Having been traveling a while, facing some more wilderness and snow, I had time to reflect on the size of my tiny existence.  So I share this verse.  "Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit," the apostle Paul writes in the second chapter of his letter to the Christian church at Philippi, "but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves."  Whether we are religious or spiritual or not, we can take these words as emblematic of a considered and worthy life.  When Mother Theresa came to Stockholm to receive her Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, she wore the same garb that she had been wearing for decades, the simple vestments of her Catholic order.  While those who gave her the prize wore their evening's finest and the ceremony held in an opulent hall once used by Europe's highest royalty, all of these, it seemed, did not matter to Mother Theresa.  She had spent her life living out Paul's encouragement to his flock so many centuries ago, to give up personal ambitions for the good of others.  She had given her life for her fellow human beings.
     Judging from the revelations of her personal papers a number of years ago, we know that Mother Theresa struggled with her faith and her walk with God.  Who doesn't?  By its very definition, faith is one of the most challenging tasks any human will take on.  On the whole, however, it is not her angst that mattered, but Mother Theresa's heart, and how she used it.
     As we journey ever deeper into Lent, we should think often of humility.  Humility is not the first thing most of us think about exuding.  It's not most peoples' modus operandi.  Humility rarely comes naturally to anyone.
     Perhaps that's the point.  Sure, there are perverse and unnatural behaviors in which we can engage, but humility is one of those "unnatural behaviors" in which we should engage.  It breaks boundaries, it undermines norms.  Looking out for others lets us know that in the biggest of all pictures, what we do for others is far more important than what we do for ourselves.

     With the coming of spring, we, at least those of us who are familiar with some of the nuances of classical music, also remember the birthday of the great German musician Johannes Sebastian Bach.  Have you heard of Bach?  For many centuries (Bach died in 1750), Bach's melodies have reverberated all over the world, stirring the hearts of millions, perhaps billions of people, many of whom probably have not been aware that it was Bach's music they were hearing.  As long as humanity moves upon the earth, it's unlikely that Bach's melodies will be forgotten.
     In this, we can rejoice.  We humans are remarkable creatures, really, beings who can create, beings who can reason, beings who can change the world.  In Bach's many glorious melodies, we see, in magnificent musical form, a bit of our seemingly unlimited potential to take what is within and before us and transform it into something that, to a music lover, is a thing beyond ready imagination.  After all, in the end, we are creatures of story and imagination.  We live with stories, we die with stories.  We tell ourselves stories, as Joan Didion put it, in order to live.  We create narratives of our lives.
     Regardless of how one sees the universe's origins (though the frequent reader no doubt knows my loyalties in this regard), we can all, I think, put ourselves into the cosmos that we see as actors in a tale of incredible marvel and wonder, birthed and gifted to explore and understand and transform the worlds that lay before us, thespians who are acting out a drama whose full results we will never see in this existence but at which we can, if we stop to think, be ever amazed.
    We can thank Bach today for what he has shown us about our capacities.  We can also thank Bach for giving to us a glimpse of the unfolding mystery of who we are in this vast, vast--and loved--universe.
     As I'll be traveling for a bit the next week, I will not be posting any entries for a few days.  Meanwhile, thanks for thinking, and thanks for reading!

     Today is the vernal equinox, the first day of Spring.  Even though parts of the northern climes may still not look like it, Spring is actually here.  Maybe, just maybe, the privations of winter are winding down.  Spring has come.  It must.  God, and the balance and tilt of the Earth guarantee it.
      So we rejoice.  We rejoice in the newness, we rejoice in the verdancy, we rejoice in the appearance of new life.  We rejoice in the power of the earth to, once again, rejuvenate and revive itself for our joy and wonder.  It's like a resurrection.
     The writer of Proverbs 27 observes that, "When the grass disappears, the new growth is seen."  Winter can be hard, winter can be harsh, and winter can be long, very long, rife with dissolution and vanishing, departure and hopelessness.  Even in the most tropical regions of the world, however, though spring, fall, and winter do not occur in the way they do in northern regions, "grass" nonetheless disappears.  Things die, things go away, things change.  And newness comes.  It's the rhythm of existence, the song of life.
     While we may not enjoy winter, personal, meteorological, or otherwise, we walk in winters, small and large, every day, for in winters is the stuff of living, the glorious and aching mess of being alive, the raw material with which God fashions, in ways we rarely foresee, our springs.
     As the apostle Paul puts it in his first letter to the church at Corinth, the seed that falls to the ground cannot germinate unless it, now detached from its moorings, slips into the ground--no longer seen--and dies.  A seed's death is the winter that brings spring.
     Rejoice in the disappearance, rejoice in the newness.  Rejoice in a world that has both.

