"You hit singles, you hit doubles, every once in a while you may hit a home run."  So said U.S. president Barack Obama recently when talking about his work in international relations.  The president was speaking to his critics who have been insisting that he should have been using, for the last six years, more force to enforce and ensure America's interests around the globe.  Better to employ diplomacy to the extent we can, the president was arguing, than drag the nation into another war.  And every once in while the country will hit a home run.  Every once in a while the nation will fully succeed in its quest to preserve its international interests--without resorting to war.
     We can surely argue for hours whether Obama's approach is working.  My point, however, is to consider the words of James who, in the first chapter of his letter, writes that, "Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger."  We can certainly employ this in our personal relationships, but we can also do so in international relationships.  In truth, we are usually better off to refrain from speaking or acting in a volatile situation, rather than run the risk of further inflaming it.  In the big picture, we ought to move slowly, trusting in the greater activity of God in the world, and be aware that we tend to think in very small and limited ways, ways that are rather myopic and often fail to see the larger issues at hand.
     Maybe that's why the Hebrew Bible says, in Deuteronomy 29:29, that, "The secret things belong to the Lord our God."  Not to reject action altogether, just to say that, given our very tiny vision, we ought to realize that despite our confidence in ourselves, we very rarely understand everything we should.

     "Without revelation," begins Proverbs 29:18, "the people perish."  so says the King James Version of the Hebrew Bible.  What does this mean?  Most of us spend our lives looking for insight, vision, enlightenment, and meaning.  We want to understand our lives and what they are about.  Or as Aristotle put it long ago, "All people wish to know."
     And how do we know?  We only know as far as our vision extends.  Beyond that, we can know very little.  Most of us are aware, however, that there are things that are out "there," but things that we do not necessarily grasp or understand.  If we are honest, we will admit that mysteries and unknowns flow through existence, mysteries that we may never fully understand.
     Maybe these mysteries are the stuff of existence.  Maybe they are part of our present reality.  Maybe that's all they are.  But maybe, just maybe, they represent something that exists but which we do not see, visibly, in this material reality, something that, somehow, though it is "beyond" this reality, interacts with it in a way that explains it, that explains its mysteries and why they exist.
     Hence, revelation, that is, communication from this "something" beyond us, this "something," this, dare I say, God,  that is somehow able to more fully frame our perception of our lives.  In ourselves, we cannot know everything about ourselves or our lives.  We cannot look at them as a disinterested observer.
     But revelation can.  It is outside us, yet it speaks to us.  It lets us see reality as it really is.

     What is the measure of our days?  If you today, this very day, were to find yourself passing away from this life, what would you say about it?  How would you assess how you had lived?
     Though each of us could propose multiple answers to this question, we all would agree that the one constant in all of them is that to be born is to, one day, die.  Regardless of how healthy or long-lived we may be, there will come a time when we, like all other human beings, will no longer be here.  And then what will our life be?
     The psalms of the Hebrew Bible speak often of this dilemma, this vexing and, for some, crushing truth about sentient existence.  It is not forever.  So, the writers frequently ask, how do I measure my days, God?  How do I understand why I have been here?  How do I fathom what will one day cease to be?
     Unfortunately, as the writers all realize, we cannot, fully.  We may look back at what we have done or who we have known, but in the end we will never be able to fully assess the measure of our lives.  We will be gone.
     In this, the psalms say, is wisdom.  In this, the writers assert, is to really live.  To live is to grasp that regardless of who we may be, when all is said and done, it is God, and God alone who will be able to frame and explain our lives as they really were lived.  Wisdom is to understand that existence is ultimately in the hands of God.
     We are not alone.  Nor would we wish to be.  How else will we know why we were ever here?
    

