As 2014 winds to a close, I share thoughts about Interstellar, which I saw last week. For those of you who have seen it, you know that it presents a number of complexities and speculations about space and time and the meaning of existence.  Many of these are worth a blog, really, but on December 31st, I focus on this:  time is more complicated than we can imagine.  We simply do not know how it works.  Though we live in it, though we die in it, we do not really know it.  But we're forever in it.
     As this year ends and a new one begins, the mystery continues.  We live, we die, we live again.
     And time, the riddle of present and ground of future, remains.

     Christmas has come, and now it is gone.  People are taking their ornaments down, stores are offering their after Christmas sales, travelers are going home.  It's over for another year.
     Or is it?  If Christmas means anything, anything at all, it cannot possibly be contained in one day.  If God has really come, if God has really visited his creation, how can anything--and any of us--ever be the same?  History, and everything in it, including you and I, has irrecoverably changed.
     Enjoy the moment, enjoy the day.  Enjoy existence.  Enjoy them, rejoicing, fully aware that they now mean more than you can possibly imagine.  The light of eternity, the word of the ages, the spoken beginning of space and time has entered our world.
     God has come.

As I always do, at the December meeting of my atheist discussion group, I give all in attendance a little Christmas treat.  Last year it was a candy cane; this year, it was a peppermint and chocolate treat.  Unlike last year, when one of the group wished me, when I greeted her with "Merry Christmas," a "Sweet Solstice," everyone responded to me with, "Merry Christmas."
     Even though no one in the group finds any reason to believe the evidence for the historicity of Jesus, and even though no one in the group plans to attend church on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, all of them, like almost all of us, find a measure of joy in the Christmas season.  It could be the happiness of family; it could be a thoughtful gift; it could be a new grandchild; it could be a host of other things.  Christmas's aura is unique in the Western imagination.  Its power, however one defines, it nearly universal.
     This is a good thing.  We all benefit when our fellow human beings, even if for a very brief season, become more intentional about how we love each other.  We all profit when a little more love seeps into the world.
     Theology aside, this is the marvel and wonder of Christmas:  love becomes ever more visible in the world.  Though some would say that this is a psychological response to a particular cultural ethos, it seems more likely that, if God did in fact come into history as a human being then, clearly, we--and our history--can never be the same.

                                                 MERRY CHRISTMAS!

     After months of, for the children among us, waiting, and for the parents and other adults among us, pondering, shopping, scurrying, and worrying, the big night is upon us:  Christmas Eve.  For some, it will be just another night; for others, a time of deep familial connections; for still others, a night of profound religiosity; and for some, perhaps a combination of two or three.  Whatever the case may be, Christmas Eve is a night that resonates in our inner and cultural imaginations.  It's a night apart.
     Why?  Consider the words of the old hymn that, "The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee [Jesus] tonight."  We all have hopes, we all have fears.  Some delight us, some overwhelm us.  Some amaze us.  Christmas Eve remembers and commemorates a night in which God, the loving and transcendent God, in the person of Jesus, enveloped, reconciled, conquered, and resolved all of them.  Whatever we hope for, and whatever we fear, in Jesus we find their meaning, trajectory, and resolution.  There is nothing more we need.
     Of course, we will continue to nurture hopes, and we will continue to experience fears.  We're still human.  But Christmas Eve tells us that we need wait no longer to know what life's hopes and fears, with all their challenges, frustrations, wonders, and curiosities, ultimately mean.
     God has come.

      As we remember the fourth and final Sunday of Advent and look towards its culminating event--the incarnation, God's appearance in human flesh--I think frequently about its origins.  As the gospel accounts make clear, Jesus was born in Bethlehem (literally, "house of bread"), a town that we might today call a hole in the wall, a little village largely forgotten by the rest of the world.  Few people cared what happened in Bethlehem.
     Nor did few people care when, after God told Joseph to take Mary and Jesus and flee the country to avoid King Herod's deadly predations, Jesus lived for a time in Egypt.  Mary and Joseph were likely viewed as just one more set of refugees, one more group of aliens moving through the flotsam of the Empire, their lives a mirror of countless migrations before:  no big deal.
     But this is precisely God's point.  Though Jesus was an alien and refugee, born in obscurity and forgotten and overlooked by the rest of the world, he was the one in whom God chose to make himself known to all humanity.  Jesus was the one whom God would use to manifest and reconcile himself to his human creation, the one whom God would use to draw all people to himself.  In Jesus, the poor and forgotten refugee, was the greatest hope of all time.  It's the ultimate irony, the greatest surprise.  It's God's way of demonstrating to us that just when we think we have everything figured out, be it our views about immigration, aliens, refugees, or anything else, we really do not.
     But isn't that what God is all about?

     Horrific death knows no season.  A cliche perhaps, but it is one I thought of as I read the news reports of the Taliban 's recent slaughter of 132 schoolchildren in Pakistan.  It's difficult to know where to begin in contemplating such awful pain.  We can offer comfort to the families who have lost children; solace to the families of the teachers who lost their lives while trying to defend their students; encouragement to the Pakistani government to redouble its efforts to eradicate the Taliban from the country; grief over the general immensity of the loss; or anguish over how religion has once again been grossly misused to make a point.  Whether we do any or all of these, however, we remain stunned by the scope of the event:  why?  Why must people do such things?  Why does the world breed such tragedy?
     As evangelist Billy Graham remarked in his speech about the events of September 11, 2001, in New York City, "How do we understand something like this?  Why does God allow evil like this to take place?"  Like all of us, Graham had no answers.  And like all of us, he probably never will, at least in this life.
     Yet as Graham continued, "We've seen so much that brings tears to our eyes and makes us all feel a sense of anger.  But God can be trusted, even when life seems at its darkest."
     As Graham would readily acknowledge, this is so easy to say yet so very hard to do.  In the face of such tragedy, however, it's really all we can--and should--do.  Difficult as it is, we can trust God.  Somehow, some way, he knows.  Somehow, some way, he is there. This is the Muslim's comfort, this is the Christian's solace:  God is there.
     For as this horrific rain of death makes clear, we certainly cannot trust ourselves. Pray for the schoolchildren, pray for the families enduring loss, pray for the Taliban who died. Be thankful for the goodness of God.

     A virgin birth?  That a woman who had never had sexual relations with a man conceived a son in her womb is one of the most controversial aspects of the birth narratives in the New Testament.  How could this, medically, be?
     Over the ensuing centuries, commentators have offered various explanations for this phenomenon.  Some have referred to rare stories about women--and men--giving birth when everything about their anatomy and interpersonal relationships indicated that they could not do so.  Others have argued that it is a metaphor to make a larger point about the meaning of Jesus' birth.  Still others have termed it misguided mythology.
     Everyone is of course free to draw her own conclusions.  If we are to take the text for what it says, however, we can only draw one:  Mary really did conceive Jesus without having sexual relations with another human being.  Why would we do this?  If we believe that the remainder of the Bible is trustworthy, which much archaeological and textual study indicates it is, then we have no reason to reject this particular part of it.  On the other hand, if we do not believe the remainder of the Bible is historically trustworthy, we will likely not believe this story at all.
     We must view this story in its wider context.  It is one of many stories (or episodes: saying that it is a story does not imply it is not true) in a document which has been vetted repeatedly by a great deal of analysis and scrutiny by scholars across the planet as being reliable and true.  In addition, however, and this is a large "addition," we must agree that there is a bigger reality in which ours is comprised.  We must agree that over and above it all is a God who speaks into this present moment.  We affirm the presence of the supernatural.
     And if we do this, we conclude that this God is fully able to do what, medically, does not seem possible:  to conceive a child in a virgin's womb.  It's a matter of faith, yes, but it is a matter of a faith firmly rooted and grounded in history.
     And that makes all the difference.
     