     In an interview in the most recent issue of Rolling Stone, well known Microsoft founder and now philanthropist Bill Gates is asked an interesting question.  "Do you believe in God?"
     After expounding on the Western movement away from a mythological to a scientific worldview, Gates said, "But the mystery and the beauty of the world is overwhelmingly amazing, and there's no scientific explanation of how it came about.  To say that it was generated by random numbers, that does seem, you know, sort of an uncharitable view.  I think it makes sense to believe in God."
     However, he adds that, "But exactly what decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don't know."
     Gates hit the nail precisely.  In her 1997 song One of Us, Joan Osborne asked, "What if you could see God?  Then you would have to believe."  Most of us have no trouble believing that some sort of greater force is behind the marvel of creation, as finely tuned and ordered as it is.  Where all of us stumble is when we go about deciding whether this fact or belief should make a difference in how we live.  What does it matter whether God exists?  What difference does it make?
     It's a good question.  If we have any inkling, any inkling or belief at all that there's something/someone bigger than what we see each day, at some point we need to ask it.  What will we do with God?

     About a week ago, I finished reading (or actually, in part, rereading) Ernest Hemmingway's Farewell to Arms.  That it is written in Hemmingway's typically laconic style should not surprise anyone, and that it concludes with a matter of fact ending should raise no eyebrows for those who are familiar with Hemmingway's writing.  As the story draws to a close, we are told that the lead character (and narrator), having just been informed that his soon to be wife and new born child have both died, "Put on his hat and walked into the rain."  And that's it.
     Two summers ago, while my wife and I were traveling through Idaho, we spent a night in Ketchum.  As the evening came on, we walked through town to see Hemmingway's grave.  Set toward the rear of the cemetery, it is not difficult to find.  Its nearly five foot long (and flat) marker is covered with empty bottles of various alcoholic beverages and coins of varying amounts.  A tree hangs over it.  It is easily the most visited grave in the cemetery.
     Judging from the bottles and coins, it seems that many of those who have viewed the grave wished to leave what they believed to be an appropriate memorial to a man who, to all accounts, lived an adventurous, if not angst filled existence, a man who tried to live what he had been given to the fullest.  Hemmingway engaged, avidly, in life's pleasures.
     Yet in 1961, Hemmingway tragically took his own life, blowing his brains out with a shotgun.  Like the protagonist of Farewell to Arms, he took his "hat" and walked into the rain.  Although his protagonist did not choose the eternal rain of Hemmingway, his actions speak powerfully to the novel's point.  In a world devoid of meaning, a world riven with the carnage of World War I the novel describes so well, a world in which life seems to have been cheapened beyond measure, what more could one do but walk into the rain?
     I guess that depends on how one views the rain.  Doesn't it always end?

     If you live in one of the major metropolitan areas of the eastern U.S. or, in the British Isles, near Ireland, you have no doubt noticed that today is St. Patrick's Day.  Celebrated by Irish (and many others) the world over, it commemorates the life and death of the most famous Christian missionary in Ireland.  Historians agree that regardless of the various rumors swirling about Patrick's life, education, or origins, he definitively broke the back of the region's paganism and laid the groundwork for the emergence of the Catholic Church, which continues to dominate Ireland to this day.
     According to Patrick's writings, his conversion was a sense of God opening to him "the sense of my unbelief that I might remember my sins and that I might return with my whole heart to the Lord my God."  One thinks of William James's (in his Varieties of Religious Experience) characterizations of conversion as a sense of transformation and entrance into a newness that its holder had not previously imagined.  Also, conversion, as he sees it, motivates its holder to proclaim what she has found, to let others know what remarkable thing has happened to her.
     So it did for Patrick.  Like the apostle Paul, who was completely transformed on the road to Damascus (see Acts 9), Patrick was similarly compelled to go to Ireland and preach as long as he had strength.  Religious conversion tends to do this to people.  Although it can touch on extremes, for instance, the violent actions of religious fundamentalists--of all faiths--the world over, on the whole, it leaves people wanting to do little but share what they have found.  They usually cannot help it, so great is the insight they have been given.
     How ironic it is, then, that the conversion of someone so long ago has produced a day of drink-filled partying and mirth around the West!  On the other hand, religion happens to all of us in context.  God never changes, but we all find him in different ways.  Though Jesus remains the key, we come into knowing him in a nearly infinite number of circumstances, the patterns of our culture, our lives, and our individual hearts.  God's designs are inevitably far bigger than our own.  Enjoy the party.

