Even if you do not live in America, you are undoubtedly aware of the fiscal and political crisis that is currently unfolding in the halls of Washington, D.C.  Regardless of where people stand on it, I suspect everyone agrees that it is a mess, a massive, seemingly unresolvable mess.
     I will not pretend to offer a specific solution to this crisis, but for me one of the most troubling dimensions of the issue is that people on both sides are claiming that they are promoting their positions because it, they insist, is the most Christian thing to do.
     To this I say:  how do you know?  Although I believe that there are reasonable and credible ways to divine what the Bible is saying, I also believe that, in the end, we do not live in a perfect world.  We live in a world overwhelmed by its own foibles, a world that is unbearably capricious and frustratingly finite, a world that, for these reasons, does not lend itself easily to black and white solutions to very gray problems.  We tread a fine line between intellectual interpretation and subjective mystery, mystery whose parameters are simply beyond our ability to fully grasp.  Even if we think we do, we only rarely know what is precisely right at every moment every day of every year.  We cannot see beyond who we are.
     Walk carefully, conclude cautiously.  As the apostle Paul notes, "We walk by faith, not sight."
     I wish the president and Congress well.

     I have a friend who, I fear, is dying of brain cancer.  The doctors say that he probably has no more than a few months to live.  It's tragic:  he will leave behind a wife and three children, all of whom are under eighteen years old.  He is only in his mid-fifties.
     My friend believes, however, in eternity.  He believes that even though he will die soon, he will live on.  He believes that he will live on in another form, in another life, a life in the presence of God.  Though his illness is difficult and painful, he endures it, believing that it is only the beginning of something far more wonderful.  His faith sustains him.
     Though I, too, believe in the certainty of an afterlife in the presence of God, I tremble before those who insist that the illnesses of this life are simply steppingstones, and nothing more, to a far greater existence.  Sure, given the inevitability of an afterlife, illnesses, like any part of life, constitute and present passage to death and the beyond.  We experience them, we grapple with them.  Life is not life without them.  But they are not what should be.  They are not what ought to have happened.
     Even if God oversees it, it is still a bent world:  choice means little if there is no opportunity to use it.

     The other day, I caught a few stanzas of the old Neil Young song, one from his Harvest album of 1970, "Only Love Can Break Your Heart."  In it, he sings of a "Friend I've never seen; he lives his life inside a dream; yes, only love can break your heart."
     More than perhaps any other word, love has been stretched, pulled, strained, and bent to shape almost every possible schemata and scenario.  As a word, it has been greatly used, and it has been greatly abused.  Sometimes it's hard to know what to do with it.
     As we all know, however, love, regardless of how we define or use it can indeed break our hearts.  Yet as we also know, love can thrill our hearts.  Love seems to be the great equalizer, stone foundation as much as bottomless sand.  It overwhelms us.
     As love should.  If we live our lives inside a dream, yes, we will never see.  We may be happy, but we will never see.  And we will never love.  Our hearts may not break, but our hearts will never be complete, either.
     How much more so when we consider the love of God.  Indeed does it overwhelm us, but why should it not?  It is a love both fierce and passionate, a love burning and a love longing, a love that breaks, yet a love that makes complete.  God's love is a love for all seasons and all reasons, a love that enlightens even while it stirs the darkness.
     And in the end, God's love is a love that wins, outshining all its competition.  It's anything but a dream.  We only need see.
    