     Recently, I saw the movie Heaven Can Wait.  This movie has appeared in two versions, an old black and white one, and the one that most of us know about, the full color depiction starring Warren Beatty.  For those of you unfamiliar with the plot, it concerns a certain athlete who is taken out of the earth before his time (an angel jumped the gun) but who when it appears that the error cannot be repaired, chooses to take another body.  And the fun commences.
     The point I am making has to do with divine intervention.  Most of us struggle with whether and how God intervenes in our reality, and why and when some people die and not others.  It's hard not to.  So what if, as the movie suggests, the wheels of heaven make a mistake?  What if, as the movie presents, what was planned did not happen as it was supposed to?  Is life really out of control, even for those whom we might think oversee it?
     One would hope not.  If there is a God, one would hope that he is in control.  Why otherwise call him a god?  Yet if God is in control, who are we?
     Even if God is not in control, however, in no way can we fill the void.  Heaven Can Wait depicts a world governed by the simple maxim that, "Everything happens as it is supposed to."  Yet if there is no governance, God, determinism, natural forces and consequences, or not, what does anything really mean?  We're at the mercy of everything we are--and will never understand.
    Yet we remain teleological beings, through and through, purposed to find purpose.  It's a paradox, yet it's true.  Like a personal and living divine:  paradoxical yet the only reasonable way to explain who we are--and why we live.

     In one song from their classic rock opera Tommy, the Who sing, "Sickness will take the mind where the mind doesn't usually go."  The Who were of course singing of the boy Tommy whose inability to see or hear gave him extraordinary psychic powers, but the point is that physical breakdown often does enable people to see things that they ordinarily would not.  The writer Flannery O'Connor, famous for penning novels of the American South while suffering from immense physical handicap (lupus), testifies aptly to this.  Her novels present people in various stages of physical and emotional duress (as she was throughout her short life) and the redemption that they eventually find in living through them.
     Most psychologists will tell us that suffering, however unpleasant, rightly absorbed and apprehended, can lead to some level of personal redemption as well.  Why?  It is indeed a broken world.  It does not run perfectly, and bad things happen.  Consequently, those who are living in the world, animal or human frequently experience hardship and suffering.
     On the other hand, this present world is all, for the time being, we have, and whether we are existentialists who believe we are "thrown" into the world or people, sometimes of faith, sometimes not, who believe that we are here for a reason, we all are living in it.  And we will have troubles.
     The redemptive lesson here is that in this broken world the only way that we can overcome it, metaphorically speaking, is not to try to avoid it, but rather to embrace it.  For it is in embracing that we overcome.  Not that we welcome suffering and pain, but that if we and the world really have purpose (an idea which most of us, in some way, believe), we will only find this purpose if we look, really look, at and engage in the world to see.
      That's why in a broken Jesus truth shines most clearly; if we were perfect, we would not need God.

     A little while back, I mentioned a project on sovereignty and choice sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation.  The other day I came across another project the foundation is sponsoring, this one having to do with this intriguing question:  what is the place of the human mind in nature?
     I won't pretend to answer this question fully in this little blog, but I will observe that many people have asked, if the human race were to suddenly disappear, would the earth be any worse off?  Others, driven by various religious perspectives, suggest that the human race is essential to the earth, that human beings have been called to watch over the planet.
     If the latter is true, a fair minded person might respond that to this point humans have done a rather poor job at managing the resources with which they had been entrusted.  In other words, does nature really need the human mind and vision?  Absent some sort of purpose for the planet, it in fact does not.  The world does not need the human mind to be the world.  The human mind does not add to the goodness or greatness of the world.
     So what is the role of the human mind in nature?  Again, unless nature is grounded and encompassed by a larger purpose, a purpose that affirms the necessity and importance of human beings in the creation, there really isn't one.
     In ourselves, we cannot insist that we have a point.

     As Easter fades away, many of us would wish to sustain, in some way, its message, its message that life does not end with death, that life will continue on beyond itself.  In the heat of existence, on the days when we are feeling particularly overwhelmed with the exigencies of being alive, remembering this message becomes difficult.  We may feel as if we are like people who, as Virginia Woolf observed in her "Lives of the Obscure," are "advancing with lights in the growing gloom," heading toward obscurity, the obscurity of a life lived, a life enjoyed immensely but a life one day to end and be gone, never to return.  Believing in eternal life is hard in the morass of the material present.  We cannot see it, so why put our trust in it?
     Some words from Yeats may help here.  "And God stands winding his lonely horn, and time and the world are ever in flight."  Time and days wear on, and the years drag by, unyielding, unchanging, but God, as this, and the psalmist, remind us (Psalm 90) remains.
     It's hard to see the end of a road at its beginning, yes, but at least there is a road to follow.  With a destiny at the end.
     Years ago, Fredrick Nietzsche claimed, "I am a destiny!"  He's right, but only because, contrary to his beliefs, there is a God.