     Buried in the text of Paul's second first letter to his protégé Timothy is some advice to, "Flee youthful lusts and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace."  I don't think any of us would deny that this is good advice.  Ought we not to focus on things which make for greater fulfillment and social comity rather than chasing after the evanescent lusts of youth?  Fair enough, yet to take this verse in only this way means that those who are considerably beyond their youth and who may have long ago forsworn such "lusts" may not find much of an incentive, in this verse alone, to seek higher things.  They have, to put it vernacularly, "moved past" them.
     Although I do not dispute that Paul is likely encouraging Timothy to work diligently to avoid being distracted by youthful folly, I cannot help but think that perhaps youthful lusts include things that are not necessarily bound by youth in terms of age but youth in terms of wisdom.  And when I mention wisdom, I think about wisdom as not necessarily the so-called wisdom of the elders, but of the wisdom that comes from acknowledging the truest and most fundamental realities of this world.
     All of us are Timothys, really.  All of us fail to consistently step back and really think about what we are all about and why we are here.  All of us get entangled in the lusts of a "youthful" perspective on life.  All of us forget that life is more than us.  Not that we need to be constantly preoccupied with such burning and fundamental issues, but that we do ourselves no favors to run blithely through life without ever wondering what it means.
     So does Paul tell Timothy to abandon the foolish of existential myopia and pursue, foremost, faith, for it seems that in faith we see the most basic of all parameters of existence.  We see the rawness of finitude, the absurdity of terminality.  We see that regardless of what we believe about God or the supernatural, we all, in the end, live by faith.  We just do not know anything with absolute certainty.
     Yet it is what we have faith in--what we fundamentally trust--that makes all the difference.  Do we trust a God who is there or a mortal self which one day will not?

     Who will remember us?  Unless we are famous or well-known, once those who physically knew us are gone, we may as well be gone, too.  Our names may appear in a family genealogy, our photographs in a family album, our letters perhaps kept for posterity, but we remain in name only, and even that is hollow.  No one will really know who we were.  We're forever gone.
     Only if there is God will we really remain.  Only if there is an eternal God, an eternally remembering God, an eternal, omniscient, and remembering God, will any memory of us be preserved beyond the deaths of our physical descendants.  Only if there is a living God, a God who has always been and who always be--and who, in Jesus, has made himself known--will memory really last, will memory really mean something beyond its immediate experience and expression.  If there is a God who is remembering, if there is a God who is in some way remembering every human being, no one will die, no one will pass on entirely forgotten, be it immediately or in the far future.  Everyone will, in some way, remain.  There is remembrance, there is memory; there is condition and hope beyond the grave.  Our history will not end.

     Have you heard of William Burroughs?  William Burroughs was one of the Beats, that group of eccentric and creative people, people who included Allen Ginsberg, author of Howl, and Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road, whose openended view of life laid the cultural groundwork for the emergence of the American hippie movement in the Sixties.  Intelligent and well read, Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, outlived all of his contemporaries and in his later years became a mentor to many a wanderer in the Sixties.
     Like all of us, Burroughs had his faults and shortcomings, but a recent biographer, Barry Miles, points out that perhaps his greatest struggle was with what Miles calls the "ugly spirit."  Like many a highly creative person, Burroughs wrestled with inner demons.  Yet it was out of these battles that came his best work.
     How ironic that the most creative individuals are often the most tortured people.  On the other hand, it makes wonderful sense.  If creativity were easy, we would all be Beethovens.  We would all be Burroughses.  We would all be Steve Jobses.  No, creativity must be difficult.  It must be demanding, it must be challenging.  It must be the fruit of a long journey.  What is important rarely comes on the first try.
     Bigger picture, however, we find creativity to be difficult because we are fractured beings living in a fractured world.  To find what is real, we must give up illusion.  We must give up what we think.  We must embrace the unknown.  For it is in the unknown that we find what we most need to know.  We step into the mystery, step into the mist.  We tread in the foundations, walk through the beginnings.  We dig into the point of it all, that creativity comes finally from the fact of a created cosmos, the personal and present metaphysical upon which all depends.

