While driving the other day, I heard musician David Bowie's Starman.  What struck me most about the song was 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."  As I reflected on this, I thought, again, of the enduring puzzle of 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?  This challenge explains why so many religions have tried to quantify or reduce God into human terms, to render him into a package to which people can more readily relate.  Nonetheless, whether this package is the Krishna of Hinduism, the Sosyant of Zororasterianism, the Jesus of Christianity, or countless other, as the Hindus call them, avatars, of the divine, the being (God) whom these packages 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 packages, 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 that we are not moving through a pointless universe.  And we can be awed that this is true.

     As the world continues to reverberate with conflict and thousands continue to lose their lives in senseless circumstance and turmoil, be it the tragic train accident in India, the ongoing effort of Christians in the Central African Republic to exterminate their fellow Muslims, the bitter antagonism that is rocking the Ukraine, or the current disagreement between China and its neighbors over sovereignty in certain parts of the Pacific, we may wonder why "we can't all get along."  We live our days looking out for ourselves, plan our lives thinking mostly of our success, deal with our neighbors from our standpoint only, and we fear what we cannot control:  others.
     Not that we should not live circumspectly and wisely (consider the thoughts of Micah 6 in the Hebrew Bible), not that we should not live attuned to our circumstances (think about Jesus' words in Luke 17), and not that we should not think of ourselves (I refer you to the beginning of Philippians 2).  We should not, however, allow our personal dogmas to override every other consideration, particularly those that involve our fellow human beings.  We will never agree with everyone on everything, nor should we ever expect to.  God made us all differently; he does not expect us to walk through the world in exactly the same way.  But God does expect us to love each other.
     Love can be complicated and, taken in its fullest, raises a host of ethical problems and moral challenges, yet love is at the same time exceedingly simple.  As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13, "Love seeks not its own."  Indeed:  in no way is any one of us the absolute fullness of creation.
     Join the human conversation.

     As many Americans, and perhaps many overseas as well, continue to recoil at the carnage that swept through the idyllic outskirts of the town of Santa Barbara over the weekend, we hear renewed calls for gun control, tougher measures against gun wielding criminals, increased access for upright citizens to guns, and the like.  We also see various commentaries on the state of American society and much debate about why people like Elliot Rodger came to a point where their frustrations erupt in deadly anger.
     Either way, these awful events present a call, again, to look ever more closely at ourselves.  At one point in his "Retribution Video," Rodger claims that when he exacts revenge, he will be like God, judging and executing judgment.  Granted, not many of us express, at least consciously, similar inclinations, but in the highly individualistic and opportunistic society that America has become, we all fall, in many and variegated ways, prey to such temptations.  When we are told from birth that we should be everything we can be, when we are told that we have no boundaries or limits on what we ought to be able to do or become--and not that these encouragements are, in themselves, wrong:  I've told my kids similar things many times--yet do not provide a transcendent moral framework for doing so, we eventually digress into a state of mind in which we, unwittingly or not, elevate the "good" of ourselves above any defining and circumscribing meaning or purpose for doing so.  We do indeed become gods, our self and our world the only limit of whom we suppose we ought to be.
     "Without revelation [without input from a wisdom greater than our own]," as the Hebrew proverb (29:18) goes, "the people perish."

     As many of us in the West return to work after the long weekend that comprises Memorial Day, we realize that for many of us, the weekend was a time of gratitude; for others, one of immense grief.  For others, perhaps it was a bittersweet blend of both.
     I had a great aunt who, I was told (she died before I was born), had four sons, all of whom were draft eligible during World War II.  Three of her sons were indeed drafted, shipped to the Pacific Theater and, unfortunately, perished.  She never saw them again. When her fourth son was drafted, however, my great aunt, though she believed in the U. S. war effort, spoke up and asked, through her congressman, that her son be spared overseas combat.  In an action reminiscent of the movie Saving Private Ryan, the military granted her request.
     Memory can be supernally wonderful, or it can be enormously painful.  Or both.  As those of us in the West remember people we knew (and those we never knew) who have fallen in war time combat, we can also remember that even if it does not bring anyone back, remembering nurtures hope.  It enables us to look beyond ourselves, to see and experience the enduring grace of existence, to realize anew that life is something bigger than we can ever make it to be.  Life has a life of its own, a purpose, a future.  Life is a drama, a drama of space and time infused with transcendent meaning.

     As many in the West, particularly the U.S., celebrate Memorial Day today, though we may differ on what justifies sending troops into combat, and though we may debate how a war should be fought, we can agree, I think, to be grateful for those who, whether through conscription or voluntarism, put themselves on the line for people, people like you and me, people they may never meet or know, for what is, in retrospect, most of the time, the greater good of the planet.
     As countless religions attest, we grow not through seeking our welfare but that of others.  Over and above it all, we are called to seek the common good.