     Most of us have heard the "Christmas story" countless times.  Across the world for thousands of years, people have read and pondered, over and over, Luke's account of Jesus' birth.  One might almost think that there is nothing new to find in it.
     But there always is.  As I was reading it this year, I found myself struck, and not for the first time, by the thought that the first people to hear about Messiah's birth were shepherds. In the twenty-first century, unless we are living in an isolated rural area in various parts of the world, we do not think much about shepherds.  In Jesus' day, however, many people did.  Shepherds were an integral part of the economy of the ancient world.
     Socially, however, the shepherds were despised, viewed as the lowest of the low.  Few wished to associate with them.  They spent their days--and nights--largely apart from the rest of the people, living lonely lives in the fields and hillsides of the nations.
     Yet throughout the pages of the Bible, shepherding is held in high esteem.  Most of us have heard of Psalm 23, the psalm of the Good Shepherd, and many of us are aware that Jesus presented himself as the good shepherd (John 10).  In addition, David, the most famous king of ancient Israel and distant ancestor of Christ, was a lowly shepherd boy when he killed the Philistine giant, Goliath.
     Many of us devote the Christmas season to finding the most expensive gifts we can afford.  We strive to go one better than we did last year.  The last thing we aim for in our gift buying is humility.  Ironically, however, the first group of people to whom God revealed the birth of Jesus were people whose lives were steeped in humility:  forgotten by nearly everyone, the shepherds labored and toiled outside the margins of conventional society. No one knew them.
     We might say that in its purest form Christmas doesn't encourage greatness; it calls for humility.  It calls us to look not at ourselves and how we can spend our money on ourselves, our friends, or family, but rather what we can do for others, what we can do for the "shepherds" among us.  Christmas demands that reach out to those on the margins. While we will always be inclined to take care of ourselves, we may not be as eager to do so for others.
     So did Jesus say that, "The Son of Man [a name that he often used for himself and which reflected traditions deep in the Hebrew worldview] did not come to serve, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for the many" (Mark 10:45).

     A few weeks ago, the famous French-born German mathematician Alexander Grothendieck passed away at the age of 86.  While his death left most people nonplussed, mathematicians around the world mourned.  Why?  After much thought and research, Gorthendieck came to establish that underlying every algebraic formula was what one writer called a "schema," an "invisible" structure without which the formula could not exist.  In other words, these inviolate formulas could not be so unless something even "more" inviolate existed as well.
     The British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell once voiced his frustration that he had to accept various mathematical formulas without any proof for their validity. These formulas just "were."  The American philosopher Richard Rorty insisted that he was an anti-foundationalist:  he had no starting point.  Nor did he want one.  He claimed that he arrived at every choice in an epistemological vacuum.
     Russell and Rorty's positions demonstrate the necessity and importance of Grothendieck's conclusions. Nothing, not even the most basic of mathematical formulas, stands in isolation from everything else.  Nothing exists in a vacuum.  Nothing exists outside of a medium bigger than what it is.  Nothing.  As medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas pointed out long ago, unless we posit a non-starting starting point, we will never be able to begin.  Mathematicians may call it "schemas," philosophers may call it a Form, and theologians may call it God.  Either way, outside of a series of "experiences," we can make no sense of temporal contingency without the eternality of something that never began.

     One morning a couple of years ago, while I was backpacking in California's rugged Sierra Nevada mountain range, I got out of my tent to see the sunrise.  I was camped in a lake basin, a lake basin well above timberline.  Trees were few and far between.  The landscape was primarily rock, sculpted and cold granite that oozed out from the water and fusing into the mountains looming above.
     So I waited.  The light slowly rose in the east, its rays illuminating the sky even before the sun's orb surfaced over the highest ridge.  The sky gradually lit up.  Temperatures remained in the thirties and forties.
     Then it came.  Exploding atop the col, the sun burst, dazzling with beams of unfettered brilliance and wonder, its multiple filaments of splendor spreading over and across the waiting land.  We rejoiced:  the light had come.
     "For the people who walk in darkness," wrote the prophet Isaiah, "will see a great light (Isaiah 9:1)."  Isaiah speaks of Messiah, the one who would come to illuminate an Israel darkened by disappointment, abandonment, and sin.  He speaks of the Christ who would enlighten and save all those who longed for him.  He speaks of the light that would come.
     On the third Sunday of Advent, we remember this fact of Messiah's light, how, like the sun exploding over a frigid mountain ridge, Messiah--Jesus--has brought us light, the light of enlightenment, the light of hope, the light of meaning that shines through the cold and ennui of an often profoundly befuddling existence.  It is the light of purpose, the light of value, the light of an eternity that, if we embrace it, embrace it as fervently as we do the warmth of a sunrise, mountain or not, of our lives, will change our lives forever.
     Once we touch this light, we'll never be the same.

     Most of us know Robert Louis Stevenson as the author of popular classics such as Treasure Island and Kidnapped.  What people may not know is that Stevenson began his career as an engineer.  As he did, he tried to use engineering to make sense of what he deemed to be a purposeless world.  Like many people of his age, the close of the nineteenth century, the human epoch that birthed modernity (the idea that God is absent or gone, and which was given graphic expression in Friedrich Nietzsche's observation that, "God is dead"), Stevenson saw no essential "big picture" meaning in human existence.  He sought many ways to counteract his constant sinking feeling that his being alive ultimately meant nothing.  One of them was engineering.
     Stevenson's observation is well put.  Those who are engineers understand that the world consists of various structures, some natural, some artificial, which are sometimes visible and sometimes hidden.  If the world is to have meaning, it must have structure, some sort of presence around which it can be organized and understood.  Whether these are the eternal mathematical structures of Max Tegmark or reflections of the eternal vision of God, it is these on which meaningfulness depends.  A world without any structure at all has no point; indeed, it cannot be.  Structure and order are essential to meaning.
     Whether we use engineering, art, music, mathematics, or religion, we understand that the world has structure and order.  As do we.  Otherwise, we would not bother.  And structure and order of course have to come from somewhere:  they have not always been here.  We want them, we need them.  So the question becomes:  why are they here?