     Is the resurrection, as some of my atheist friends have told me, parochial?  Is it really so small and insignificant that it affects only a very small corner of an infinitely large universe?  Is one itinerant Jewish preacher's return from death really that important?
     The resurrection is only important if it actually happened.  And the resurrection could only have happened if this vast universe is the creation, in some way, of a personal being.  Only personal beings rise from the dead; impersonal things were never alive.  If we look at the universe as the product of impersonal forces, well, we will indeed consider the resurrection to be irrelevant.  Why would life be expected to continue after it is over?  Deciding that the universe is the result of personal intelligence and creativity, however, changes the equation, profoundly.  A necessarily eternal creator inserts a potential into the fabric of the cosmos that would not be there otherwise, the potential to experience, somehow, some way, eternity.
     In this light, the resurrection becomes anything but parochial.  Indeed, it comprises the sum of existence.  The resurrection means that life is more than itself, that life as we know and love it is not all there is to experience.  There is more to life than meets the eye.  Or the ear.  Or the heart.  The resurrection means that this present is only the beginning of a far greater present still, a present that will never end.
     What did the apostles say on Easter morning?  "He is risen!"  In Jesus' rising, God communicated the heart of what it means to be alive:  to know that, now and always, life is the work and vision of God.  We're only along for the ride.
     But oh, what a ride!  We live our lives richly, for we live them as if they will never end.  And they won't.  As Jesus told Martha in John 11, "He who believes in me will live even if he dies.  And he who believes in me will never die."
     There is life again.

     If, as the Christian scriptures make clear, God--the God who created the universe and everything in it--died, died, in the person of Jesus Christ, a death like every human being, but then after three days rose again, rose again to a new life, a life after a life that was once lived, a life which death would not end, a life that conquers life itself, a life greater than existence can possibly be--how can we, and the world, ever be the same?
     He is risen!

"Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends."  So said Jesus, Jewish Messiah and, as he constantly made clear, the son of God, on the eve of his crucifixion.  Most of us know how Jesus would, in a few short hours, demonstrate his words in tangible form by dying on a Roman cross for, as he had long proclaimed he would do, all humanity, billions and billions of people, people who had already lived and died, people who were living, people who had not yet even been born.  Most of us know that this man Jesus, God in the flesh, gave himself so that we could find eternal life, an abundant life in the present moment and, when our days draw to a close, life forevermore.  Most of us know that because Jesus died, life is more than living and dying.
      Not as many of us, however, know about Maximilian Kolbe who, in his own way, did exactly the same thing.
     Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish priest who was imprisoned at one of the most notorious of the German concentration camps, Auschwitz.  In an act of selfless sacrifice that will be remembered for many ages to come, Kolbe willingly came forward to serve the death sentence of another prisoner, one Franciszek Gajowniczek, whom he had not even met.  After two weeks of slow dehydration and starvation, Kolbe finally died when the guards injected him with carbolic acid.  Gajowniczek, who died in 1995, devoted the rest of his life to telling the world about Kolbe's incredible sacrifice.
     Kolbe surely exemplified Jesus' words.  He willingly and happily died for another human being. As did Jesus for us.  As the Christian world remembers Good Friday, that darkest yet most sacred day on the liturgical calendar, the day on which Jesus, the son of God and God in the flesh, sacrificed himself, giving everything he was for the world that he had made, all of us should therefore ask, with joy, gratitude, and astonishment:  what kind of a God would do such a thing?
    

