Yesterday, many Americans, and probably many more people around the world, celebrated Halloween.  Most of us know the story of Halloween.  It's a night traditionally viewed as a time when the ghouls, ghosts, and other macabre creatures escape their chthonic dungeons and roam freely across the earth, fomenting fright, horror, and panic.  Today, it is a day exceeded only by Christmas in the amount of money American consumers spend on it.
     However much one may wonder about Halloween's flirtation with the forces of darkness, we can observe that it is a night that might lead us to think about how we really see the world.  Do we see it as ruled by light or do we see it as ruled by darkness?  The tragedies of life seem to point to the latter; the joys, the former.  
     I suspect we all would like to say that light dominates.  And why not?  No one wants to walk in darkness.  In a fractured world, however, we will always have both.  How good it is to know, then, that ultimately, despite darkness's inroads into our experience, light will prevail, for it is the first thing God made. 

     Many years ago, I was an avid reader of D. C. comic books.  In particular, I enjoyed Batman.  A person with no innate superpowers, Batman was nonetheless amazingly effective at fighting crime. With his innate intelligence, technology, and ability to think quickly, Batman vanquished every foe that came before him.  Sometimes he struggled, other times he cruised.  But he always won.
     The world of D.C. comics is surprisingly materialistic, namely, that there is, at least when I read them, no discussion about metaphysical issues.  We live and act on this earth and nothing more.  There is a measure of eternity in some of the punishments meted out to enemies of Superman, and there are inklings of justice beyond the grave in some of the various superheroes' words.  But on the whole, there is little talk of anything other than this existence.  We are what we are, superhero or not, and that is all.
     Justice, then, was how the winners defined it.  And because the winners were always, after a fashion, good, that was enough.  A powerful natural theology prevailed, really, making what was good the logical outcome of a conflict between good and evil.  Good had to win, well, because it was good.  And the values of what was good usually resonated with readers:  who would not want for an evil criminal to be apprehended and brought to justice?
     I wonder, however, and I in no way intend for this to be a criticism of D.C. comic books, as I loved them as much as anyone, what our world would really be like if superheroes were our saviors, saviors even more powerful than the forces of our sundry military forces, saviors more powerful than those of the world's religions.  In the absence of a transcendent God, the superheroes would be it!
     Yet we're still on square one, stuck on the question of origin:  where did the superheroes come from?!

     In a few weeks, America will remember the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, otherwise known as JFK, the 35th president of the United States.  Baby boomers around the world remember that day well.  It produced an event that was singularly shocking and improbable:  how could this happen?  But it did, and America would never not be the same.
     Although JFK's name is just a memory today, America's desire to remember it says volumes about the human being.  What we remember is a function of what we desire, really, the fruit of what we, out of the countless experiences that flood through our lives every day, find most formative, striking, and significant.  Some may want to remember the day as a reminder of an era of exploration and challenge now long gone; others may want to remember it because it set them on a new trajectory for their lives.  And on and on.
     If we dig deeper, however, what we see most is the idea that remembering a name remembers a memory, and remembering a memory moves, if it is sufficiently purposeful and important, the farthest reaches of our mind and soul.  It makes us who we are.
     So we remember JFK.  But we also marvel at the fact of memory itself, that we are creatures who recall and remember, that we are beings who long and desire, and who remember that we do.  It's true in politics, and it's true in religion:  we remember what we most desire.  Rightly does the prophet Isaiah say of God, "Your name, even your memory is the desire of our souls."
    