     Recently, I read some of the work of the British writer William Morris, who lived and died in the last half of the nineteenth century.  If you are familiar with the writer J. J. R. Tolkien, you may like knowing that Morris's thinking exercised a significant impact on him. In his reflections on his craft, Morris talked about the notion of a Second World (Tolkien discussed this, too).  This is a world apart from present reality, a world completely unto itself, a self-contained world with its own laws, beliefs, and reality:  a world of fantasy. Tolkien's famous Lord of the Rings trilogy is a case in point.  Those familiar with this remarkable work know that Tolkien presents its events in a world that he has created and which has no connection to the world the rest of us occupy.  It's a fantasy world.
     Although we could make all kinds of parallels with other things with this, I mention it in relation to, predictably, the supernatural.  Part of the reason some of us have trouble grasping or accepting the supernatural is that it appears to function in a way that seems at odds with the world to which we are accustomed.  It does not always evidence a credible connection to what we currently know.  The perfunctory response to this is of course, "Well, one must have faith."
     While no doubt this is ultimately true, if it is all that is true, then we are left with intimations of a world that we will never really know.  It's easy to reject the validity of such a world:  of what value can it possibly be to us?
     On the other hand, if the Second World, e.g., the supernatural is accessible to us, its credibility magnifies considerably.  We can know it, feel it, hear it, and see it in our experience.  We connect.
     This is the message of Advent, this is the story of Christmas.  The Second World becomes the First.
     

     How much risk is reality?  I ask because I recently read yet another article about the famous high wall climber, Alex Honnold.  Honnold has made his name by scaling enormous walls, some three thousand feet high, alone and without using any ropes whatsoever. Some call him foolish, others crazy.  Still others admire his penchant for risk and adventure (and he is not the only rock climber who engages in such things).  Honnold has attracted a significant following.  As he put it in the article, "I have a gift" for dealing with high pressures situations in a calm and reasoned way.
     For Honnold, reality is a high risk activity.  He puts his life on the line every time he stands at the foot of a rock face.  For the rest of us, however, reality also is a risk.  It is a risk because reality is so frightfully unpredictable and contingent.  We frequently make decisions whose outcome we cannot precisely anticipate or fathom, and we almost every day engage in activities which, though they seem reasonable and wonderful at the time, can just as easily descend into a morass of confusion, even darkness and despair.  We can't tame reality fully, and that is why, despite everything we know about it, reality remains a profound mystery.
     And mysteries carry risk.  On the other hand, if life had no mystery, though it might be safer, it would also be immeasurably less interesting.  It wouldn't have a heart.  We're not made to pursue what we can clearly see and know.  We're made to seek that which we do not.  Whether you believe this reality dances before a thin veil of the supernatural or it dances with itself and itself only, you understand that to be human is to engage in quest, a quest for hope, a quest for meaning.
     Life is the greatest--and grandest--risk of all.  This is even truer if there is a God, for then risk assumes the more profound challenge of all:  faith.  Yet to paraphrase Honnold, faith is not a risk without reason, but a risk which, all things considered, is the most reasonable of all.

     For those of us who are baby boomers, we remember the night of December 8, 1980. John Lennon, the former Beatle and an enduring icon to many of us, fell to an assassin's bullet outside of his apartment in New York City.  As those of the "Greatest Generation" remember December 7, 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the momentous changes it unleashed on millions and millions of people, as the Millennials remember the darkness of September 11, 2001, so we remember December 8th.
     I've listened to Lennon's classic "Imagine" more times than I can count.  Though I look at it differently than I did on the other side of my embrace of Jesus and Christianity, I still marvel at the simplicity of its vision.  Though religious people may quarrel with "Imagine's" focus on the things of this world to the exclusion and detriment of things beyond it, we should, I say, identify with its passion to imagine what we do not now see. While Lennon did not see world peace at the time he wrote the song, he nonetheless longed for it and, it seemed, believed it would one day happen.  Similarly, most religions, Christianity and Islam and Judaism in particular, though they do not now see the fullness of that for which they long, nonetheless believe that one day they will.  We all long, we all imagine.  We all wish for a better world.
     We all dream of peace.  Before we experience it, however, we must imagine--and believe--it will happen.  For it will.  In the end, peace will be a work of human endeavor undergirded and sustained by the fact and activity of God.  Humanness craves it, God guarantees it.
     Imagine.

     "For the grace of God has appeared," writes the apostle Paul in the third chapter of his letter to Titus, "bringing salvation to all people" (Titus 2:11).  What is Paul saying?  Simply, that as we remember the second Sunday of Advent, we can come to understand more fully that in Jesus, God in the flesh, we see concrete expression of God's grace, physical manifestation and display of his truest posture toward us.  In Jesus we see the fullest possible picture of God's benevolence, favor, and compassion.  He has come.  Jesus is the grace of God.
      We grant each other grace every day, as we should.  Yet it is God's grace that enables us to see and understand that amid the frequent senselessness of the world in which we live, there is hope, a hope that reality is more than what we see--but which frames and orders what we do.  Jesus' appearance tells us that whatever else we may think about God, what we ought to think most about him is this:  God is loving, God is gracious, and God is for us, for us today, for us tomorrow, for us forever.
     As the musician Johannes Sebastian Bach put it, "Jesus, joy of human desire."

     Most people, I suspect, are at least peripherally familiar with the great British scientist and mathematician Isaac Newton.  Moreover, most of us, I suspect as well, know that he is remembered for his "discovery" of gravity, a discovery that led humanity to realign nearly everything it had previously believed about the structure and workings of the universe.
     A good deal of this realignment had to do with religion.  During the Middle Ages, the era in Western Europe that preceded the period (generally called the Scientific Revolution) in which Newton made his discovery, the Church (at that time solely Catholic) determined what was right and true.  Few dared challenge it.
     As modern science (which, by the way, most historians believe, found its genesis in the then prevailing belief that because God had made it, the universe was one of rationality and order and therefore amenable to thoughtful investigation), bolstered by the development of instruments such as the microscope and telescope, began to learn more about how the universe worked, however, most intellectuals came to view the Church's authority on such matters as decidedly less credible.  As they saw it, it was the scientific method, developed by Francis Bacon, that now constituted the means by which responsible people should ascertain the inner structure of the cosmos.  Nonetheless, nearly all of these scientists continued to believe in God, and to place him as the center and impetus of creation.
     Newton was no exception.  Writing on page 440 of his famous Principia (translated from its original Latin), the mathematician observed the following:

     "And lest the systems of the fixed stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other mutually, he hath placed those systems at immense distances one from another."

     The way Newton put this is highly instructive.  He allows gravity to be the sovereign force that governs the movements of the stars (the "heavens"), yet notes that it is only able to do so effectively because the Creator (God) had set the stars in a certain way. Although we can argue about how God did so--whether he simply "spoke" it or used natural forces to execute his vision--we come away with an intriguing juxtaposition of divine presence and natural capacities.  It is a juxtaposition in which we see a perfectly balanced picture of supernatural and natural in which to frame our understanding of the universe.  God is there, yet gravity is, too, natural as well as supernatural, both present, both necessary, both contributing, both upholding, both ensuring the existence of the cosmos.