     Wouldn't we, at least a little, like to know the future?  As I hope all of us know, however, we never will, fully, anyway.  Nonetheless, we try.  We cannot help but do so.  It's part of being human.
     On the other hand, recognizing our limits and limitations is also human.  Part of an exhibition titled "Form and Future" held in Palm Desert last fall was a piece that its maker called "Contemplating an Unknown Future."  It presents a gangly figure of weathered wood hanging onto a ladder, staring into space.  One may think here of the story of Jacob's ladder, the night the Hebrew patriarch Jacob had a dream in which he saw a ladder reaching to the heavens and angels descending and ascending upon it (see Genesis 28).  Or one may think of Ecclesiastes 3:11, the verse that tells readers that although humans are made to seek and look into the future, they will never understand or grasp it completely.  Or perhaps one remembers Jules Verne's Time Machine, the story of one man's journey into the world many thousands of years ahead of his own.  Or on a more comedic note, the Michael J. Fox film, "Back to the Future."  Whatever it is, we humans echo Georg Hegel's words that, "In the individual alone do the eternal moments of absolute truth unfold into existence."  We often envision ourselves as caught in the crossfires of wanting to know, understanding acutely that we all have ladders leading into our futures, yet also struck, even burdened by the weight of the inexorable presence of mortality.  We are dust, Genesis reminds us, and to dust we will one day go, but we are also flesh and blood sentient beings wanting to make sense of our present state and condition.
     It all comes down to trust.  Do we trust the fact of future--and why?  Do we trust because we believe it is all that is there, or do we trust because we believe it is only there because there is something greater still? 

     How do we reconcile divine sovereignty and human will?  For ages and ages, philosophers and theologians have wrestled with this unsolvable puzzle.  If we can choose, but God is in control, are we really choosing?
     Many, many books have been written on this topic, and I will not attempt to rehash every argument involved in the debate.  I will say that ultimately, we will never fully understand precisely how these two apparently incompatible conditions fit together.  We embrace the mystery.
     This notwithstanding, a group of scientists and theologians, funded by the John Templeton Foundation (John Templeton, for those who follow the stock market, the now deceased founder of the hugely successful Templeton Fund) are embarking on a two year study to ascertain how God may or may not work through "indeterminate" processes.  In other words, thinking back to the opening question of this blog, they are trying to understand how we can (or cannot) juxtapose the idea of a providential and sovereign God with the indeterminancy (unless one is of the ilk that we have none) of human choice.  What is the theological value, if any, of randomness?
     Although we must wait for a couple of years to hear this group's conclusions, from my humble vantage point, I will observe that randomness has massive theological value.  Who wants to live in a airtight and robotic world?  And what kind of a God would make a world in which nothing is left to chance, in which there is absolutely no openendedness?  Not to deny that God is sovereign, but that it seems that randomness is the stuff of life.  It is the ground of adventure, the fuel of achievement, the impetus of personality and value.  If life were not contingent, if life were not indeterminate, it would not really be any fun.  Sure, we might be safe in a controlled world, but wouldn't we rather sacrifice safety for a genuinely lived existence?
     And if God really is there, we need not worry about whether our lives, regardless of how we live them or how they turn out, have a point.  They do.  Enjoy the mystery!
    

     Can a rationalist be a mystic?  This is the question that author Barbara Ehrenreich asks in her latest book, Living With a Wild God.  A life long self-described "hard-core" atheist, Ehrenreich writes in this book about various what she has come to describe as mystical experiences.  Initially, she finds this to be odd:  how could we experience anything that seems to have roots in something beyond what she considers to be this material reality?
     Upon further reflection, however, Ehrenreich comes to think that what she is experiencing is not something with psychosomatic roots, as so many aver, but rather represent "encounters," though she is not certain what they are encounters with.  For this reason, although she rejects the idea of a supernatural, she is willing to use the tools of science to explore the source and content of these encounters.  In short, as she puts it, "Is science ready to take on the search for the source of our most uncanny experiences?"
     While I appreciate this type of experiment, I hope that whoever does it makes herself open to the idea that, despite Ehrenreich's disclaimer, perhaps the source of these "encounters" does indeed have roots in a reality beyond our own.  That she will be willing to deal with the possibility that another but integrated, connected, or encompassing reality may be responsible for or influencing what we experience in this one.
     Beyond this, that Ehrenreich has had these "encounters" demonstrates that regardless of how much we might think we know about ourselves and our world, because we are finite beings living in what Stephen Hawkings has called an infinite universe, we will likely always be touching things we do not understand.  Though we may test them, though we may explore them, we may never fully grasp what they are.
     All to say, there's more to life--and us--than meets the eye.  And that's the point.