     In many parts of the world, this week marked the beginning of Daylight Savings Time.  Historically instituted for the benefit of farmers and others who made their living by the light of the sun, today Daylight Savings Time functions more as a boon to commuters worldwide, enabling them to enjoy more of the day, primarily after working hours.
     Although it is still early March and much of the West still lies in the throes of winter, Daylight Savings Time is a signal, a sign.  It is an indication that spring will really come, that the vernal and verdant will really soon reign.  As God promised Noah after the flood, as long as the earth stands, so the seasons will come.  Winter may be difficult at times, but it is not forever; summer may be overpoweringly hot, but autumn will come.  Nothing stands still, nothing remains unchanged.  Life is bigger than its parts.
     As Tolstoy writes in his masterpiece War and Peace, when the light rises and the grass greens, when the flowers bloom and the birds sing, when the land awakens to its destiny, spring has come.
     So does the psalmist write of God, "You open your hand and care for every living thing."  Even us.  We live in the heart of divine promise.

     For those of us who follow such things, yesterday marked the first Sunday of Lent.  As a result, repentance and circumspection dominate the religious imagination, as those so inclined spend ever more time pondering the exigencies within their lives, the fleeting puffs of materiality in which we have life and breath.  Life becomes a road to its meaning.  Lent, however, demands that we look for ultimate meaning in that from which life came and not life itself.  As spring seems increasingly in the air of the northern climes of the world, it's easy to rejoice in life's wonder without also wondering why life is, why we have it, why this existence has been given to us.  To what end do we live?
     In its call to slow down, to meditate and consider, to let go of the immediate, at least for a while, Lent carves multiple inroads into this question, dissembling the perfunctory and expected and normal.  It calls us to not blast life apart without knowing what we are blasting it into, to cease striving for what will not last, and to relax, as the Psalmist says, in the reality of God (Ps 46:10).
     Need we really acknowledge larger realities in our earthly existence?  Only you can decide that.  One truth, however, will remain.  We will never escape the fact of our mortality.  Lent reminds us of our contingency.  It also reminds us that if the world is contingency only, the universe would never have had a reason to be.  And neither would we.
     Enjoy the journey.

     If you are a pianist (I, by the way, am not, although I do play the piano on occasion), you may have heard about the recent passing of Alice Herz-Sommer.  Believed to be the oldest known living Holocaust survivor, Ms. Herz-Sommer died in London at the age of 110.  In addition to noting that she survived the Nazi death camps, what people have found notable about Ms. Herz-Sommer is that she credits her love for the music of Fredrick Chopin for enabling her and her son to endure their years in the concentration camp at Terezin in Czechoslovakia.  As an accomplished musician, Ms. Herz-Sommer was invited to perform with the camp's orchestra, making music that, as she recalls, lifted everyone's heart, helping them stay alive.  Even her guards fell under the spell of her music.
     So is music to the human being.  To make melody, to sing songs, to listen to both:  these are the joy of billions of people around the world.  Music moves us as nothing else can.
     Psalm 19 says that the heavens are telling of the glory of God, that day and night, the heavens are speaking to us of the presence and wonder of God.  The creation is constantly singing of its creator, constantly infusing the universe with the fact of his presence.  When we do or hear music, when we tap into the musical rhythms of existence, we step into the heart of what is really true.  We touch the foundation of the cosmos, the active and continuous note of the loving movement of God. 
     If the world didn't sing, neither would we.

     Some things, good and bad, never seem to die.  Although Adolf Hitler has been dead for many years, his legacy, in too many ways, lives on.  I refer to the existence of various Nazi parties in different parts of the West, groups of people who call themselves National Socialists and who insist that their respective nations are to be filled only with pure white Aryan people.  Anyone else is not welcome.
     Aside from the patent intolerance such attitudes convey, their existence carries a deeper message.  Though we in the West may pride ourselves at creating a world better than the one into which we came (and several studies done in recent years conclude that, on balance, the West is becoming progressively less violent), we cannot escape aberrance altogether.  We will struggle with it until the day we die.  We will struggle with it within ourselves, and we will struggle with it as a human community.  For all our wondrous glory, we remain deeply flawed beings.
     What to do?  We surely do not want a world like Aldous Huxley's 1984, a world of perfect test tube people, nor do we want a world like B. F. Skinner's Walden II, a world of people trained to respond to commands without thinking.  We want a world in which all of us can be ourselves while we look out for each other.
     We will never, however, find it in full.  But we keep trying.  And we should.  Nazi or not, we should keep trying.  Yet we should remember where we really are.  We live in a material world, yet a material world into which the immaterial, the spiritual, has irrupted and broken through, a material world whose fullest meaning we therefore only experience when we look to its deepest ground and agree with Jesus' words, as recorded in the third chapter of the gospel of John, that, "Unless you are born again, you shall not see the kingdom of God."
     This world will be as good as the extent to which we believe in the power of its richest meaning.