     Have you heard of Malala?  She is the young Pakistani girl who, due to her fearless campaigning for girls' education, was, a couple of years ago, shot in the head by the Pakistani Taliban as she was traveling home from her school.  Thanks to a generous Pakistani government and gracious British doctors, Malala was flown to Britain and made a full recovery.  Today, she is living in Birmingham, attending school, and continuing her campaign.  She recently was made one of two recipients of the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize.  She is the youngest person ever to receive the honor.
     After reading her autobiography last month, I found myself quite struck by her courage and bravery, of course, but also by her unwavering trust in her god, Allah.  She firmly believes that Allah preserved her life for a purpose, and that for the rest of her days she wants to travel the planet advocating for the right of all girls to an education.  It's hard to argue with her conviction, really, as making education universally available for girls around the world will benefit everyone, not just Muslims.  We can surely argue over whether it was indeed Allah who spared Malala, yet if we believe in one sovereign and loving and personal God, we ought to nonetheless rejoice that he saw fit to grant Malala more days, perhaps many, many days on this planet.  What kind of a God would God be if he only loved the people of the West?  Or only the people of the East or South?
     God's economy and intentions are vast beyond our imagination.  Only with enormous trepidation do we try to understand and grasp them.  We can only resolve to appreciate each glimpse of their outworkings, while marveling at how, one day, we will see how it all fits together.
     Thanks, Malala, and thanks, God.

     In a bit of terribly sad news, I received word the day before Thanksgiving that one of my cousins, a cousin with whom I had grown up and with whom I had many fun and enjoyable times, had died of mesothelioma.  She was 61.  Elizabeth left behind a husband, two children, three grandchildren, and a host of relatives and friends.
     In the days before she passed, I had occasion to chat with her husband.  He affirmed his belief to me that when Liz died, she would be with God in heaven.  Although he would miss her "immensely," he felt better knowing that she would be in a "better" place.  And she will be.  While given our finitude, it is difficult to describe precisely how much "better" this place will be, we can know this much:  my cousin now stands on the other side of the curtain.  For her, life's final drama has unfolded.  Eternity awaits.  Earth is no more.
     It is a world of faith, singularly, perhaps insuperably challenging to grasp.  We can accept it, we can reject it.  But we cannot ignore it.  We cannot ignore the possibility of the openendedness of reality.  Moreover, if possibility is ultimately probability, as theories of infinity seem to tell us, this is a world more real than anything we can imagine. It's a world without which this present world cannot credibly or meaningfully exist.
     Do we really live and die in utter darkness?

     Speaking to his disciples in what has come to be known as his final discourse, Jesus predicts that one day their opponents will seek to kill them in the name of God (John 15-16).  In today's world, we do not need to look far to see how true Jesus' words were. Christians are murdered in the name of God every day.  Conversely, however, far too many people have died at the hands of Christians for the "glory" of God.  Moreover, this practice is unfortunately not confined to Christianity.  Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and adherents of countless other religious traditions also kill people in the name of God.
     We who are religious should move carefully when assessing or discerning who our enemies really are.  Regrettably, too often it is us.  As a person who wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times a number of years ago said, "Although I am an atheist, I envy the solace religious people find in their God.  But when I look at the pain that religion inflicts on the world, I see little reason to believe in him."
     This person has a point.  As Mahatma Gandhi once stated, referring to the behavior of his "Christian" British overlords, "I like Christ; I just don't like Christians."  Religion can be profoundly wonderful.  Those who practice it, however, can often be exactly the opposite.
     Those of who believe therefore ought to tremble before the hidden and inchoate purposes of God.  Rarely does he disclose, to anyone, the full scope of his intentions and vision.  If we believe, we do so humbly and carefully, and realize we walk in the shadow of immense mystery.

     Running through the theology of the early Christian church was a belief called Gnosticism.  In sum, Gnosticism held that all things pertaining to the flesh, that is, of the physical body, were harmful and evil, while only that which was intellectual, that is, of the mind, was good.  What the Church found most insidious about Gnosticism was that although it elevated God above all else, it at the same time made it impossible to associate God with anything having to do with matter, things of everyday existence on earth.  God was there, but irretrievably distant from the flesh and blood problems and challenges of humanity.  And if God is impossibly distant from us, why should we bother with him?
     Here is why we must consider, in this first week of the Advent season, the time of year in which Christianity remembers and celebrates the appearance of Jesus Christ on the earth, just how important Jesus' coming is.  If Gnosticism were true, we would never see God, we would never know God, we would never understand God as a personal presence in our lives.  He would always be infinities apart from us.  But Christianity says that, as John's gospel tells us, "The Word [that is, God] became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14).  God, in the person of Jesus, became part of our world, became an integral part of our everyday reality, became a being as flesh and blood as you and me, subject to all its infirmities, hardships, and limitations while, and this is crucial, remaining the omnipotent and creator God.  God became like us.
      Most importantly, God became for us, our greatest joy and hope and meaning forever.  It's the ultimate paradox:  a perfect God in an imperfect world.  But it works.  How can flesh and blood ever be the same?

     Like many of us, I regret that, driven by various competitive pressures, some retailers in the States have chosen to open their Black Friday sales on Thanksgiving evening.  In many ways, this represented one of the nadirs of capitalism:  doing whatever it takes to make a profit, basing one's motivation solely on whatever opportunity the market will bear.  Such obsession should cause us all to pause and ask ourselves about how we conduct not just ourselves but how we manage our desires.
     Desire is good, yes, and desire drives us to do many great and wonderful things.  Nevertheless, we do well to remember the essence of the moment before us.  It is not about shopping, it's not about supplying our loved ones with as many material goods as we can afford, it's not about draining out bank accounts to throw a lavish party, it's not about diverting every thought into an experience that in most households lasts barely an hour, if that, but rather it is to recognize that, as Jesus put it in Mark 1:15, "The kingdom of God is at hand."
     Though we may cringe at the idea of a kingdom in the largely democratic West, we miss the point if we summarily dismiss Jesus' words.  He is not talking about a kingdom in the sense of knights and castles and physical hegemony but rather a kingdom of the heart, a kingdom that calls us to love, to care, to move ourselves toward inner transformation of mind, body, and soul, and be better citizens of the planet and the greater realities in which it sits.  Jesus' kingdom is not one of arrogance and might, nor one of dogma and exclusivity, but a kingdom of welcome and grace and community, a community rooted in a profound truth:  God, the ultimate and overwhelmingly real beginning and repository of existential meaning, the great and longed for Emmanuel, the Christ, is with us, with us now, tomorrow, next year, and forevermore.
     We live for and live in immeasurably more than ourselves.  I trust that as we go into this Christmas shopping season, we all realize this, realize it in our minds, our bodies, our hearts.  God is real, God is there, God is the resolution of all desire, obsession, and expectation.
     "The kingdom of God is at hand."

