From Thinking About God:  Meditations on a Considered Life, 2007, William E. Marsh

     Before I share another portion of my book (yesterday), I take time to reflect on the discussion in which I engaged during the meeting of atheists and agnostics which I attend once a month.  After we watched a video talk given by Sean Carroll, a professor at Cal-Tech, a talk in which he argued that there is no purpose in the universe, some of us suggested that this doesn't matter, that we make our own purpose, whatever we decide it should be.  That is, our purpose is not imposed on us; rather, we develop it ourselves.
     Though this sounds good on paper, if we examine it more closely, we face a potential problem.  If the cosmos has no meaning, as the professor insisted, then doesn't that mean that everything in it, including us, has no meaning, either?  When I suggested this, one person responded that there are two levels of purpose and meaning.  There is the universe as it is, the vast and impenetrable universe that is without purpose or meaning.  Then there is us, rational, conscious, intentional human beings who, the professor wants to say, by their very nature, can develop purpose and affirm meaning.  Things, he says, have teleology.
     Fair enough, but do not we human beings live in this universe?  We all know we do.  So how do we justify saying that we have purpose and meaning when we are living in a universe which has none?  We cannot develop purpose in the absence of it.  And we cannot insist, in ourselves, that we have purpose:  what is our basis for doing so?  Subjectivity may work for awhile, but in the end we must realize that we really have no justification for using or asserting it.  Either there is teleology, or there isn't.
     And we go on.

     For the next few days, I share from a chapter in one of my books (Thinking About God).  It's a meditation on faith.

     "Sleep well, my sweetheart", he said to his wife, "please don't worry too much."

     No one will know how much Rob Hall believed in what he said.  Terribly weak from lack of food and sleep, he was bivouacked on the south summit of Mt. Everest, the highest mountain in the world, talking on a shortwave telephone receiver via satellite to his wife at their home in Christchurch, New Zealand.  She was eight months pregnant with their first child.
     By dawn, Mr. Hall was dead, one of eight who would die on the mountain that night.  No one expected him to go; he was one of the top Everest guides on the planet.  Incredibly strong and durable, he had climbed the peak several times before.  The storm in which he was trapped was just one more in a long series he had encountered on the mountain over the years.  He'd make it.
     Maybe that's what Mr. Hall really thought.  Maybe he really did believe that he would get through the night and be all right.  He had every reason to think so.  He had the utmost faith in his ability to deal with anything the mountain threw at him.  He trusted himself implicitly.
     His belief in himself framed his world.

     When the Roman Catholic College of Cardinals elected Albino Cardinal Luciani as the pope following the death of Pope Paul VI in August 1978, one of his colleagues, hoping to encourage him as he assumed the responsibilities of leading the largest Christian denomination in the world, whispered to him, "Be strong; God will not call you to a task that he won't help you carry out."
     In other words, Pope John Paul I, make your faith in God the underpinning of the way you go into the future.  Make it the hope, strength, and measure of your world.
    Although Rob Hall and Cardinal Luciani saw the world in different ways, they both looked at it through the eyes of their faith.  They formulated their picture of reality according to what they believed.
     As do we.  What we believe shapes and determines what we see and, consequently, what we do.  It creates our world.  For instance, if we do not believe that mountains exist, then we would regard a trek through the Himalayas as little more than a walk down a country lane.  Though our eyes would see the mountains, our mind would not.  Similarly, if we did not believe in cancer, we might as well smoke cigarettes twenty-four hours a day.  Although we may have read of the relationship of cigarette smoking to cancer, we have refused to believe it.  Our eyes have seen, but our mind has not.
     What we see and what we choose to see can be very different.  Reality is what we inherently see, and it exists whether or not we believe that it does.  Faith, however, is what we choose to see.  It is not necessarily consistent with what is real or true.  It may not conform to the way that someone else pictures the world, either.  But it is true for us.  Faith is the painting—our painting—of reality which we believe gives the most meaning to our life.  It's the world we create, and how we create it.   Faith is a way of seeing, a way of looking at the world, a way of looking at ourselves and, if we so choose, God.  It's the lens through which we look at our challenges and circumstances, the patterns of our times, the façades of existence.  With faith we look at the universe and try to understand it; we question, ponder, and decide what we think and what we do.  With faith we grapple with what we know, and wrestle with what we do not.  We discover, we encounter.  Faith is the beginning of the way we live, the basis of how we interact with our environment, the knife with which we carve the path of our lives.  Faith is how we see.
     And we shall see tomorrow that how we see is much important than what we see, for as we shall also see, we really will not "see" anything unless we believe there is something to be seen.