     Recently, I read, again, about the life of the Mongol chieftain Genghis Khan.  Although I was appalled at the bloodshed and carnage he unleashed upon the world, I was equally struck by the extent to which he enabled the Renaissance in western Europe.  By controlling and making safe passage between Europe and Asia, the great Khan, wittingly or not, sparked a flow and exchange of information and ideas that helped Europe to restore and revive itself in the latter centuries of the Middle Ages.  Were it not for the Khan's decimating conquests, his storied ability to level entire civilizations in the course of a day, the vast stretches of land between Europe and Asia would have remained impassable for many more centuries.  Europe would not have encountered and learned from the cultures of the Orient nearly as soon as it had and would not have thought to engage in exploration across the Atlantic when it did.  The world would have been a very different place.
     How ironic it is, then, that one of history's most violent individuals laid the groundwork for the birth of one of history's most brilliant eras.  We human beings try so hard to grasp what time and events mean and where everything is going, but our context and purview are so very small.  We rarely know how our actions will affect the generations that follow us.  Moreover, we rarely know when or how what we consider despicable turns out to enable something grander than we can imagine.
     But the life of finitude is like that.  We never know.  What we do know, however, is that reasons only exist when life itself has one. 

     Perhaps you read it, too.  I'm referring to an obituary about Erich Priebke, a Nazi who was convicted of ordering the execution of 335 men and boys at the Ardeatine Caves in Italy in 1944.  Mr. Priebke was 100 years old.
     Is this justice, one might ask?  Is it fair that someone guilty of committing such a heinous crime lives to be 100 while countless other perfectly good individuals, famous and not, die much younger?  Is it right that a Nazi prison guard should outlive even the survivors of those he killed?
     No, it does not seem right or fair that such a thing would happen.  On the face of it, one would be hard pressed to find anyone who would disagree that Priebke's crime was horrific.  Almost all of us would agree that his conduct exceeded every boundary of human thought and decency.
     Ironically, however, if we were to follow postmodernity's insistence that truth is always relative, we would, as the philosopher Richard Rorty, himself no friend of religion, pointed out, have no basis to say whether Priebke's action was evil or not.  Absent some sort of absolute standard, we have no way to know.
     Rorty is quite right.  Moreover, we still face a conundrum, that is, why did Priebke live so long and others did not?  Sure, things happen, and sure, some people seem to have good luck and others less so.  If existence halts at death, however, we watch Priebke go to his grave (if he ever finds one:  no one seems to want to bury him), guilty beyond a doubt, but outliving almost everyone who brought him to justice.  And what happens to him now?  Absolutely nothing.  In a very real sense, he's forever free.
     If there are absolutes, however, we have hope that Priebke's actions will reverberate beyond his earthly grave, that standards that we, relativistic creatures that we are, cannot possibly devise, prevail, now and into eternity.
     The song is just beginning.

     "The most fundamental phenomenon of the universe is relationship," famous and influential scientist Jonas Salk once said, for, he continued, the human being is a being who seeks to relate.
     We cannot really argue with Dr. Salk's observation.  We all appreciate relationships, and, unless we are hermits, we all enjoy connecting with our fellow human beings.  Have you ever wondered, however, why this is?  Evolution would say that it is because relationship proved to be humanly advantageous.  Religion would say that it is due to God having made people this way.  Who's right?
     It's a terribly big question, but we can perhaps break it up this way.  If we say that we relate because we want to, we must still explain why we want to; that is, what is in us that causes us to desire relationship?  Is it simply random chance that we developed various chemical and neuronal capacities to connect and relate?  How would initial chaos develop these longings?  On the other hand, if we say that we relate because we were made to do so, we must of course explain why God wished for us to be this way.  We'd need to explain the mind of God, no easy task.
     But which is easier?  To explain the presence of a mind or the fact of a nothingness from which mind has come?  It's difficult to see how relationship originated in nothingness, yet it is difficult to see how God, alone in himself, could create such a thing.  How would he know to do so?
     Consider this:  we would only know and believe he could if God knew first.