     As Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, we all, I think, find ourselves being thankful for many things.  I talked yesterday about Beethoven's Ode to Joy and its profound paeans to the wonder and power of existence. I am indeed thankful for life and how every human being has the opportunity to live it.  Even more, I am thankful for the God from whom life comes and in whom existence and the cosmos in which it dwells find meaning and sense.
     On the other hand, all of us are aware, I suspect, that countless people across the face of this vast planet do not have the opportunity to live life as they wish or please.  Too many people spend their days, the only days, I might add, that they will ever have on this earth, living lives bent by tyranny and oppression.  For this, I weep.  For this, I cringe, trembling at the inhumanity of humanity.
     Though little I or anyone could say can ameliorate the immediacy of these terrible situations, I will say, on this Thanksgiving Day, that we can be thankful that those of us who are not in subjugation, of whatever kind--religious, political, cultural, or economic--are given a moral sense that enables us to define and address and respond to these tragedies.  We can be thankful that we care, that we are moral beings who live in a moral universe.
     And for this, we can give thanks ultimately that we are not plops, as one person put it, of matter without a point or meaning.  We can give thanks that, ultimately, there is a God, a God from whom all morality comes. We indeed weep at oppression, we rightly cringe at human pain.  Yet because there is a God, we can also be thankful that no one, absolutely no one is totally ignored or forgotten.
     Wherever and whoever you are this Thanksgiving, be grateful for the grace and ubiquity of God.
     And live in it.

     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, or 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.  As Thanksgiving approaches, we can rejoice in our existence each day.  We can be thankful that we are here, that we are loved, that we have life.  We can delight in the beauty of knowing that we are alive, every moment of every day.
     It's a wonderful picture of the heart of God.

     I first read about Dorian Paskowitz about a decade ago.  A surfer and doctor who died last week at the age of 93, he made his mark by leaving his profession behind and raising his family in a 24-foot camper on the beaches of California.  He insisted that his children would benefit more from reading books and traveling across North America than sitting in a conventional educational setting.
     Paskowitz may well be right.  Conventional schools often tend to stifle or inhibit the creativity of many people.  Moreover, far too many of us seek (often for perfectly legitimate reasons) what is safe or secure rather than the adventurous and uncontrollable.  We may be more comfortable, but we may also miss on something bigger and, in the big picture, more meaningful.
     We can fit this into a number of scenarios, ranging from vocation to family to religion. It is often the people who take the most chances, intellectually, artistically, culturally, physically, or spiritually who reap the greatest existential rewards.  We might observe, however, that this is how God intended for us to live, for ourselves, and for him.  We're born to be, and become.  God and life are profound mysteries.  They may be dangerous, they may be hard, they may be joyful, they may be easy.  But they cannot be mastered fully.
     And we wouldn't want it any other way.  Nor would God.  Just ask Jesus.

     In a recent interview, Larry Ellison, America's Cup winner, technology magnate, and one of the richest people in the United States, said that, "Death makes me very angry.  It doesn't make any sense." Katherine Kubler Ross, best known for her highly influential dissection of the processes of death, might respond that Ellison is merely encountering the initial stages of the human awareness of death.  In the end, she might add, he will accept it.
     Ellison, however, sees it differently.  He is spending millions of dollars (pocket change to him) to develop ways to sustain life indefinitely.  If death is nonsense, he wants no part of it.  A biologist might argue that death is an inevitable, even necessary part of life, for it enables the creation to renew and refresh itself; a theologian might suggest that death is the inevitable result of a sin which has fractured the entire created order and was not originally meant to occur; a psychologist or philosopher might add that death is simply another experience which fuels the richness of the human adventure and that we should not strive to avoid it.  And so on.
     So maybe death is not necessarily nonsense, but rather an experience, an inevitable, even essential experience that can be best understood in the full compass of who we and the universe are.  Few of us want to die, yet almost all of us comprehend that one day we will.  We may not like it, we may abhor it, we may get angry at it, but most of us are reasonable enough to understand that we cannot stop it from happening.
     Would we want to?  I would think that we would want to stop death only if the rest of the cosmos was equipped to deal with an experience of indefinite and undefined existence.  Otherwise, we would be living among people in a universe not always prepared to accommodate us. Eternality and materiality do not always mix well.
     Except once:  in the person of Jesus Christ.  If we are to understand Jesus as he presented himself to be, we understand that he was the eternal born into and living in the temporal.  More than anyone else, Jesus fused that for which we instinctively long (endless life) with that which many of us (particularly Larry Ellison) vehemently hate (death)--and came out the better for it.  But Jesus had to die before he could experience it fully.
     As must we.  Though this may sound like a cliche, I'll say it:  only in death will we see genuine life.  Only in death will we see life as it was meant to be, an eternal existence in an eternal setting, not an endless adventure in a temporal fishbowl.
     It's the most real dream.

     A few weeks ago, I noticed a Facebook posting from a Muslim friend of mine saying that, sadly, his mother had died.  "I pray," he wrote, "that Allah will forgive her sins and that she will go to the Jannah Firdu."  [Jannah Firdu is the highest level of the Muslim Paradise.]  How simple (in the richest sense) is my friend's perception of reality.  When we live, we live being obedient to Allah, and when we die, we die falling into Allah's arms.  There's no gray.  Whether we live or die, we are Allah's.
     Writing from a different standpoint yet voicing similar sentiments, the apostle Paul said in his letter to the church at Philippi, "To live is Christ, to die is gain."  Whether we live or die, we belong to God.  Whether we are here not elsewhere, we do so in the arms of the Creator.
     I sent a card to my friend, telling him how sorry I was and that I would be praying for him.  Having lost my own mother a little over four years ago, I know firsthand how difficult a loss it can be.  Indeed, it is one from which I--and he--will likely never get over.  But we carry on, believing, trusting, bending ourselves to a reality which we will never undo.
     Whether we are Christians, Muslims, or adherents of other faith traditions, we know and believe that life is at once immensely complex and innately simple:  it comes, it goes, then, singularly and profoundly, it comes again.  When death therefore comes, all that will be left of us is that from which we and everything else have come:  God.
     We know we're coming back.

     Yesterday, I wrote about my experience of watching a production of the Diary of Anne Frank.  Today, the play still very much on my mind, I think about an observation of French philosopher Theodor Adorno who, writing about the Holocaust, said, "The Holocaust means that we cannot forget memory."  Although the memory of the Holocaust can be highly debilitating, he noted, it is a memory which actually revives and strengthens.
     Adorno is right on here.  We all have things in our lives that we would like to forget. On the other hand, there are things that have happened to us, things whose impact has been so profoundly painful and negative that they in fact produce positive returns for us, as well as our fellow human beings.  The few Holocaust survivors who still walk the earth live as daily reminders to the rest of us of the necessity of all memory, good, bad, or otherwise, in that it is often the most awful remembrances that yield the richest of present return.  While we certainly do not say this in the midst of the experiences that produce these memories, when I listen to Holocaust survivors recount their experience, then reflect on their lives today, I realize that I am hearing people who have been to a hell, an earthly hell beyond imagination, and back--and are still here to tell us about it. They know, know in the most profound sense, deeply and clearly and passionately, in ways the rest of us simply cannot.
     Nor would some of us want to.  So we stand in awe before a God who, in the person of Jesus Christ, endured the Cross.