     For the last couple of days, I've been away, speaking at a retreat (hence, no entry yesterday).  I talked about one of my favorite subjects:  prayer and faith.  Thinking about some harrowing and long ago mountain adventures, some in which I prayed, others in which, at that time not being a believer, I did not, I noted that, ironically, whether I prayed or not, the adventures in which I was enmeshed continued, unfolding their challenges and difficulties.  Broadly speaking, either way, I experienced no visible relief.
     So what, in this case, is so great about faith?  Faith, as we know, is difficult.  Even with faith, we often see nothing.  We often do not see what we want to see, we often do not understand what we would like to understand.  Belief comforts, but it doesn’t always explain; faith soothes, but it doesn’t always resolve, at least in this life.  So does Paul say, in 2 Corinthians 5:7, that, “We walk by faith and not by sight.”
     How true this is.  Did I see anything, any visible signs of surcease or relief in the often overwhelming blackness of those mountain challenges?  No, I did not.  But I believed.  Even in darkness, I believed.  Even in the darkness, I believed that there was something more, believed that that was something else, that there was someone besides me amidst the mountain tumult erupting around me.
     But I still couldn’t see.  Was I really better off?  Yes, I was, but, oddly enough, it was only because I believed.  Because I believed, I had long ago come to understand and find thoroughly logical and sensible that I (and everyone else) live in a framework of knowing more profound than we can finitely imagine.  I knew that even though I would never be able to see everything, there nonetheless existed, in a way that is difficult for us to fathom, someone who knows and understands everything, someone who grants value and purpose to all things.  I could not see this purpose, I could not clearly know this purpose, but I knew and believed it was there; if I did not, I knew that I was looking at a world without any point at all, an accident in an accidental nothingness, an eventuality that defies all explanation.  So I prayed.  I stepped into faith.
     And I did so aware that as the apostle Paul observes at the end of the fourth chapter of 2 Corinthians, what we--every one of us--do not know now pales before what we will one day know, that the uncertainty we experience now will one day crumble and faint before the certainty of the, as Paul puts it, “weight of glory” to come.  There is something more than a random world.
     We believe now precisely because we cannot now see.

     We in the West live in the shadow of such tremendous disparity.  A few days ago, I attended a wedding.  It was a beautiful affair, full of life and wonder, overflowing with joy and good will as several hundred people gathered to honor two young people (and their families) who were preparing to join their lives together forever.  It was a grand occasion, one that my wife and I were loathe to leave.
     When, before my morning run the next day, I picked up the newspaper and glanced at the headlines, my heart sank.  While we were celebrating the riches of an existence that only living in a relatively safe West can bring, across the world, in a shopping mall in the city of Nairobi, Kenya, Islamic militants were systematically gunning down over sixty people.  In the sweep of a few moments, over sixty people, over sixty wondrous creations of God were gone, their lives snuffed out forever.  Never again would they live on planet Earth.  For them, everything was over.  It was overwhelmingly depressing.
     "To those to whom much has been given, much shall be required," noted Jesus.  Those of us who have had the good fortune to live in reasonably safe parts of the world, while we may have the greater material blessings, we also have the greater spiritual responsibility.  What we have should become the foundation of who we are, what we do, and what we give.  After all, what else is good fortune for?
     Never do we want to be on our deathbed and wonder whether we could have given and done more, for by then it will be too late.
     Enjoy the gift.
    

     Light and dark.  We deal with light and dark, physically as well as metaphorically, every day.  Oddly, we cannot have dark without light, for dark is no more than the absence of light, but unless we have experienced darkness, we cannot fully enjoy and appreciate light.
     Many centuries ago, the religion of Zoroastrianism emerged in the sands and mountains of ancient Persia, proclaiming a world dominated by a god of light (Ahura Mazda) and a demon, maybe more a demi-god, Ahriman, purveyer of darkness, who are constantly battling for supremacy of the universe.  Zoroastrianism understood that life consists of darkness as well as light, and that being human is to deal with both.
     As do we.  We usually do whatever we can do avoid darkness, yet we know in our hearts that we cannot elude it altogether.  And we of course embrace the light in our lives, reveling in the joy and wonder it brings us, hoping, perhaps, that it will never end.
     But it will.  As Zoroastrianism pointed out, however, light, embodied in Ahura Mazda, is, in the end, always stronger than the darkness of its counterpart.  It understood that, in the biggest of all pictures, light, driven by divine forces beyond imagination, will prevail.
     Why else would we live? 