     What is emptiness?  In the second chapter of his lengthy missive, the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, speaking for Yahweh, ancient Israel's God, asks the nation, "Why do you walk after emptiness and become empty?"  It is a good question, really, a question all of us should ask ourselves regularly.  But we can only answer it if we decide what emptiness, for us, is.
     For a Buddhist, emptiness is positive, a state to which one aspires, as it represents one's success in shedding the temptations of impermanence to enter an untroubled eternal destiny.  For almost every other religion, emptiness or, put another way, nothingness, is essential to finding real meaning.  As we let go of what we have, as we relinquish what we know to embrace what we do not, we find what really matters.  We empty ourselves so as to be filled.
     Outside of religion, however, most of us would agree that, if we wish to live meaningful lives, we will devote ourselves to pursuing things of importance, things that last, things that do not take us into unnecessary or undesirable places, things that do not bring us into emptiness.  Although we will not all agree on what is most important, we will probably agree on what is not, except for, perhaps, things having to do with religion.
     Therein lies the problem.  For the religious, that which is important is a function of what has been received, believed to be, and internally considered and processed as divine communication, whereas for the non-religious, it is solely a product of individual meditation or social consensus.  On the other hand, there are things, be they qualities of character or standards of conduct, which both sides agree are important, and it is these on which we can proceed.
     Yet there is a deeper question still.  If we are talking about emptiness, we are in fact affirming that we have meaning, that we have purpose.  Emptiness means nothing unless there is a fullness from which it begins.  So it seems that if we are not to, as Jeremiah urges, pursue emptiness and become empty, we should live in a way that recognizes that we and life have, in and of themselves, value.
     But if we are to be credible, we must also recognize that this value can only be value if absolute value in fact exists.  Otherwise, we have no honest way to claim that value exists at all.  Everything really would be emptiness, the emptiness of a world in which emptiness is all that can be.  And even then, fullness and value, must prevail.
     It's difficult to live without transcendence.
    

     Recently, I saw a vehicle I had not seen in a long time:  a Corvair.  For those of you who remember, it was the Corvair which consumer advocate Ralph Nader made famous (or, better put, infamous) with a book (Unsafe at Any Speed) that described in great detail how dangerous it was to drive.  Although the car's makers protested, Nader's arguments won the day, and the Corvair quickly disappeared, never to be seen again except at automobile shows and the occasional sighting on a city street.
     Why mention the Corvair?  The history of consumer products is lengthy and unending.  Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, literally millions of products have come and gone.  Some are still around.  Each was the fruit of human ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and invention, and each was designed to meet a particular human need.  The Corvair is just one more.
     Every invention, successful or not, however, becomes part of who we are, part of our cultural DNA, part of what makes us human beings.  We live in the products and workmanship of those who came before us.  Their innovations have become ours, just as ours will become the fodder for the generations that will follow us.  So we walk humbly or, as the prophet Micah put it, circumspectly, acutely aware of the minute size of our moment in history.  We are not the beginning, nor are we the end.  We ride a wave that has been cresting for millennia, and one that will crest long after we are gone.
     But the adventure continues, implicit, inexhaustible, real, a real adventure in a real world.  The Corvair and its many counterparts were of course real, but only because life itself is so, a life that is not a dream, but rather a life dreamed from above.

     Writing in his I and Thou, his remarkable meditation on the human relationship with God, the Jewish writer Martin Buber observes that, in interacting with the divine, it is not so much seeing the divine that is to be sought, for as some students of the Bible know, the prophet Moses remains the only person who, as the text puts it, has seen God face to face.  We might say the same today.  Countless people of a wide range of religious ilk and inclination have claimed to have seen God, in some form, over the centuries and, regrettably, have frequently proceeded to foist untold suffering upon various groups of human beings.  Rare is the person who has claimed to have physically seen God and gone on to reap good for humanity.
     No, Buber says, it is not so much seeing that is important.  It is rather hearing.  Not hearing in a physical sense, or hearing voices in one's head (for even a psychopath may claim to hear voices in his head), but hearing in the sense of holistic encounter, hearing as an event.  The Hebrew word that is translated into the English word "word" is dabar, a word which in fact means "word as event."  That is, to hear, particularly the "voice" of God, is an event.  It is a happening, a moment, an experience that pervades the entirety of one's existence.
     We see, but we may forget or misplace what we see.  But when we encounter, when we step into and engage with every fiber of our being, we rarely forget, for we experience inner transformation and change.  We see God, and we envision:  we strive to change the world; we encounter God, however, and we strive to be like him, to be humble, as Buber presents it, an I before God.
    