     Have you read the Diary of Anne Frank?  If you have, you know it is the recovered diary of a young Jewish girl who, along with her father, mother, and sister, and another family (and one more man) were hidden in an apartment during the Nazi reign of terror in World War II Europe.  Unfortunately, not too long before the war ended, everyone was betrayed, removed from their hiding place, and shipped to various concentration camps to the east.  Most of them lost their lives.  Anne's father, however, survived, and after the war returned to the Netherlands and retrieved her diary.
     I read the diary decades ago, but had occasion to think about it again when I saw a play production, The Diary of Anne Frank, recently.  Though dozens of thoughts flooded my head during the two and a half hours of the play, one to which I kept returning was the bittersweet nexus of familial love and abject terror in which everyone constantly moved.  Ensconced in love, they were also trapped in terror, unwilling to leave the one, unable to abandon the other.  They lived with a profound and unyielding tension, physical as well as spiritual, a tension which most of us may never experience, their lives as fragile as gossamer yet potent as the mightiest army to stride the earth.
     All the people had was love, love for each other, and love for their creator.  They lived in the former, they rested--and trusted--in the latter.  No doubt they were familiar with Psalm 46:10, which reads, translated from the Hebrew, "Relax, let go, and know that I am God."  In the end, this trust was all they had.  Did it let them down?  Some might say yes:  nearly all of them died.  Others will say no, for they died believing that they had lived, and would continue to live, a life larger than life itself.  Caught in a most painful tension, they set themselves free.
     As many a rabbi will say, "The eyes of God are everywhere."

     In one of his many essays, the English writer C. S. Lewis, who died nearly fifty years ago, November 22, 1963 (the same day, I might add, that John Kennedy and Aldous Huxley died as well), pondered the meaning of the German word Sehnsucht. Although Sehnsucht is generally translated as a longing or wishing viscerally for something, Lewis chose to describe it as a “inconsolable longing” for “we know not what.”
     At first glance, we might wonder how we can long for something we “know not what.”  On the other hand, I suspect all of us have found ourselves, at one point or another in our lives, wishing for something, something intangible, something unimaginable, maybe even something unspeakable, yet something we feel that we must have, something we believe we cannot live without—but we do not always know why.  We may not be able to describe it fully, we may not be able to define it completely, but we know—we sense—that we long for and want it.  It’s mysterious, it’s elusive, but it’s real, too.
     Some, including Lewis, called this longing a longing for God.  Others, those who perhaps do not share Lewis’s Christian sentiments, would call it our natural human bent, our natural human inclination to know more than what we know at the moment.  Maybe, in their own way, both sides are right.  Unless we long, we are not really human.  But unless we long for something beyond ourselves, we are not human, either.  If we never longed for anything beyond ourselves, we would be complete.  But we all know that we are deeply fractured and damaged beings.  We are far from complete.  So we long.  As the Buddhists might say, that which is impermanent cannot be permanent.  Yet permanence, lastingness,and wholeness are those for which we all long.  For only what is permanent can satisfy the longing of what is not.

     Is faith believing in something without evidence?  Many, including some in my atheist discussion group, believe that it is.  According to every dictionary definition they can find, one but, significantly, not all definitions of faith is a belief or conviction without any evidence for it.  Fair enough.  What many people overlook,however, is that according to dictionaries that present the full etymology of words, in its most original sense in the English language faith was construed as a sense of trust.  Drawn from the Latin word fide, faith connotes a willingness to trust what one cannot necessarily, at least for the moment, visibly hear, touch, taste, or see.
     So why do people choose to trust in this way?  People choose to trust in this way because they have sufficient reason, based on reasonable research and experience, to do so.  No thoughtful religious person would choose to believe for no reason.  No rational and spiritually inclined person (by the way, despite what one might think, rationality and spiritually are not antithetical) would elect to trust if she could see no credible reason to do so.  People who choose to have faith do so because they have good reason to trust the objective historical evidence for its object.  They believe in God because they see no good reason not to trust the objective historical witness of his activity in the world and the human heart.
     Can we see God?  Can we hear God?  Although some people insist they have, most of us have not.  Yet we have ample and credible historical testimony as well as the present experience of those who believe in him to conclude that he is there and, as the late Francis Schaeffer said, is not silent.
     Faith is exceedingly complex, but it is also exceedingly simple.  To repeat, in its most basic form, faith is trust.  We all trust, all the time.  We all trust the future, that it will happen, and we all trust the past, that it indeed happened.  We trust ourselves, most of the time, and we trust each other, most of the time.  Why?  We have good reason to do so.
     So it is with faith in God and, from a Christian standpoint, Jesus Christ.  We trust them because we have good reason to do so.  Perhaps we cannot see them, perhaps we cannot hear them.  But others have.  History testifies amply to this.  We trust, we believe. We trust and believe because others, people who had far more reason (for they were eyewitnesses of the risen Christ) than we to do so.  And we trust because all things considered--scientific, philosophical, and otherwise--we have no good reason not to.
     But we have to trust.

     After running through a forest preserve the other morning, I came home, fixed myself some tea, and sat down to read through the ninth chapter of Ecclesiastes.  I read about its assertion of the futility of existence, that in the end it will not matter what we do, good or bad, for we all will die anyway.  Death has no favorites.
     (And I wondered whether like my father, who died at the age of 63, I would, too. Again:  death has no favorites.)
     Then I read through some chapters in Revelation, the last book of the Bible, wondering about its precise meaning, wondering precisely how John's vision of the end of the world will really be expressed in the span of human history and time.  Will there really be massive lights and flames in the sky?  Will there really be angels sounding trumpets across the planet?  Will there really be a plague of some type of locust that will kill one third of humankind?  Are there really glassy seas in heaven?  How will the world really end?
     No doubt, some of these descriptions are figurative, and no doubt that the person who had this vision lived in a very different time from our own, many historical miles from the abundant scientific technology we possess for exploring cosmological variants today.  Yet maybe that's not the point.  I think most of us can agree that death has no favorites, and I think that all of us can agree that when we die we will no longer be physically attached to our earthly achievements.  Death is thoroughly black and white.  We're either alive, or we are dead.  There's nothing in between.
     Where we might differ is the extent to which, as Revelation sees it, God will intervene in the world as it approaches its final days.  So what can we learn from comparing these very different passages of scripture?  Two things.  One, life means more, right now, because it ends.  We do not know our time.  We therefore strive to make every minute count.  Two, even though the world will one day come to an absolute end, if God, in some way, is working through it, this end means more than itself.  It will also be a beginning. And we likewise endeavor to make every moment of life count, for each moment rests not only in a catastrophic nothingness of stardust and plasma, but in the tangible vision of a personal and infinite God.