     What's so important about Ash Wednesday?  As billions of people around the world come together today to commemorate the beginning of what the Christian church calls Lent, all of us, whether we are religious or not, can learn something from their devotion.  Ash Wednesday is a call to humility.  It is a call to recognize that we are, indeed, ultimately no more than collections of chemicals which, one day, will be dust.  Ash Wednesday is a sign to all of us that life is not so much about getting what we want, for we did not cause ourselves to come into this existence, but about learning what we should from this life that we have been given.  It is a reminder that we are not to take from life as much as we are to give to it.  In Ash Wednesday and the forty day period of Lent that it initiates, we see that humility and circumspection and repentance are the foundation of what is most important in being human.  In contrast to the vapid frivolity of the Oscars a few days ago, Ash Wednesday underscores what many philosophers have labeled as humanity's central concerns:  guilt and death.  It is guilt because we live a life that we did not manufacture or make, a life that owes everything about it to forces infinitely beyond our control, a life that is lived in the grip of a morality we did not devise, and it is death because as we all know, regardless of how long we manage to postpone it, one day we all will die.  We cannot escape our mortality.
     Even if you do not celebrate Ash Wednesday, savor what it means.  Savor the goodness of humility, taste the joy of circumspection.  Bask in repentance and forgiveness, human and divine, and revel in resolving to admit humility, to know your place, to let go and move on.  And delight in Ash Wednesday's journey, its journey to the joy waiting for us at the end:  the remembrance and celebration of the reality of resurrection.
     God will yet win.

     If you are at all familiar with the history of art, you are aware of Pablo Picasso, the famous Spanish painter who is perhaps best known for introducing the world to cubism.  Much has been written about Picasso, and countless museums have mounted exhibitions of his art over the years.  He has achieved a notoriety, good and bad, and fame which few artists have surpassed.
     It is in the thinking behind cubism, however, that Picasso perhaps made his most significant mark.  Prior to Picasso, art, despite its numerous divergences into Impressionism and Postimpressionism and the like, continued to present its images reasonably proximate to the object it was portraying.  But cubism actually broke up its images, fracturing them, twisting them up and down and around, bending them in ways that they would never be in real life.
     Picasso dared to break boundaries, dared to dream in ways that others either could or would not.  Although some religious people found his forays threatening and felt as if his art was making their world less secure, others welcomed Picasso's perspective.  It was simply another way of looking at the human condition.  It underscored the fact of human magnificence in the midst of a world which, wrestling with the ennui of modernity, was looking for a way out.  Though Picasso's cubism didn't necessarily solve the problem, it more than made it plain:  we are significant people in a, apart from loyalty to a divine being, insignificant universe.
     When boundaries fade, we find new boundaries still.

     As most of the world knows, last night the Oscars came to Hollywood.  For those who follow and enjoy such things, the parade of "celebrities" on the red carpet adorning the entrance to the auditorium prior to the ceremony was a veritable feast for the eyes.  One after another, the most famous stars of film passed by, smiling, waving, preening, displaying themselves for the adoring crowds.  All of them expect it, all of them know it is good for the movie business, and all of them know that this night is, for them and their successors, one of the most important evenings of the year.  They literally cannot afford to miss it.
     I've never been one to swoon over "celebrities."  I'm happy for them, happy that they found their vocational niche, and happy for them that they've been able to make a good, indeed a very good living from it.
     This notwithstanding, what I find interesting, even intriguing about the adulation some people heap upon these "celebrities" is the extent to which it represents, to me, a longing for heroes, for people to look up to, for people who have risen above the fray and who seemed to have found a happiness others do not have.
     But happiness, as so many of us know, is not something we find.  Happiness is what happens to us.  Happiness is what we experience when we have resolved not our vocational angst or material paucity but our innermost longings, our deep seated longings for meaning.  Our greatest heroes need not be those who are materially successful, but rather those who have been successful in matters of the heart, those who have found what the Hebrew Bible calls "integrity" and what Jesus calls "perfect," a completeness of body, spirit, and soul.  Happiness is grounded in the present necessity of God.