     I went camping over the weekend.  I had not stayed outside in a tent since my backpacking trip last summer, so I appreciated the opportunity to get out again.  The autumn colors had must peaked, so the forest looked particularly full of color.  On the other hand, because the colors had already reached their peak, the land was beginning to show signs of its winter decline, the time when every last leaf falls off the trees and every deciduous tree is barren and gone, pale skeletons against the stark and unforgiving brumal landscape.
     Yet skeletons are necessary.  Without a skeleton, we would not be.  We need its structure, need its form.  Even in a creature that does not have a skeleton as we understand it to be, a form exists.  There is a structure, a framework, a place:  a starting point.
     So it goes with existence.  The autumn colors seem so brilliant because they appear after the euphoric green of summer, which in turn surfaces following the nascent exuberance of spring, which in turn comes to us after the barrenness of the winter.  In every instance, however, form and place prevail.  Things appear in context, in a time, in a space which, at one time, began.
     Here and elsewhere, be it material or ethereal, natural or supernatural, nothing happens without something else happening--or simply "being"--first.

     A few weeks ago, my youngest sister turned fifty-five.  It's hard to believe.  I could say that life moves quickly, that we don't always see what is coming, that life is fragile and fleeting, or that we often miss what's right before our eyes.  These are all well worn responses and observations.  And they are largely true.
     What amazes me most about my little sister turning fifty-five, however, is that the life that we have both been given, a life that has traveled many days and miles in us, together and apart, is a life that remains, when all is said and done, a life ever unfinished and undone.  We have lived and loved richly, we have tasted all manner of joy and sweetness.  But we always see more.  We will always experience new things.
     In this is the final wonder:  we will never know the fullness of existence until it ends.  For that's when it will really begin.

     There must be something else [to life], " the late Lord Bertrand Russell once wrote to a lady friend, "though I don't believe there is."  The ambiguity of Russell's ruminations makes one swoon.  On the one hand, he realizes that life is more than what we physically experience, but on the other hand, he will not believe there is.  It is at once the grandest and most tragic of existential bargains.
     Like it or not, although we are thoroughly material beings, we all experience immaterial things.  Lord Russell sensed the vacuity of existence, someone else might find love, someone else might touch joy.  In every case, the person knows she is experiencing this thing, even if she cannot physically see it.  She cannot deny that she encounters it.
     That is the crux of the dilemma.  Ordinarily, something material would have nothing in common with something immaterial; what reason would there be to do so?  But the human being is different.  Though the human is material, she experiences the immaterial; although she is physical, she experiences what is not physical--and knows, in the bottom of her heart, that she is doing so.
     Where do we go from here?  We have two choices.  We can dismiss it, as did Lord Russell; or we can embrace it for the mystery it is, and live accordingly.  We needn't run from the immaterial, nor do we need dispute that we experience it, for we know that we do.  But if we embrace it, we must embrace something else:  the possibility that there is more to reality than just us.
     And that, as philosopher Rudolf Otto noted in his Idea of the Holy, published early in the last century, is perhaps the most frightening (and wondrous) reality of all.  Life is unbearably, and happily, greater than we can imagine.
     There is a God.

     How do we know where we are going, not only physically, but intellectually and spiritually as well?  The writer of Proverbs 16:9 offers an intriguing take on this dilemma.  "The mind of a human plans his way," he opines, "but the Lord guides his steps."
     What does this mean?  We make plans, we dream dreams, we conjure visions of what we want to do.  Then, if all seems good, we proceed.  Frustratingly perhaps for some of us, we do not do so in a vacuum.  If we did, we would only know what we see . . . and we all know that what we see is not all there is to "see."
     Robots we are not, beings we are.