     A few months ago, I wrote about musician David Bowie's song, Starman.  When I heard it again last night, I thought about it again.  What strikes me about it is its chorus, which talks about the Starman, lurking and hovering over us on the planet, maybe wanting to come down, but thinking that if he does, it will "blow our minds."  This is so much, it seems, like us and God.  So many of us wonder about God, wonder whether a God exists and, if he (or she) does, what is he like?  What would it be like to see this God, to interact with this "being" whom we think might be lurking and hovering over us?  If we saw him, would he really blow our minds?
     If God is any kind of almighty being, and we were to see him, he probably would blow our minds.  We likely would not know what to do.  How does one deal with a being whose power and grace far exceed our own?  Although countless religions have tried to quantify or reduce God into human terms, to render him into a package to which people can more readily relate, none do so perfectly.  Whether it is the Krishna of Hinduism, the Sosyant of Zororasterianism, the Jesus of Christianity, or countless others, as the Hindus call them, avatars, of the divine, the being (God) whom these efforts present remains shrouded in mystery.  People still cannot understand God fully.
     Of course, given my starting point, I find it easy to commend Jesus as the most meaningful of these attempts, but as anyone who has read the New Testament knows, even Jesus is a person of befuddlement and intrigue.  As he should be.  Regardless of how we try to reduce God to into terms we can understand, he will remain God.  For this, we can be grateful as well as awed.  We can be grateful because we have a point to which to look for some level of ultimate understanding, and we can be awed, and humbled, that we are not so smart and mighty that we can suppose that we know all things.  Besides, how would we know we do?

     We'd have to blow our minds.

     Have you been in the military of any country?  If so, you likely know that most nations of the world have set aside a special day in their calendar year to honor those who have. For the U.S., this day is November 11, the day that students of World War I know marks the day that the armistice that ended that war took effect (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month).  Most municipal, state, and federal offices close, many schools shutter themselves, and a few businesses give their employees the day off.
     I am not a warmonger.  All things considered, I would rather the nations of the world never fight again.  I do not live to engage in and love war and combat, and I do not favor using war to resolve international differences.  Broadly speaking, I do not believe that God does, either.
     Yet wars happen, and many people feel called to or are conscripted to fight in them. Unfortunately, while some survive, far too many do not.  And this doesn't count the untold numbers of civilians who perish, too.  War's tragedy is immense.  So when I think about Veterans Day, I think about the horror of war, and I think about the safety of innocent people.  I also think about the sense of duty many people feel to their country. In addition, I think about the sin of the world, the fact of human compassion, and the beauty of peace.  And I think about God's willingness, in Jesus Christ, to die for us--and the world--so as to set all things right.  And I try to put all of these together.
     It's not easy.  It's not easy to know what, amid the forest, God thinks.  It's not easy to know what eternity, the lens by which all things will be assessed, envisioned, and judged, means.  But it's easy to know that God is present, in peace as well as war, his love for us ever unchanged.  What kind of a God would he be if he were not?

     Recently, I saw a very interesting movie called Europa Report.  The astronomers among us will know that Europa is one of the principal moons of Jupiter, known to us since the days of the Scientific Revolution.  As the movie's story unfolds, we learn that a group of astronauts is traveling to Europa, commissioned to conduct a series of experiments to determine whether this moon is indeed suitable for life.  Previous observations had given researchers strong reason to think that it was.  After a journey of nearly a year, this group of astronauts was about to find out.
     Unfortunately, once the expedition lands, one by one, for various reasons, its members encounter situations resulting in their death.  One falls through the ice that covers the moon's surface; one accidentally spills a lethal substance on his space suit and is barred from reentering the ship for fear he would contaminate its ventilation systems (he is left to drift into space, quickly succumbing to the loss of oxygen, saying that, "I thought I was doing a great thing, but now . . . ." as he died); one dies of disease; another perishes when trying to stop the ship from crashing following an aborted take-off. Eventually, only two are left.
     As one of these two, a woman, recounts what happened next, she constantly returns to the phrase, "Compared to the knowledge yet to be known, what does your life matter?"
     In the final frames of the movie, we see that everything we have seen to this point is merely a recording of what has happened.  In fact, not one person on the expedition survives.  We are only left with a video.  In the final frame of the video, however, we are treated to a startling sight:  as the landing craft sinks inexorably through the ice and water rushes in, a massive octopus like creature appears, its tentacles aiming for the woman.  Life indeed exists on Europa.
     So does the person who administered the expedition remark, "This [image] will forever change the context in which humanity understands itself."
     Maybe so.  Pondering the fact of life is always a risky game.  Yet it's here, and we must deal with it.  The deeper--and darker--question then becomes this:  how do we understand that which we do not understand in the first place?
     In an opaque and impersonal universe, humanity's road is endless.
     

     As I read recently an account of the final days of former ISIS hostage James Foley, and pondered how he felt as he sensed his days drawing to a close (for those who have been living in a cave, James Foley was the first person ISIS publicly beheaded, later posting the entire deed on You Tube for all the world to see), I thought often about the riddle of existence.  For James Foley, life is unfortunately over.  He won't be back.  For him, existence is no more.  (On the other hand, as Foley converted, sincerely, to Islam during his imprisonment, he surely died believing that he would soon be with Allah in Paradise.)
     And for us, life goes on.  When I look at James Foley's life, however, I cannot help but see life as an enormous fishbowl, a fishbowl in which we all are swimming, yet a fishbowl into which we did not ask to be.  It's a fishbowl we know nothing about other than we are in it.  Yet we go on living in it.  And one day, we no longer will.
     And even if a personal and infinite transcendence exists, life remains a conundrum. On the one hand, the Hebrew Bible advises, "Whatever you do, do with all your might."  On the other hand, the New Testament commands, "Do your work heartily, as unto the Lord." Two perspectives, the one rooted in materiality, the other centered on transcendence, yet both speaking into one existence.  So we walk, all of us, a fine line between what we see and what we cannot, some of us believing that the former is all there is, others believing that both are present, the one subsisting on the hope of this life only, the other on the hope of one beyond it.  Either way, we live in what we perceive stands before us.
     Therein is the issue:  without transcendence, without an eternal and infinite personal, there is no meaningful, and honest, way to really know.
     Be well, James Foley.

     What about humility?  The other day I was talking with someone about Jesus' parable in Luke 14.  It is the account of a person who, when entering a banquet room, immediately sits himself next to the host.  But when someone else enters the room, someone of higher social stature than he, he is asked to go to the end of the table.  Jesus' point is that if we assume we are great, we will always be disappointed.  Better to be realistic about who we are, he suggests, than elevate ourselves for no valid reason.
     Living in a world, particularly its West, in which many people are bent on hyperactive achievement, we often forget who we are.  We come to measure ourselves by what we do, not by who we are becoming. We forget that, at the end of our days, the latter will be far more important. When we live to achieve, we subsist on evanescence.  We'll never be satisfied.  Not that achievement is wrong, just that it can become a bottomless pit, never offering complete solace for the challenges and vagaries of existence.  When we live to love, and when we live to give, however, we actually achieve far more.  We infuse our world, and everyone in it, with the presence of what humanity can most be:  beacons of hope in an often very dark cosmos.
     The apostle John tells us in the initial verses of his gospel that in the  Word [Jesus] was light, and this light was the life of the human being.  Whether we know or believe it or not, when we shine with love and sacrificial giving, we attest to the origin and meaning of all creation.
     It all began with light.