     For those of us who were around in 1964, you may remember the tragic case of Kitty Genovese.  Who was Kitty Genovese?  She was a woman in New York who was one day savagely attacked and killed by a man while, regrettably (and this is what made her case so famous), a number of people stood by and simply watched.  As one man put it, when Genovese asked for help, he demurred, saying, "I didn't want to get involved."
     Today, the killer, Winston Moseley, continues to serve a life sentence in a prison in upstate New York.  Genovese would have been 79 this year; Moseley is approaching 80.  At the time of the attack, numerous newspapers opined about the tragedy of it all, wondering aloud why no one, absolutely no one would help Genovese.  Why?
     We may never know, fully, but we can say that, sadly, all of us have heard the spectator's lament countless times before:  few of us want to be involved in the problems of others.  Though I could offer all manner of (mostly deserved) critique of American society on this point, I will observe only that none of us would be here today had it not been for the selflessness and sacrifice that rests at the heart of the universe.  We weep for Ms. Genovese because though we understand that the cosmos is the result of various chemical reaction and exchange, we also understand that we only love because the universe itself is grounded in a sacrificial love that makes life worth living.  We want to love because there is love with which to love.

     In the most recent session of the atheist discussion group I attend once a month, we took time to share with the group what we believe and how we have come to believe it.  Although I already knew what most people believed, what I found disheartening was the extent to which almost everyone reported that they had come to atheism as a result of unpleasant experiences with organized religion.  In almost every instance, it was the dogmatism of a particular religious (always Christian) tradition, a dogmatism not so much in doctrine but in practice, that caused irreparable harm to their latent spiritual sensibilities.  For one reason or another, these various traditions had treated these people in ways that, to them, showed little or no sensitivity to their particular life circumstances.  And some of these circumstances were the result of events beyond their control or changes in their lives which they did not ask or invite.  Instead of feeling loved by those in these traditions, my atheist friends felt wounded and rejected.  The one institution that one might think would unreservedly care about people appeared to do the opposite.
     This is tragic.  Not only it is tragic because my friends decided that God is of no value to them.  It is tragic because the institution that is supposed to explain the heart of God to the world behaved as though this heart didn't exist.  The community of belief acted as if its belief was more important than how its people acted it out.  In their zeal to keep the law, they overlooked the heart.  So did Jesus say about the Pharisees centuries ago.  When people sinned, what did Jesus do?  He accepted them as they were, then told them to walk a new way.  He loved them first.  And they believed in him.
     So should today's believers do the same.  After all, who really wants someone to reject God because he or she does not feel he loves them?

     In an interesting new book, Our Mathematical Universe, physicist Max Tegmark suggests that ultimately we and our universe are simply parts of eternal mathematical structures.  What is an eternal mathematical structure?  According to Tegmark, it is the ground of what is real; everything comes from them, everything happens in them.  They have always existed, in fact, they always will exist in this universe (unless this universe slides into a parallel universe, of which Tegmark believes at least four exist, and they become different structures).
     Curiously, Tegmark insists that although we can assert the fact of these structures, we cannot describe or fully understand them.  We know, believe, and affirm they are there, but we cannot begin to really grasp what they ultimately are.  It is beyond our current capabilities.
     After reading this book and finding great intrigue in how Tegmark builds his case, as he posits the ideas that "everything that can happen happens somewhere;" that there is an physical reality independent of the human mind; and that the theory of multiverses (multiple universes) solves the problem of infinite regress by presenting an infinite number of possibilities for what can be; and other fascinating thoughts, I came away thinking that he had simply solved one problem by raising another.  This has to do with what I will call the necessity of eternality.  Eternality is insuperably difficult to grasp, be it of God, mathematical structures, or otherwise, yet an eternal "somethingness" remains our only option for explaining how anything came to be.  Though Lawrence Krauss in his Universe from Nothing, asserts that something indeed "came out of nothing," we still cannot explain why there was even "nothing."  One way or the other, we need an eternal or endless starting point.
     And then we have the same question:  how did this get here?  There is either an endless personal or an eternal impersonal.  What to do?  Look at yourself, look at the world, and decide:  which eternality best explains how incredibly--and unbearably--orderly, complex, and complicated you, the world, and the universe, are?