     Better late than never, I guess:  computer problems this morning:

     Do we live with reason, or do we live with faith?  In truth, we use both.  We use our reason to make choices and decisions, and we use our faith to move forward when we  do not have all the physical evidence that we should do so.  We need reason to live intelligently, yet we need faith to live aware of the limits of reason.
     But do we need reason to be aware of the limits of faith?  This is the dilemma I face as I recall that roughly thirty-nine years ago today, I came into a life changing encounter with Jesus Christ.  Oh, I tried for years to reason my way away from this moment, sought steadfastly to deny, on the basis of what I could logically grasp, that such a moment was even possible.  Jesus seemed anything but reasonable.
     Reason, however, only carried me so far.  In the end, reason, by making me, or so I thought, aware of the limits of faith, enabled me to see that, in contrast to reason, faith really has no limits.  I could reason my way through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.  I could understand them intellectually.  But I could only experience them if I believed they happened, and if I believed they happened for me.
     Although my encounter occurred many years ago in, to borrow a phrase from the Star Wars movies, a galaxy far, far away (see my book Imagining Eternity:  A Journey Toward Meaning), it is ever present in me today.  And it is so because although I believe it with my reason, I ultimately know it with my faith.  Jesus is reasonable, but only because we experience him by faith.

     Today marks two years since my siblings and I met in California to climb, together, our mother's favorite mountain and scatter her ashes.  Mom passed away in July of 2012 and, after another year, we managed to sell her house and dispose of her remaining possessions.  All that remained was to scatter her ashes, which one of my sisters had been keeping since we got them from the mortuary.
     As anyone who has lost a parent knows, such a task is bittersweet at best.  Though we all missed Mom terribly (our dad had died many years before), we knew that she would want us to scatter her ashes on the top of Mt. Baden Powell, a 9,400 foot peak with which she had grown up.  It had been one of her favorite places, one to which she, while she was able, returned time and time again.
     As had we.  Now, however, the four of us were on the mountain alone, no Mom, no Dad, just us and our thoughts and memories about them.  They were gone.  It was a heartbreaking thought, really, to realize that the ones whose presence had graced our life the longest, the ones who, in the course of our  lives, had loved us most fully and dearly, were now irretrievably and forever gone.  It was a poignant commentary on the fleetinglessness of existence.
     Now that over three years after passed since Mom's been gone, I find myself slightly less overwhelmed by the enormity of the loss of her presence, marginally less struck by the devastating existential ambiguity of life without any parents at all.  But the loss persists.  And it always will.  My parents had always seemed larger than life, people whose lives had pervaded ours with more than we could usually grasp, a founts of love and care that never failed to move and brighten and enlighten us.  They were wonderful beyond words.
     Happily, however, I can never forget who my parents have been in my life.  Even though, particularly in the case of my father, many, many years have passed since they left me, I cannot forget them.  Our memories are remarkable and wonderful things.
     So, to use a vastly overlook cliché, life goes on.  But it seems that it is not so much life that goes on but rather our perception of it, that we, living out our days on this fading planet, find ourselves grasping an experience which, in the end, endures even if we do not.  We live, but we do not.
     And that's the beauty, as well as the tragedy of it:  we live in something we did not make but which we enjoy and appreciate greatly, live with something we strive daily to take hold of and understand, something that one day we will no longer have.  But we live anyway, for what else is there to do?
     Just this:  whatever and wherever our--and by this I mean everyone on this earth--parents may be today, we know that in them we see (or have seen) that life can only be life if it means more than itself, that what makes life, life, is precisely that, life, unmade, ever and always there.  Otherwise, why are we even here?