     Have you heard of Charles Manson?  People who grew up in the American Sixties do.  Mr. Manson is remembered, infamously, for sending, on an August evening in the Los Angeles of 1969, a group of his followers to murder, brutally, everyone who happened to be staying at a particular house in an wealthy enclave in the hills above the city.  The gruesome character of the murders shocked the city, and the nation.  Manson's group quickly followed with another, equally horrific one the next night, frightening the residents of L.A. even more.
     Why am I recounting such a painful memory?  I've been reading a recently published biography of Charles Manson, who is now almost eighty years old and still living in a high security prison in California.  He will die there, I'm sure.  Although I have so far found many interesting things in the account, one that I have thought about for the last couple of days is the life of one of the sons Manson left behind.  This particular son was named Charles Manson, Jr.  He could never live with this name; he was always haunted by the image he thought it presented to the world.  He eventually took his own life, shooting himself on a deserted highway in Colorado in 1994.  It's a sad and tragic story.
     And it's a sad and tragic story that underscores to me the aching difficulty of making sense of the ultimate meaning of existence.  Why was this young man, out of all the young men in the world, fated to be born with this name?  Why did he have to suffer such a destiny?  What does this say about the real purpose of life?
     These are hard questions.  If we say that it's all part of the master plan of God, we are left wondering why God planned such a thing.  Yet if we say that it just happened, that it was a purely random twist of fate, we are left wondering whether anything in this existence means anything at all.  Why him?  Is it just bad luck?  Is it just bad luck that his young man had only this one chance and now he is gone forever?
     Maybe it is.  If so, however, we walk in a life that is totally random and, like anything that is random, without purpose.  What is the point?  On the other hand, grounding life in God raises questions of its own, questions to which I alluded above.  However, with God comes, difficult as it may be to discern, glimmers, gossamer glimmers, and inchoate intimations of abiding, even in the darkness of existence, purpose.  It is not a purpose, but purpose, purpose that, unfortunately but, ironically, is, often and inevitably, shrouded in mystery beyond our human ken,
     So:  random or purpose.  Which mystery will yours be?

     I was reading the other day a review of an upcoming exhibit, in Philadelphia, of the work of the deceased artist Jason Rhoades (who, tragically, died of an accidental drug overdose and heart disease at the age of 41).  Central to the exhibit is Rhoades's The Creation Myth.  According to Rhoades at the time he produced it, The Creation Myth attempts to represent how people processe information, make memories, and develop transcendent things, like art or music, or hate and love.  As I pondered this, I realized that Rhoades aptly captured the essential and necessary flow and content of human experience.  Fundamental to our sense of self is our ability to process information, of any kind, as we move through our world.  It is then with this information that we develop ideas with which we formulate how we will respond to our various realities, and it is with these responses and engagements with reality that we form memories.
     From one standpoint, the story could stop here.  We process, we respond, we remember; we process, we respond, we remember; we process, we respond, we remember, and one day we die.  Sure, as Rhoades seemed to say, we may do art, we may do music, we may engage our higher sensibilities, but we never go beyond the fundamental schemata of process, response, memory.  It's a circle with nothing beyond it.
     Viewed from another angle, however, it's a circle with everything beyond it.  Myth or not, creation cannot occur in a vacuum, and myth or not, transcendence cannot be unless the fact of transcendence exists.  We do transcendence, be it art, music, literature, or anything else, because there is transcendence to be found.  And transcendence cannot be, much less be found if the circle is on its own.

     Many of us are familiar with the story of Thomas, the so-called doubting Thomas of the gospel of John.  As the story goes, when he was told that Jesus had risen from the dead, Thomas insisted that he would not believe it unless he could put his hands on Jesus' nail shredded hands and his fingers into the hole in his side left by a Roman spear after Jesus had expired.
     A few days later, Jesus appeared to the disciples and, after greeting them, invited Thomas to do what he had indicated he wanted to do.  When Thomas physically felt Jesus' hands and side, he exclaimed, "My Lord and my God."  He really believed.
     In response, Jesus remarked to Thomas that, "Because you have seen me, have you believed?  Blessed are they who have not seen, and yet believed."
     One might say that faith in Jesus was easy while he walked on Earth; people could see him, touch him, hear his words.  As we know from various accounts, however, it was not always so easy; many did not believe.  But they could not deny that Jesus was there.
     For we who are living many centuries later, faith becomes even more difficult.  Whether we believe or not, we cannot point to a physical Jesus, walking and talking on the hills and dales of the planet.
     Yet the evidence for Jesus remains, enshrined in the annals of numerous writers of the ancient world as well as in the four gospels of the New Testament.  But try as we might, we will never see Jesus standing before us.
     So we have a choice.  We can realize that we cannot see and believe the testimony of those who did; or we can realize that we cannot see and deny the testimony of those who did.  We can understand that faith only happens if we let it be what it must be, that is, assenting to, with reason and reasonable evidence, the only thing that can be true.