(From Thinking About God:  Meditations on a Considered Life, 2007, William E. Marsh)

     Who is watching the summer slip away?  As I was mowing my lawn the other day, I could not help but notice a distinct change in the feel of the grass.  In contrast to the spring, when it was rich, full, abundant, and green, today, the second week of August, the grass seemed markedly drier, now longer deep green but pale and transparent, looking as if it would any day now stop growing altogether.  I marveled at the way the land changes, unprompted and right on schedule, year after year after year after year.  No one tells it to change, no one makes it change; it just changes.  Its rhythms never cease.
     This led me to think that, in the fading grass of August, we see a picture of the patterns of the medium in which we live our lives.  We are born, we live, we die.  This is the unfortunate truth of a finite existence.  Nothing, as the late Chairman Mao once remarked, is eternal.
     But doesn't the land always come alive again?  Rhythms, particularly the rhythms of the cosmos, do not occur in a vacuum.  They occur in presence, a presence that, necessarily, never began and, oddly, will never end.  The universe is itself, yes, but it is not everything that is.  It has to be somewhere.
     Enjoy the rhythms of the seasons.  Enjoy that they began, enjoy that as long as the planet is here, they will never end.  Yet enjoy most of all that there is order and predictability in the cosmos.  There is intelligence, there is form, there is eternal presence.  We are not running into nothingness.

     "What has been is exceedingly remote and mysterious.  Who can discover it?"  This piece of advice from the writer of Ecclesiastes (7:24) is well put.  Even if we manage to reconstruct, absolutely and completely, a particular event in the past, we will never be able to understand, fully, what it means in the broader flow of history and time.  Although in looking at events many thousands of years in the past we may come close to divining how they fit into the span of human adventure, we likely will never be able to see precisely the full extent of what they mean.  Causes are many and often recondite, and effects, rippling as they do through many centuries, are elusive.  That's the mystery, that's the wonder.
     But mystery is good.  It tells us, as we continue careening into our various tomorrows, the many futures before us, that whatever future we build, we do well to remind ourselves that we will always be creatures of our historical contexts and times, however lengthy these may be, and that we cannot possibly hope to independently shape or fathom the full meaning of our destiny.  As the apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13:12, we "see in a mirror dimly," that is, we cannot hope to see or understand anything beyond the present moment (and even the present moment, once we experience it, slides instantly into the mists of the past).  We're locked in a mystery far greater than we can possibly imagine.
     On the other hand, if there were no mystery, there would be no meaning.  Denying mystery is denying that existence has any meaning at all.

     As Muslims around the world draw their thirty day celebration of Ramadan to a close with the festival of Eid this week, those of us who are not Muslims, regardless of how we feel about Muslims or the Islamic religion, can, if we hold to any kind of spiritual commitment, be thankful that over a billion people across the planet have, for the last thirty days, taken concentrated time out from their often busy lives to focus on their spiritual heart and condition.  Not many of us, I dare say, are willing to go without food or drink for a few hours, let alone from dawn to sunset for thirty days in succession.  And very few of us intentionally take time for extended--more than ten or fifteen minutes--spiritual meditation or retreat.
     Sure, most of us have issues with the bases of others' spiritual commitments.  Most of us wonder, at various points, why other people pursue the spirituality they do.  Very few of us can fully agree with the foundations or parameters of every type of spiritual pursuit.  Nor should we:  if we cannot be reasonably firm and certain, against other thinking, of our own spiritual commitments, then perhaps we need to reconsider why we adhere to them. 
     Nonetheless, as the world continues on its merry way, frolicking through its sundry religious and philosophical gyrations, we can be grateful for the presence of the spiritual, however we define it, in the human experience.  We can be grateful that we and the world are such that we can ponder the larger forces beyond us, the presence that made us, the eternal intelligence and love that sustains us.  We can be grateful there is a God who has endowed the cosmos with purpose greater than itself and that we, in our spirits, can engage and enjoy it.  We can be thankful that we are more than chemicals and neurons.
     Hence, however we feel about Ramadan or those who remember it, we can be thankful that it exists.  Despite it all, God is still at work.  And only he, he who has made himself definitively known in Jesus, knows how it will all end.