     Thinking about my post yesterday, one in which I reflected on the apparent vacuity of existence, to be, as Bob Dylan once sang, like a rolling stone, no direction, no home, and how the universe is, in so many ways, precisely like that, here for billions of years then, in the space of more billions of years, returned to darkness, I was rereading this morning the ancient Germanic saga Beowulf.  If you do not know this work, I recommend you read it; the movie made about it some years ago does not capture the fluidity and excitement of the story it unfolds.  It is a tale of fantasy and intrigue wrapped in the rich undercurrents of ancient Danish and Icelandic lore.
     At any rate, one thing that caught my eye, at least this time, was the way that the poem conveys the rhythmic flow of existence, birth, life, death, birth, life, death, over and over, and that despite the heroics of Beowulf in killing the dragon, in the end, he, too, died, left to be buried on a hill overlooking the sea.  Though his life was grand and will be long remembered, when it was over, Beowulf was alone, apart, journeying through a vast, distant, and mortally unfathomable eternity:  like a rolling stone.
     If we believe in an eternity, something which I suspect most of us would like to think exists, that although this earthly life will one day end, life itself will in some way continue, we would hope, I think, that it is more than travel through an unfathomably dark emptiness.  I would bet that we would like for this eternity to at least have a face, to have a means to experience it with passion and feeling, that it would not be incomprehensible but rather something into which we feel perfectly at home, not like a rolling stone.  It would be an eternity made for us.
     After all, as finite creatures, how could we ever expect to make our own?

     "How does it feel," once sang Bob Dylan (who is, by the way, one of my brother's favorite musicians!), "to be on your own, with no direction home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?"  The baby boomers among us remember the day at the Monterey Folk Festival when Dylan, up to that point seemingly committed to folk music as a way of life, burst all his audience's categories when, set to perform this song, he made it electric and, most commentators agree, rock music was never the same.
     Ours, however, is not to dwell on this point, however historically interesting it may be.  It is rather to ponder, from an existential standpoint, the import of Dylan's words.  Most of us, I wager to say, have a home, and most of us, I also wager to say, are not completely unknown.  We have a place and people in the world.
     If we expand the picture, however, we see ourselves, known as we might be, still essentially alone.  The transience of this existence guarantees it.  Even what we consider to be our home, and even those whom we consider to be our closest and most dear friends and lovers will one day be gone, either before we go or, eventually, after.  Nothing, as someone wrote as he watched volcanic lava swarm over the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, lasts forever.  We walk in a world that, without any God or eternity to see it, is indeed like a rolling stone, great, amazing, and magnificent, yet fated to forever roam through a trackless cosmos, no reason for it to do so, no reason for it to be.  And one day, it, and everyone in it, will be gone.
     So I ask:  is this really all there is?

     At the atheist discussion group which, as I said before, I attend once a month, we last night listened to a video in which an atheist applauded any and all efforts of believers to enter into dialogue with their unbelieving counterparts.  He cited various episodes of discrimination against atheists and noted how many Americans instinctively assume that anyone who does not believe in God must be an intrinsically bad person.
     I couldn't really disagree.  Many Americans do indeed discriminate, consciously or not, against atheists.  They tend to shun them.  This is unfortunate, as we will never get along with each other unless we agree to talk with each other.  Avoiding communication will not advantage anyone.
     Aside from rejecting atheists because they believe that anyone who does not believe in God must be a bad person, I think that many Americans also do so because they would like for knowledge to be safe, secure, and settled.  Most of us want answers, most of us want to know, most of us would like to explain the world and our lives in it, to wrap our answers into one box.
     But the atheist does not offer such a neat package.  Yes, she does not believe in God, but she will add that she does not know many other things as well, for instance, how, in some sort of medium or space without time, the world came to be.  Or why we are moral beings, or why most of us would rather love than hate.  An inability to answer such questions troubles many people, often acutely.  We instinctively want closure.
     However, whether we believe in God or not, life simply isn't that way.  We can take black and white positions about morality and God, but we must remember that we are implementing them in a very gray world in which a very gray and unfathomable existence prevails.  Ready answers are not always there.
     On the other hand, if we insist that answers can, eventually, be found (which all of us do), we must also accept that the world is not here by accident, that it has purpose and a point.  And that, like it or not, can only be the province of God.