     Those of us who followed rock music in the Sixties know about Jack Bruce.  The driving force behind the songs of the short-lived British band Cream, Jack Bruce, sadly, passed away late last month, a victim of liver disease.  He left a wife, children, and one grandchild. He also left an incredible musical legacy.  The music he played with Cream will forever endure in the annals of rock and roll.
     Music seems almost eternal.  Its ability to touch us seems inexhaustible.  When a song writer dies, his music lives on, sometimes indefinitely.  For we human beings who often writhe in the grip of  mortality, we find tremendous solace and affirmation in this.  We love the music we invite into our lives, we love that it touches something in us, something that arouses and challenges us as nothing else can.  We love that it lasts beyond our perceptions of earthly permanence.
     Perhaps we also love that music underscores that life is more than the moment, more than the year.  It is unfathomable.  We will probably never know what precisely was going through Jack Bruce's mind as he composed his music, but we can certainly gasp at what he made it into:  imaginings bigger than anything we can imagine.  Like life.  We're here, we live, we die.  And we imagine.  We imagine what is and what can be.  We imagine imagination itself.
     And if our hearts are open to what is possible, we might imagine a reality bigger than all imagination, larger than music, larger than art, a reality fuller than all the transcendence music and art bequeath us, a reality which sounds in every corner of the universe.  The song of the creator.
     Thanks, Jack Bruce.  We will miss you.

     As we consider the fact of All Souls Day, traditionally the day after Halloween, we remember.  We remember our loved ones who are gone, we remember what has gone well, we remember what has not.  We remember existence, we remember life itself.  We ponder the import of memory.
     We also ask, how do we explain what has happened, what has been?  How do we measure the span of our existence?  How do we measure the value of our days?
     In ourselves, though we may take pride in reflecting on a life we believe to be well lived, a life that has made its mark, how do we really know?  We have only ourselves and our fellow human beings.  We measure by what we know.  And what we know is frightfully little.  Rarely do we ever see the big picture.  Rarely do we grasp the full meaning of our years.  We're finite creatures living in a finite world, a world that, one day, according to all cosmological predictions, will be burned up by an expanding sun, gone forever, never to be seen again.  It's over.
     Take heart.  We know our lives have value; we affirm it with everything we think, say, and do.  Do we need anything beyond this?
     Maybe, maybe not.  God indeed said to Adam that, "From dust you have come, and to dust you shall return." Yet even dust only has value if it has a reason to be, that is, if someone thought of and remembered it, someone who birthed it into reality.  Absent this, though dust could well be, and all of us as well, we have, absent anything in us, no reason to believe we and everything else should be.  It all just happened.
     Sure, things happen all the time.  But why?  The rhythms of the world demand it, the patterns of the cosmos enable it.  Yet where did these come from?
     As we remember our loved ones, as we remember what has been, as we look forward, as poet Robert Browning wrote so eloquently, to what is to come, we also remember this:  if nothing, broadly speaking, was meant to be, then there is no reason for anything to be.
     Enjoy the ride, delight in God:  revel in the fact of personal creation.

      As Halloween, the night that, in ancient tradition, the spirits and goblins of the inner earth escape, for one bone chilling evening, their chthonic imprisonment and roam about the planet, weaving magic, confusion, and mystery into the lives of those still living, approaches, we might think of it in another way.  We might think of Halloween as a night not of goblins, but as a night of God, a night in which God is newly afoot, on the loose, tearing open reality, overturning assumptions, undermining the obvious, and unfolding an otherness, a beyondedness, a somethingness which we might not otherwise see.  On this night, we might imagine not deceased spirits wailing about their ignominy, but God, a living God who is presenting himself and making himself known, making himself known as a presence of the more, a herald of the future, a proclamation of a new life, a richer hope, a new dawn.
     Think about God as one who eclipses and overcomes the tangible and apparent, who overwhelms present form and long ago imagination to promulgate and usher in a new day, a new day of insight, wisdom, and truth, a day in which he appeared as we are to show us who we could most be.
     As the psalmist writes in Psalm 36, "In your light [Lord], we see light."
     And light always overcomes the darkness.

     One of the things my wife and I do to mark the coming of autumn is to purchase a couple of bales of hay to set among the mums on our patio.  We also buy a corn stalk to set in our front hallway.  As I sat on the patio the other morning, looking at the beauty of the changing autumn colors on our trees, I glanced at the bales and noticed that they had begun to sprout grass.  Out of what had been very dry and seemingly lifeless bundles of hay had come dark green grass, thrusting into the air as though spring had arrived, six months early.
     Looking at the grass, grass a color with which I normally associate the months of April and May, I found myself struck by the resiliency of existence.  These blades of grass didn't know that autumn had come; they didn't know that winter and its snow was coming; they didn't know that dry, dead hay should not sprout fresh greenery.  But there they were, pushing themselves into the world, brumal inevitability be damned.  They were determined to be.
     Understanding the mechanics of existence is relatively easy.  Science has enabled us to know a great deal about how the world works and comes together.  Grasping the fact of existence, however, is considerably more difficult.  Why do all things want to live?  Why is every animal reluctant to die?  Why, despite all odds, does life keep going?
     Life of course is not aware that it is living or going; it simply exists.  It cannot define its truest purpose.  So it is with us.  We're here, of course; but why we are here, and why, generally speaking, we continue to want to be here, well, those are another questions altogether.  They are questions that, try as we might, we will never fully answer.
     In the end, it's either us or God.  We can know ourselves, we can know God, or we can know both.  But unless we know God, we'll not know, fully, ourselves.
     We can't see past our own selves.

     What's so good about gray?  For some, particularly those who are growing old, gray is an ominous sign, a physical development to be avoided, a hair color that signals, yes, one really is old.  (On the other hand, the book of Proverbs lauds those with gray hair, saying that gray hair is a sign of wisdom.)  For others, those of a political bent, gray indicates failure to take a stand, an inability to distinguish what is really right from what is really wrong.  Similarly, for those who inhabit the halls of religion, gray is viewed as retreat, a refusal to recognize that the things of God are qualitatively and forever different from those of the world and will never be compatible with them.  Finally, for people who may view life as an open book, gray is the only way to view reality.  We should endeavor, such people say, to be always willing to embrace another perspective, experience, or viewpoint.  Life is incredibly diverse and no one has a monopoly on what it might mean.
     A highly interesting book, The Luminous and the Gray, by a British artist called David Batchelor, takes a different position altogether.  He presents gray as a useful counterpoint to color.  The latter, he says, bursts the world, makes it less understandable, renders it less hospitable to meaning.  Gray, he contends, offers a an appraisal of the world that pushes it into a kind of blurry uniformity which, rather than making it tedious, makes it more real.  Unless color is presented without any lines (which he asserts breaks it and, by extension, the world, up), it lacks any capacity to encourage meaning.  We find meaning, he suggests, in gray.
     The world is of course replete with colors, colors which many people find vastly meaningful.  Color infuses us all with a sense of existence.  In addition, there are things that can only be black and white, for instance, the existence of God.  Either God exists, or he does not.  On the other hand, black and white doesn't always explain things fully.  It makes a statement without giving solid evidence that it is true.
     That's the role of gray. When we look at the world as gray, we come to understand that the most profound--and seemingly rigid--delineations permeating existence communicate mystery, mystery that we cannot always solve in color or black and white. We must get used to the gray--and accept the reality and presence of the unknown.
     We are so finite.