     Does heaven speak?  Many of us are familiar with the New Testament accounts of Jesus' baptism.  After Jesus was baptized and rose from the water, these accounts go, a voice was heard, a voice which seemed to come from heaven, the voice of a person who identified himself as Jesus' heavenly father.  Heaven, those who were there believed, had spoken.
     Of course not everyone believes these accounts.  Not everyone believes that God had a son or that he actually spoke.  Not everyone believes that heaven, whatever and wherever it may be, expressed itself.  Yet if these accounts are true, there is indeed what theologian Karl Barth called a "strange new world" outside or beyond but nonetheless connected to the one we currently inhabit.  And it is a world that communicates with us.  On the other hand, if these accounts are not true and there is neither God nor heaven, much less ones that speak to us, we live in a world that we define solely on the basis of itself.
     Yet as the philosopher Hans Gadamer observed, even if we engage in the things that seem to be "there," we still do not know what is actually there.  We still do not know what "is."  We therefore always need to be open to the possibility that what we think is there may not be everything that actually is, and, more importantly, what we do not think is there may in fact actually be so.
     We won't hear heaven unless we believe we might or, can.  But if heaven is there, it, and its voice will be greater than all of our epistemological limitations.

     I have mentioned before neurosurgeon Eben Alexander's best selling book Proof of Heaven, in which he recounts what he believes to be an experience of heaven.  I commented that whatever we may think of the facticity of Alexander's vision, we can nonetheless take away that despite any protestations to the contrary, we live in a universe whose deepest dimensions we will never, in this life, fully understand.  It's very difficult to reduce everything to chemicals and neurons.
     Competing for a place on the best seller list is another book about an experience of heaven, a book that has been made into a movie, Heaven is for Real.  It's a father's retelling of his three year old son's vision of what he believed to be heaven while he was having an emergency appendectomy.  While most of us might tend to believe Eben Alexander's vision more than that of a three year old boy, we must acknowledge that both people are, as far as we know, rational, likely as rational as you and me.  We may not believe their accounts, but we cannot deny that they experienced them.
     Does this make their accounts valid?  Not necessarily.  But it should serve to remind us that even if we reject or have no use for religion, we should recognize that many of our fellow human beings have experiences which they cannot explain using the things of this world.  Granted, sometimes these experiences are induced or shaped by prior belief, but as William James pointed out long ago, sometimes they occur in the absence of such things and, most importantly, prove to be life changing for those who experience them.
     Religion as dogma means little unless religious experience validates it.  Faith's truest test is in the road its adherents take. 

     Last week, the Swiss artist H. R. Giger died at the age of 74.  Who was H. R. Giger?  He is perhaps best known for designing the title character and various special effects for the movie Alien (a movie which was, for me, one of the most intense I had ever seen).  But Giger also created some incredibly bizarre and frightening images of darkness, the macabre, and the morphologically twisted and askew.  As he often put it, his paintings attracted "crazy people."
     I have written before about the darkness that lurks in all of us, a darkness that for most of us, draws us to, for a host of primordial intellectual and spiritual reasons, conclude that deviance, however we define it in our cultural context, is oddly fascinating.  Giger's work bears this out aptly.  Viewed in another context, this fascination (a word drawn from Greek and Latin words connoting mystery and dread) with terror and darkness evokes very different things.  Writing at the turn of the last century, the religious scholar Rudolph Otto suggested that many people find holiness, that is, the perceived unwavering moral standard of a transcendent being, to be similarly fascinating.  He averred that even though people find holiness to be awful, dreadful, and terrorizing, primarily because it is perceived to be rooted in a divine and unapproachable being, they nonetheless feel drawn to it.
     Whether it's art or religion, some of us feel drawn to that which dreads and frightens us, not in the sense of being afraid, but as something that rocks not merely our mind and heart, but the depths of our soul.  We find it singularly compelling.  Be it the darkness of phantasmagoria or the dread of holiness, we feel another reality, another thoroughly undefinable reality impinging upon us.  And even though we can't see it, we cannot help but sense mystery, even fright and terror. Our feelings have causes, our fears have roots. Moral structure prevails.  We're not alone.

     Do we need to believe that Jesus was God in order to believe in his teachings?  When I was asked this question the other day, I immediately thought of the distinction the German theologian Rudolph Bultmann made between the "Jesus of history" and the "Christ of faith."  As Bultmann saw it, it does not so much matter that Jesus lived, died, and rose from the dead as it is that we learn how to appropriate the notion of resurrection into how we live our lives.  We can appreciate what Jesus did even if we do not believe that he did it.
     This dichotomy will work for a while.  Eventually, however, it will collapse under the weight of its contradictions.  If we are to take Jesus as he and his life are presented in the New Testament manuscripts, to take in the totality of what he said and did, we can draw no other conclusion than that he was God and he lived, died, and rose again.  And we cannot fully appreciate the latter without fully accepting the former.  As C. S. Lewis observed long ago, Jesus didn't give us a choice about who we thought he was.  As he wrote,   

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

     The Jesus of history must be the "Christ of faith."