     "Seek your bliss," the renowned historian of religion Joseph Campbell once wrote.  Seek what is you, seek what is meaningful, seek what is true, seek what is real for you.  To this sentiment some might respond that, yes we agree, but surely, we should place limits on the ability of people to fulfill such inclinations.  We do not wish for a psychopath to indulge the fullness of his desires, do we?
     I cannot argue with this response.  However, I'm not sure that it captures Campbell's full point.  Regardless of our religious or spiritual stance, we can agree that to seek what is most meaningful for oneself ought to be to seek what is, by extension, what is most meaningful for all of humanity.  If we all come from the same creator, and if we all share the same fundamental desires and sensibilities, we understand that our meaningfulness is necessarily intertwined with that of everyone else.  To find true meaning, that is, a meaning that transcends and encompasses all other meanings, is to therefore find something that is true meaning for every human being.
     How can you, some might say, insist that there is only one true meaning?  Well, if there isn't one true meaning, we are looking at a species--ourselves--that constructs itself on the basis of what it is (even though it doesn't fully understand what "it" is), and nothing more.  How can it know?  We will spend our existence striving to find something that we cannot, logically, never find.  What does bliss mean if it's only its own?

     The other night I got an email from a friend of mine who is a devout Muslim.  He and his wife had been scheduled to get together with my wife and me in a couple of days.  We had planned to walk through a forest preserve together, a prospect to which all of us were looking forward.
     Unfortunately, Hashim said, we would need to postpone our engagement.  One of his aunts was only a few hours from death in a hospital in Dallas, and he needed to leave immediately in hopes of seeing her before she expired.  I of course understood, and told Hashim that I would pray for him.
     Why did I say that I would pray?  I'm a Christian, not a Muslim.  I do not worship Allah, nor do I believe that Mohammad was the greatest of all prophets.  In times of the most severe human crises, however, one's religion doesn't matter.  It really doesn't.  Death is like that.  It's the final leveler of humanity, the one event which everyone experiences, and the one event which no one can prevent from happening.  Death's inevitability touches us all.
     Hashim and I could talk all day about our differing versions of the afterlife.  When we are looking at death's door, however, standing on this side of mortality, set to watch one of our loved ones step across that unfathomable abyss that is always hovering on the edge of earthly existence, what I want for him and his aunt to feel most is that God (or Allah, for Allah is simply the Arabic word for God) is there.  We are not alone.  As a life fades away, it, and those who survive it, can know that, more than ever, death, surely one of humanity's most heartbreaking experiences, is not the end.  God is there.

     Have you ever wondered how people can say that God is sovereign, that is, that God controls and knows everything--every little thing--and that nothing, absolutely nothing occurs without him knowing or allowing it?  It's an exceedingly difficult position to hold.
     Although I long ago decided to accept the idea of God's sovereignty, this does not mean that I do not question it; I probably question it every day.  Every day I bump up against the limits of my knowing, and every day I must remind myself that even though this is the nature of who I am, that there is nonetheless a God who knows everything and who, for reasons known only to him, is working in the world in ways beyond my understanding.
     But this will never satisfy me altogether.  I read in Romans 11, Isaiah 40, Psalm 33, and other passages about divine sovereignty and, although I agree with them, I still struggle with not knowing why about many, many things.  I always will.  So will, I suspect, many of you as well.  On the other hand, I, and everyone else, too, must decide which is most real and true.  Is the world really nothing more than a set of random happenings into which we are, to use Martin Heidegger's word, "thrown"?  Or does the world really have a point, a point which it cannot, logically, determine in and of itself (how can a box know why it is a box?)?
     If we choose the former, we will spend our lives trying to find a meaning that we will never really find fully.  Yet if we choose the latter, we spend our lives pursuing a God who has given our world its point but who will not share it with us, fully, until we see him face to face.  Either way, we encounter struggle and frustration.  After all, we are only finite.
     Struggle, yes, for you will, but purpose to struggle with what can only be, logically, true.