     I guess this is my week for movies, as the other night I saw Hitchcock, Anthony Hopkins's stunning portrayal of the legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock during the making of his masterpiece, Psycho.  Hitchcock knew suspense very well.  He knew how to frighten, he knew how to titillate, he knew how to create a longing to see what was next.  He was a master of cultivating fascination.
     The word fascinate comes from a old Indo-European word that means awe or fixation.  We are awed by suspense, we are fixated on waiting to see what will come next.  Why?  Why do we crave suspense, however macabre it may be?  We are such small and limited beings, yet we change worlds, ours and others, with our longing for the bizarre.
     Maybe we are inherently bizarre; maybe we are inherently beings who are made to seek the odd and unusual, the mysterious and unsettled.  Maybe we are entities who can only live if we step into things that we believe will turn our emotional worlds upside down.  Such things do not need to be frightening, nor do such things need to be gruesome.  But they need to be things that we did not expect.  After all, if we know how the story will end, why start it?
     Perhaps that's why the writer of Deuteronomy suggested, in Deuteronomy 29:29, that there are things we will never know, that we will only know what we can physically know, and only God knows the rest.
     We live, fascinated, with the suspense of God.

     Have you seen The Island?  An intriguing movie that I saw for the first time a few days ago, The Island is a tale of the necessity of humanness.  In it, a corporation produces clones for wealthy individuals who, as their organs break down, can harvest new ones from the clones and consequently add more years to their lives.  However, along the way the corporation begins to produce clones that, unbeknownst to them, come to generate memories and emotions of their own, memories and emotions that their "originals" do not share.  In the end, these clones break out of their bondage, find themselves, that is, their implicit humanness, and build new lives.
     The implications of this scenario are many, and I will suggest just one.  We have come to embrace pathos as intrinsic and essential to being viable and fulfilled human beings.  To be human is to wrestle with doubt and meaning, emotion and longing, and the very idea of existence.  Much as we may want to, we cannot ignore these things; much as we may want to dismiss the need for meaning, and much as we may wish to look past the turmoil of our emotions, we know that, deep down, we cannot live without them.  We know that we must embrace the full angst of being human if we are to be one.
     That's why to live as if on one hand the puzzle of existence does not matter but to on the other hand give vent to our passion and imagination is wholly inconsistent with who we are.  We cannot have the fullness of existential meaning if we, consciously or otherwise, overlook any of its parts.  So, yes, appreciate the joy, but enjoy the mystery, the puzzle, the angst of wondering about the fact of existence, too, for in doing so you are affirming a fundamental part of the universe:  if meaning of who you are does not matter, nothing else does either.

     In my atheist discussion group this month, we watched a video of a magician and psychologist who, through power of suggestion, induced an admitted atheist to experience what, to all appearances, was a religious conversion.  Without warning, this person stood up from her chair and began to weep uncontrollably, saying later that she, without any warning, was experiencing deep meaning and unconditional love, feelings that most religious conversions generate as well.
     Does this mean that all conversions are psychological?  To be sure, anyone's conversion is a combination of prior experiences and mental images, external and/or unexpected input, and a given state of one's mind and heart.  If we deny a transcendent basis to conversion altogether, however, we are in actuality denying the integrity of all experiences.  We can no more prove the absence of transcendence in experience than we can prove its presence.  Indeed, it seems that the burden of proof lies on those who deny a transcendent basis for conversion, as they must decide how to reconcile a profound, obvious, and unexpected change of heart with a brain whose innermost corridors, despite our best efforts, we still do not fully know.
     If transcendence exists, it will speak.

     As most people who have studied such things know, the notion of resurrection is fundamental to Christianity (as it is, in some form, for other religions as well).  The dimensions and implications of the resurrection are of course varied and profound; today, I'd like to talk about its connection to the idea of restoration.  God talks repeatedly in the Bible about his ability to restore us, to restore what we may have lost, be it years, meaning, vocation, direction, hope, loved ones, and on and on.  This is not to say that God will bring these things back, for he understands that we cannot fully undo the physical effects of lost time.  It is to say, however, that God can, by virtue of his inexhaustible power and authority, renew and overcome the pain of anything we may have lost.  He can restore our hope and revive our vision.
     We could not believe this unless we also believe in resurrection.  Without resurrection, without the possibility of another day, we are lost.  Ironically, although we all want to believe in renewal and restoration and, consciously or not, place our trust in the cause and effect construct of the cosmos to do so, we often overlook that every dream of newness depends on physical laws whose origin we cannot fully fathom or explain.  We dream, as it were, in a myth.
     Put another way, unless God is real, restoration means nothing, absolutely nothing at all.  Why do we otherwise dream? 