     What if we could make a person?  Although the science of genome and cloning may well be on the verge of doing just this, and despite that many of us can now, if we are willing to spend enough money, come very close to deciding which genes we would like for our children to have, to date no one--at least as far as we know--has cloned or manufactured a human being.
     A few people, people like Mary Shelley in her novel Frankenstein, or Aldous Huxley in his book Brave New World, have dared imagine what the world might be like if we could indeed make a human being.  A movie I saw recently, Ruby Sparks, though I doubt it was intended as a commentary on this issue, made me think anew about it.  The movie is about a young and lonely and successful novelist who dreams of a woman, Ruby, then proceeds to write a novel about her.  One day, to his surprise, he walks into his apartment and who should he see but Ruby!  The woman about whom he had dreamed had suddenly come to life, behaving exactly as he had described her in his nascent manuscript.  He of course is very happy:  she loves him totally and without reserve.
     Eventually, however, he sees that Ruby is beginning to wander, to explore the world outside his.  After fretting about this, he realizes that by returning to the novel and adding new information about Ruby, he can make her be or do precisely as he pleases.  Soon, Ruby is caught in the crossfires of the lonely and frustrated novelist's life vision, a parody of what a human with choice making capacities should be.  She is no longer her own person.
     Like Frankenstein in Frankenstein, like the rulers of the Brave New World, like every other person who has attempted to make a human being, the lonely novelist stumbles into the fundamental crux of humanness.  Whenever we try to make a person be whom we want this person to be, this person ceases to be the person we ought to most want her to be.  People without choices are not people at all.
     The philosopher Frederick Nietzsche may have gotten many things wrong, but he was right on one thing.  It is our will that defines the essence of what it means to live as a human being.  God made us, yes, but he made us with the will and capacity to "make" ourselves.  God understands that if we cannot exercise our will, we are no longer human beings.
     We live, and die, with astounding liberty.

     As Lent continues apace and spring continues to surface, rejoice.  Rejoice in the wondrous blend of paucity and plenty through which God shapes us, his creation, rejoice in those remarkable twists of unfathomability and clarity that come from believing in the splendor of an intelligence more vast than the widest sea.
     Rejoice as well in the inevitability and mystery of being human, in remembering God's picture of its perfection, for us, in us, in Jesus, God's son.  It's a marvelous world.  But rejoice as well in the privations of existence, that life is by its very nature incomplete, though we so desperately want it to be otherwise.  It is in life's fractures and splinters that we see its true character, that we see that although life is indeed astonishing, it is ultimately the greatest and most vexing mystery we will ever encounter.  Though it's all we know, we will never solve its puzzle, the ever lingering--and pestering--question of why, existence.
      That's one reason to think about Lent.  Not to say that we should not keep trying to fathom existence, but to say that when we stand before a door into what we know in our hearts we will never fully understand, we in fact open a window.  We open a window into the tumult, the confusion, the conundrum.  And we learn that we will never grasp life and existence unless we grasp that which makes its denouements and end.
     Creatures of space and time that we be, we stumble before the maw of purpose and eternity.  But we can still rejoice in the greater good to come.

     What's in a beating heart?  Karl Ove Knausgaard, in the first volume of his massive six volume Proustian-like autobiographical tome, asks this question, repeatedly and often as he takes the reader into the beginnings of his childhood.  It is a question well worth asking, for much depends on it.  When a heart beats, life reigns; when it does not, life ends.  When a heart beats, we move and breathe; when it stops, we do neither.  It is on the heart that all life depends.  It is on the heart that nations rise and fall, it is on the heart that history unfolds, it is on the heart that time itself is filled.
     For the ancient Hebrews, the heart was more than the physical organ.  It circumscribed the whole of intention and desire; the heart was the center of who a person was.  It invested and presented its holder in and to the world.  Though we moderns view the heart as foremost a physical organ, we cannot help but view it metaphorically as well, making it the instigator of emotion and longing, the seat of our deepest dreams.
     We all are poets of ourselves.  We survive with science, but we live with our hearts.  We need our brains, but we need our hearts to be fully human, in the broadest sense. for we  see with far more than our eyes.  If the universe were only a brain, it would still need a heart.  We are more than particles and chemicals.
     As the Romantics once observed, we err if we suppose we can live on reason and logic and materiality only.  We need the poetry of our hearts.  And we need the personal transcendence from which it can only come.