     Have you heard Beethoven's Ninth Symphony?  The nineteenth century German composer's last symphony, the Ninth is perhaps most famous for its final movement, the so-called Ode to Joy, a glorious paean to the glory of humanity and its existence in the world.  Although I've heard the movement many times, I heard it again the other day, and came away, struck again, by its deep passion for life.
     When I consider the context in which Beethoven wrote this magnificent symphony, the aftermath of the European Enlightenment and the emerging Romantic movement in the West and the vast shifts in worldview that these engendered, I marvel at the drive, the unmitigated drive of humanity to find its place, its meaning and purpose in the cosmos.  With the Enlightenment, the Western intellectuals abandoned the idea that God was a legitimate path to truth, and in the Romantic movement proceeded to develop a new idea of what truth might be.  Ironically, the Romantics averred that truth may yet be found in some sort of eternity--but not a personal God--while the rest of Europe, soon caught up in the technology of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, concluded that truth might in fact never be found at all.
     Nonetheless, people continued to look for meaning.  They do so even today, usually settling for finding it in the richness of existence, the fullness of living, and the encompassing wonder of being alive in a vibrant world.  Whether they know it or not, they live in the spirit of the Ode to Joy every day.
     Whatever else we may think about the Enlightenment or the Romantics, we can thank Beethoven who, despite his inner torments, gave us an anthem for all seasons, a fervent shout of joy to all that is beautiful in the world.  We can rejoice in our existence each day.
     It's a wonderful picture of the heart of God.

     What about Eden?  For most of us, the word Eden conjures up a mythical place of endless delight, a land that is always green, a locale of continuous abundance, a fount of pleasure without cessation.  Eden is a place, be it in our imagination or physical perception, for which we, consciously or not, inherently long.  So did Joni Mitchell sing in her "Woodstock" that we are trying to get "back to the garden."
     For we are.  Most of us understand that the earth contains serious flaws, and most of us understand that we, despite our majesty and greatness, are heavily tarnished and fractured beings.  Most of us realize that things are not always right with us or the world.  Sure, we may enjoy our lives and the world in which we live them, but we all would like to see, if we are honest with ourselves, them to be a little bit better.  Regardless of our religious or political (even Marxism wishes for a utopia) perspective, we all wish for some sort of universal renewal and restoration.
     It's easy to say that this longing is simply part of being human, that for any number of reasons we and the world suffer from various neuroses, maladies, and afflictions, and we naturally wish for things to be better.  But do we ever ask ourselves why we long for something better?  Is it because that's part of being human?  If so, why is it part of being human?  What is it about us that makes us long for improvement?  What is it about us that makes us pine for greater value?  And why do we even use value?
     Our near universal longing for some sort of Eden (or put another way, an edenic longing) should make us ponder exactly who we are.  Why, if we have emerged from nothingness, disorder, and chaos, would we think about and long for perfection?  Where would such values come from?
     Maybe, just maybe there really was once an Eden, a seminal and encompassing source of morality and value.  And maybe, just maybe it will come to us again.  Why?  Because for us to be who we are, it had to have been there at the beginning.
    