     Can something be wild yet still be good?  Of course.  As I was walking through a newly established forest preserve recently, I noticed, as the path wound into the forest, a neatly manicured lawn, spreading expansively around a rather large house, standing in stark contrast to the wildness of the meadows, lakes, and trees just beyond it.  The difference was striking:  on the one side, all that is safe and secure; on the other, everything that is wild and unknown, separated by an arbitrary property line.
     As I looked at this divide, I thought about a line from the British writer C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia.  In it, a character is talking about the lion Aslan who, as readers of the Chronicles know, is an image or picture of the Christian God and his love for humanity.   Aslan, the person says, "Is not safe, but he is good."  How true.  Like the forest preserve, with its mystery and challenges, perhaps God is not wholly safe; perhaps he is a more harrowing adventure than the safe and ordered manicured lawn.  Perhaps.  On the other hand, we could wander through manicured lawns, of any kind, all of our lives, and never really understand what life is about.  We might not know disturbance and pain, but we would also not know the more fundamental dimensions of this finite existence.
     So it is with God.  Not believing in him seems safe.  We do not need to change our world in any way.  Yet given life's puzzles and conundrums, maybe we should consider that it is better to embrace the "unsafe" in order to find the deeper goodness in this existence we share.  It is only in the challenges of the wild that we find what is truly good.

     Ever since Saddam Hussein, the once and now gone president of Iraq, proclaimed, before the beginning of the Gulf War, that the war would "be the mother of all wars," countless people have employed the phrase, modified to fit their situation, to underscore what they alleged to be the gravity or importance of their claim, saying, "the mother of this or that," etc.
     To say that something is the "mother" of all similar things that preceded it is to implicitly acknowledge that for every thing, there is a larger thing on which this thing based.  A mathematician might say that every set is a subset of a larger set, the "mother" of all sets.  As Aristotle pointed out long ago, however, to view reality in this way means that we could wear ourselves out, physically as well as intellectually, trying to determine when we have found the "set" or "mother" of everything else.  It's endless.
     This reminds me of what many consider to be one of the logician Kurt Godol's greatest insights, that there are axioms, that is, laws of numbers, that cannot be proven.  We simply accept them as they are.  To link this to the idea of a "mother" of all things, whatever those things might be, we might say that, in the end, we either accept the existence of a starting point or framework (a "mother) whose existence we cannot definitively prove, or find ourselves in an infinite regress from which there will never be any return.

     Recently I was talking with a friend, who has been a practicing psychologist for decades, about some dimensions of her profession.  Many psychologists, she said, believe that the only valid or testable psychological phenomenon is one that can be examined analytically.  It must have physical evidence for its presence, a physical evidence that can be explored and tested in an empirical way.
     However, she added, this does not leave room for explaining an experience that may elude ready physical form, definition, or testability.  It omits something that cannot be measured by conventional means or methods.  Such an experience may include the spiritual.
     Therein lies the problem.  Someone who has had a spiritual experience knows that she has had one.  But she cannot necessarily explain it in physical terms.  It is something that conventional science cannot therefore easily verify nor, and this is critical, readily deny.  It exceeds the boundaries of the analytical.  And it cannot always be attributed to an errant or unusual psychological twist and turn.
     Maybe that's why Jesus remarked many centuries ago that, "Unless one is 'born again' [from above], she cannot see the kingdom of God [in other words, fully experience God]."  The spiritual bursts our analytical categories, yes, but to deny its existence is to affirm that we are ultimately nothing more than a collection of molecules and dust.  If there is nothing more than this world, then we are nothing more than what the world is, that is, without any reason to be here.
     Make room for what you cannot always analytically understand.  You never know what you will find.