     I recently watched, probably for the fourth time, the movie Men in Black.  Have you seen it?  It's the amusing story of a team of two people (Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith) whose mission is to monitor aliens from taking over America.  Jones, who has worked for the "alien" agency for many years, recruits Will Smith to be his partner in his quest to deal with the aliens.  After Will Smith agrees to join the team, the agency head informs him that every record of him will be expunged from every database that has ever existed.  In other words, as the director puts it, "It will be as if you never existed."
     How would that be?  How would it be if you had existed, then you did not?  Sure, when people die, they cease to exist physically, but memories of them endure, sometimes for millennia.  They're gone, but they're not.  If someone had lived, however, and suddenly the world had no record that they had ever done so, what would be left?  There would be memories of course, but try to picture remembering a person who for all intents and purposes never even lived.  It would be as if this person had never been born.
     But of course this person had been born.  And of course this person had lived.  Only if memory, everyone's memory, had completely vanished would this person really be gone.  Yet if all memory had vanished, all time would, too.  And the universe really would be as meaningless as many people claim it is.  If there is no remembrance of or in time, we are nothing more than points of light, always shining, but pointing to nothing.
     Maybe that's why Genesis tells us that in the beginning, God made light and, consequently, day and night.  God knew that time without a foundation, time that just happens, is time that may as well never happened, as if everything in it had never existed.

     To live is to, unfortunately, suffer.  Part of living in a bent and broken world is experiencing misfortune, be it mental, spiritual, or material, misfortune that sometimes drives people to despair.
     The aftermath of World War I was no exception.  Although the West had entered the twentieth century optimistic about itself and its future, the carnage and pain of the War cruelly shattered these illusions, dashing them into the soil that by the War's end had absorbed the blood of millions of young men.  The future looked decidedly less hopeful.  Great despair ensued.
     In addition, though religion is, by most definitions, a call to hope or trust in something bigger than this world, even religion could do little to forestall the sense of hopelessness and ennui that swept through Western Europe.  It quickly pervaded every layer of society.
     What could religion do?  Buffeted by these forces of modernity, the conservative wings of Christianity and Judaism retreated into themselves, ensconcing their people in a box from which they were not to emerge for nearly fifty years.  On the other hand, the liberal sectors of these religions, though not fully agreeing with the tenets of modernity that undergirded this societal despair, chose instead to embrace and step into the pain of the planet.  They set aside moral uneasiness to bring their religion to those who needed it most.
     However, just as religion in the twentieth-first century does not always satisfy everyone, so did religion during this time period fail to fully mollify as well.  How could it?  Even if we believe, as most religions do, that God is present in suffering, this does not necessarily end it.  Nor does it always explain it.  Religion found itself caught on the horns of a dilemma, to believe in the light while embracing the darkness, to walk through the world's pains while speaking of a grace in and beyond it.
     In the end, it asked the West to trust, nothing more, nothing less, to trust in what it could not see to overcome what it could.  To recognize that although the world had closed in on them, God had opened it again.  Better to face the questions than pretend nothing had happened.

     April 1.  In many parts of the world, it's April's Fools Day.  But it's also the birthday of one of the greatest of the Romantic pianists:  Sergei Rachmaninoff.  Born in Russia later emigrating to America, and becoming an American citizen shortly before his death in 1943, Rachmaninoff composed some of the richest music ever written for the piano, blending intense and mournful melody with powerful and intricate chords and keyboard movements, capturing and expressing the deepest spirit of the Romantics.  His playing took his audiences into the fullness of their emotional imaginations; they left amazed.
     Romanticism speaks of emotion, sense, and imagination; the heights, and the depths of the full gamut of humanness, taking us to the peaks of ecstasy, dragging us through the nadirs of tragedy.  It is life.  Rachmaninoff gave us a glimpse of a human being struggling with what it is to be alive on this planet, what it is to experience, what it is to know, what it is to be a personal being, alive, emoting, and real as anything can possibly be.  His piano touched us all, for we all are, in the end, creatures of heart and imagination.  We live as sensual beings.
     So it is that we, people who delight in the poignant melodies of the Romantics, we today bask in the light of life, realizing that regardless of what we believe about its origins or meaning, we can surely believe in it as a fundamental miracle of being.  And though we struggle with our presence, we marvel at what it yields.  Like Rachmaninoff, we wrestle with as well rejoice in being alive.   We daily tangle with the weight, and hope, of existence.
     As we should.  That we are here is its weight, that we will one day be beyond it, real and true, is its hope.  The rhythm of God's universe, from fading tree to dying star, is this:  life, and death, are the beginning of life again.