     Imagine a world in which, as the writer of the Hebrew Bible book of Judges describes it, God does not speak.  It is a world devoid of any communication from the outside, without a word of input from the divine, a world in which any external thinking is oddly absent.
     Not so bad, some may say, given that God may not exist, anyway.  And even if he did, why do we need thoughts from him?
     Most of us, this argument might go, seem to have gotten along fairly well in the course of the many millennia of humanity's adventures on this planet.  Sure, there have been bumps, some rather large, but overall humanity has survived, even thrived.  Generally speaking, humanity is better off than it has ever been.
     This may well be true.  We have not experienced a global war in nearly seventy years, life spans are increasing, some formerly devastating diseases are declining, planetary wealth is growing.  What we do not know, however, is how little or much God had to do with this.  If we say nothing at all, how can we prove it?
     Yet if we say everything (or close to it), what is our evidence?  Just this:  if there is no God, we really do not know why--even if we know how--we are here.  Why did our lives happen?  If we say that they "just happened," we attach to them a profound sense of meaninglessness and oblivion.  An origin in nothingness is precisely that:  nothingness.
     Put another way, if God did not speak, if the divine did not communicate itself, we're living a life in a world that cannot explain why, we communicative beings that we are, communicate at all.  Nothing comes from nothing.
     Enjoy the speech of God.
    

     We were at an art show over the weekend.  It's an art show which we attend every year, year after year after year.  We always see something new.  After all, newness is the nature of art.  One thing that caught our eye this year was the work of an artist who worked in what is called mixed media, that is, using different types of painting materials to produce an image.
     One of the images this artist produced featured a row of trees stacked atop a hill, a sort of cloud and sun vista lying beyond.  Not a radically new choice for a work of art, of course, but the nature of the vista, portrayed as it was with a wild burst of sundry and diverse materials blended together, made me think of how most of us see our lives on this earth.  We all seek vistas, we all seek dreams, we all seek meanings to fill the years of our lives.  And we all come to see, eventually, that the roads to such things are often filled with chaos and uncertainty, mélanges of circumstance and whim, tangles of unseen difficulties that we frequently do not expect or anticipate.  Life is a mixture of everything, things that are good, things that are bad.  But it's all life, life in the world God has made.
     For even if the world were still in its perfected state, even if Adam and Eve had never sinned, unless the world offered the recondite and intrigue, it would not be much of a world.  Though we often recoil from pain, problems, and unknowing, we remain aware that without them life would not be the experience it is, a mystery, a beautiful, glorious, vexing, and inchoate mystery, a mystery grounded in the infinite--and personal--presence of God.
     After all, if we already knew, we have finished before we even start.

     Autumn, observes the naturalist Edwin Way Teale in a piece I was reading the other day, is a time of scattering.  Unlike spring, he notes, usually experienced as a time of genesis and rebirth, autumn, coming on the heels of summer's lazy abundance, causes us to regroup, to take heed, to recognize that life doesn't always flow in straight lines, that existence isn't always clear and direct, and that we walk aware that things do end, that things must be let go, that wonder grows alongside longing and, sadly, despair.
     On the other hand, if we watch the animals use autumn to prepare for winter, we notice that, unlike the summer, when everything came easily, the animals seem to live ever more intensely as autumn comes upon them, feverishly working to ready themselves for the coming cold and snow.  There's no time to fret, there's no time to despair; rather, it is a time to grapple even harder with the joyful challenges of existence, the beautiful angst of being alive.
     And why not?  They know, as do we, that after winter comes spring, the spring that the writer of Proverbs 27 notes, is "the new growth that is seen."  In a universe of purpose, a purpose implicit in the fact of divine creation, possibility, not one of unverifiable quantum nothingness, but of intelligence and intention, always remains.