     Recently installed on the streets of New York, Ursula von Rydingsvard's "Ona" is a singularly curious work of art, a massive "glob" of cedar and bronze that, as one views it, quickly veers into a curious stream of whim and imagination.  Polish for "she" or "her (like the Hebrew "ima" for mother and "oma" for grandmother), "Ona" is anything but feminine.  She is essentially shapeless, heavily layered and textured (though some might compare this to the many levels of makeup that some women put on themselves), and by most assessments almost garish in appearance.
     On the other hand, with its enormous, almost hulking presence, and untold permutations of metal and wood, "Ona" reminds us of the utility of looking at life and its expressions in diverse and multiple ways.  For some, "Ona" is comforting, a sort of eternal warmth to which they are drawn; for others, she is inspiring, a monument to possibility; and for still others, a highly evocative moment in an otherwise staid and nondescript day.  Like life, "Ona" has something for everyone.
     "Ona" also underscores to us the importance of looking at people with, as much as possible, open eyes.  In the constricting caldron of our individual desires and ambitions, we often look at people not as they are but as whom we wish for them to be.  We miss things, we overlook things, we stumble over what we should see most.  And we fail to understand who our fellow humans really are.
     Perhaps that's the biggest thing that "Ona" can teach us.  If we really want to grasp the picture of who we are and what we really mean, we must be willing to step into that which we don't always understand.  We have to let go of what we have assumed, give up what we know.
     We remember that because we are made in the image of an infinite and inexhaustibly creative God, we will find marvelously new worlds every time we open our eyes.

     In one of the many tributes to the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who passed away last week at the age of 74, a writer quotes from one of the poet's observations about his way of writing that it is "a journey where each point of arrival" has "turned out to be a steppingstone rather than a destination."  A new insight does not mark finality, but foundation and ground for one more.  Nothing is ever resolved fully, nothing is ever the ultimate word.  It is a journey without end, yet a journey in which fresh wonder surfaces with every new moment of putting thought and pen to paper.  Life is an endlessly open book.
     It's a glorious way to look at existence, isn't it?  We never arrive, nor do we want to; we are always exploring, learning, and growing to the fullest extent that our capacities allow, confident that with each new dawn day we will find something else that speaks to us.  To use an oft quoted phrase from the religions of the East, it is the journey that is important, not the destination.
     But why is this?  If God, the divine presence that is presiding, in various and mysterious ways, throughout and everywhere in the cosmos, is eternal, which he must be if this world is to be a credible experience at all, then all things in this creation will function as such.  That is, we can experience them in a potentially inexhaustible way.  Life does indeed become a journey without end.  Until it ends, that is.  For it is then that we must ask:  what is next?  If there is nothing, then the world, journey or not, meant absolutely nothing at all.  It has been a line with no form or point.
     The journey only happens when the universe is on a journey of its own.

     Ah, work!  Given a choice, many of us would not work, at least not at the job in which we are engaged currently.  On the other hand, given a choice to work at a job which we genuinely enjoy, we would probably not mind working.  If we like what we do, we will not mind getting up to do it.  And we will not always mind the time it may take away from other things we enjoy doing.
     In the end, however, most, if not all of us, would like it if we did not need to work, if we did not need to get up each day to labor, if we did not need to insert ourselves into a tiresome world of competition, supervision, and activity simply to earn a living and pay our bills.  We might enjoy a life of continuous and unrequitted leisure.
     Or would we?  Unless we are properly retired (and retirement is not an altogether undesirable experience), we, the human species, are made to work.  From the very beginning, since the day that God set Adam in the garden and instructed him to work, to till and cultivate the land before him, people have worked.  To work is to be human, and to be human is to work.  Working enables us to discover our humanness most fully.  It challenges us, involves us, enables us, fills us.  Working gives us a more complete grasp of who we are in our world.
     So why do so many of us dislike working?  Unfortunately, once Adam and Eve plunged the world into a state of entropy and disrepair, the existential meaningfulness of everything their descendants (you and me) would do would not be as meaningful as it was originally intended to be.  Though humanity continues to work, we do not find it to be as meaningful as it could be.  It never completely satisfies.
     Should we weep and wail over this?  Perhaps, to a point.  But we should also remember that regardless of what we do with our time in the workplace, we do so in the knowledge that, whatever we do, it has a point.  God created it, God endowed it with meaning.  We need to realize that however we may feel about our jobs, by doing them we, believe it or not, become most fully human.  We come closer to becoming whom we are created to be:  people who are meaningfully involved and purposefully enmeshed in this remarkable world, people who are gainfully and mightily contributing to the common history of humanity, people who are eloquently and passionately doing and communicating what they have been given to further the greater good of us all and, of most significance, to find more deeply what enables it all.
      Thanks for working.