     Whither will go capitalism?  In chapter nineteen of the admittedly enigmatic book of Revelation, the writer, the apostle John, observes the destruction of a great city, Babylon, as it suffers judgment for the "immorality," as the text puts it, it has systematically cultivated and perpetrated across the planet.
     And what is the nature of Babylon's immorality?  It seems that its immorality is more than its complicity in encouraging sexual aberrance and lewd behavior.  Rather, it seems that Babylon's sin was to serve as a center and bastion of economic and financial greed, that is has systematically and willingly corroborated with the kings (rulers) of the earth to pursue lives focused exclusively on economic gain, usually at the expense of those too weak or powerless to mitigate it.
     Although the Babylon presented in the text could be a literal and physical city, it is more likely a metaphor for all that is wrong with economic systems that, unchecked, reduce themselves to greed and unconsidered gain.  Although capitalism has done much for the world, it also carries tremendous potential for corruption.  When we consider the financial chicanery and insider trading of America's Wall Street, the various economic scandals erupting in the ruling classes of China, the hacking controversies in Great Britain, governmental abuse in Russia, and the many other instances of people illegally manipulating the global markets for their, and only their, gain (not to mention the international drug trade, which works on supply and demand as much as anything else), we can conclude that perhaps the vision of Revelation rings true.  Left to its own devices and populated by selfish people, capitalism will indeed run amok, driving the rulers, economic and political, of the earth to engage in acts of immorality, acts of economic injustice that drag everyone, big and little, into a morass of social and cultural decadence--in every way--from which escape has proven, historically speaking, difficult.
     What to do?  We always take time to consider and remember why we are pursuing gain in the marketplace.  Is it for us?  Or is it for the world?  Do we do it legally?  Or do we do whatever we can do, absolute morality aside, to make a profit?
     As John records the vision, "Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!"

     Have you ever thought about yes?  It's a wonderful word.  Yes speaks of goodness, grace, optimism, and hope.  Yes communicates actuality, that things happen, that things work, that things and people (and God) respond to our efforts and queries.  And yes tells us that we have a choice, every moment of every day, a choice to either agree with existence and all that it proffers and entails, or to reject it, to reject the potentiality implicit in every part of the creation.
     Ironically, if we suppose the world to have originated from things wholly chaotic, random, and impersonal, we really have no grounds to assume that there is anything like yes:  how can something that never existed suddenly begin, on its own, to do so?  How can it possibly say yes?
     To wit, if we assume the possibility of yes, we must also say that the world is such that an idea like yes can exist.  We must say, with the writer of Proverbs who, in the second chapter of his ruminations, reflects on the promises that attend believing in God, that our greatest calling and challenge is to simply say yes, say yes to the only presence that guarantees that there is a yes.  It's the most human thing to do.

     A narrative of place?  A few days ago, I received an email from an old college friend with some very intriguing thoughts about the narratives of places.  An artist, my friend is very interested in how the stories of the places we occupy work themselves out in our lives.  As I reflected on his words, I thought back to, again, my recent backpack when, to my great amazement, I revisited some backcountry sites which I had first seen over forty years ago, a time, to borrow a phrase from the Star Wars movies, in a galaxy far, far, far away.
     As I stepped into these places, I remembered the stories I created about and from them.  I have carried those stories, those narratives over many more miles and years, yet the stories have changed with each passing day.  As we grow, as we age, as we experience new times and places, we constantly weave new narratives into the ones we have been using, reworking and reshaping them into a continually changing--and always new--tapestry of life and existence.  It is our places that provide the fodder for our experiences, it is the narratives, the stories of our time in those places that lead us onward.
     We might think about God as a master story teller, a person who is telling--even as he creates--a story about us, our experiences and places, a story that we--and he--are working out each moment, each day.  Infinite yet entirely immanent, God, like the Miller in Procol Harum's song "A Whiter Shade of Pale," tells a tale, a tale of us, of him, of us and him in the world he has made.
     In doing this, God elevates existence into life.  It is one thing to exist; every sentient being does that.  It is quite another to live, to understand and know existence, to grasp the essence and meaning of why we are here, and nowhere else.  Our narrative, our story of time and place is a story of life, a life with meaning beyond its existence, a life that shines with wonder, for in the construct of time and eternity that undergirds the cosmos, it will never end.