     Does nature have purpose?  No, said Alan Lightman in a recent Op-Ed piece in the New York Times.  Nature, he insists, "is purposeless."  As letter writers who agreed with him observed, clearly, something that is really no more than a physical force cannot possibly have purpose.  It just is.
     Another writer, however, remarked that, au contraire, nature has purpose.  Its purpose is to create more life.  To this, we must ask how can a thing, an unconscious thing (this does not mean that the entities that share this "thing" (nature) are unconscious, however), really, in and of itself, sense purpose?  How can a "thing" really know that it is doing what it is doing?  Does nature really create life because it wants to?  Or does it create life because of how it is constituted or made?
     The more important question, it seems, is this:  why is conscious life here, anyway?  Who or what decided that?  Therein, it seems, is the source of purpose.  Knowing this may also enable us to answer an even more important question:  why does purpose even exist?

     What is it to learn morally?  After wrestling with this question for decades, American secondary schools, colleges, and universities still do not have all the answers.  While not pretending to have answered the question, either, New York Times columnist David Brooks, in a recent piece, suggested that while Westerners tend to define learning cognitively, Asians lean toward defining it morally.  In other words, for many Asians, to learn is to ultimately learn about how to live virtuously.  Although some Americans, notably Alan Bloom, author of the Closing of the American Mind, and Anthony Kronman, author of Education's End , have endorsed the worth of this position, most American universities have yet to respond positively.
     Not that knowledge is unimportant.  It is vitally important to an industrialized society.  If knowledge is all on which we focus, however, we will eventually encounter a problem.  We will know all we can know about the world, but we will not know how to live in this world.  Conversely, if all we know is what we believe, we will not know how to live in a world in which knowledge as well as belief are required.  One objection that many have to organized religion is that its adherents frequently know a great deal about their God, but do not consistently demonstrate this in their actions.  We might say the same about people without religion.  They may know a great deal about morality, but they inevitably fail to live it consistently.  Either way, if we think about knowing, we overlook doing.  Yet if we think only about doing, we will soon not know why we are doing it.
     Writing in the first century A.D., the apostle James stated that, "For just as the body without the spirit [a body of knowledge without morality] is dead, so also faith without works [a lived and acted faith] is dead" (James 2:26).  When we view knowledge as a means to live virtuously, we become people who, to use James again, this time in the first chapter of his epistle, who are like "the person who looks at his face in a mirror and then walks away."  Like Oscar Wilder's Dorian Gray, we fail to recognize who we really are, that is, people of mind and spirit--and what, given this fact, we must really be. 

      Most of us know about the great German composer Ludwig van Beethoven.  I read recently an article about how Beethoven became the first composer to use human voices in a symphony.  Although many of his predecessors had used human voices in choral pieces, Beethoven, according to this article, was the first to use them in a symphony, notably his last and perhaps greatest, the Ninth.  It's an intriguing thought, really, and made me think of Psalm 19, which forms the basis of Joseph Hayden's The Heavens are Telling.  The psalmist writes about how the heavens are constantly testifying to the presence of God, how even though they appear to be silent, they are in fact day and night announcing the reality of God.
     Some may disagree with these sentiments; others may ask what does this have to do with Beethoven?  Just this:  if music reflects the ardor of the human soul, and if we view or represent the soul as the core or essence of a human being, then adding voice to a an already spectacular symphonic piece further underscores the inextricable link between music, soul and, if the psalmist is correct, the transcendence that surrounds us all or, put another way, God.  The heavens are singing, and so are human beings.

     We all wrestle with truth.  Many of us believe it to be relative, many of us consider it to be absolute.  And many more believe it to be irrelevant.  Underlying this debate is a more fundamental, no pun intended, truth, that is, we all come to what we consider to be truth on the basis of our assumptions.  We construct what we believe to be true, or at least credible, according to how we see the world.  If we are religious, we might say that truth is enshrined in God.  If we are not religious, we may say that truth is either irrelevant or that it is what we decide it should be.
     So perhaps it is a question of authority.  By whose authority do we decide what is truth?  It is here that we enter shaky grounds.  In ourselves, we cannot grasp, really, what is "true".  How do we know when all on which we have to go is our perception?  On the other hand, even if we believe in God or some sort of transcendent divine, we still cannot grasp the "true".  We're finite.  Either way, we are dependent on what we do not, and may never know to enable us to find or decide what is real and true.
     Hence, we can view what is true and what is truth as works in progress, works whose completion we have not yet seen.  As the apostle Paul remarks in 1 Corinthians 13, "We walk in a riddle, our knowledge incomplete . . . but one day we will know fully, just as we are fully known."  To know what is real and true means admitting that it is not ours, tiny and fragile beings that we are, to know fully.

     As various Western countries continue to deliberate about how to respond to the Islamic group Boko Haram's brazen kidnapping of over two hundred teenage girls from a school in Nigeria, most of the rest of us wonder how this group can view its actions as the right thing to do.  Yes, we know that from the vantage point of its particular religious perspective, those in the group view their actions as the only thing to do.  They see it as Allah's call to them.  Yet given that countless mainstream Muslim groups have uniformly condemned Boko Haram's action, averring that it is inconsistent with Islamic teaching and should be rejected by all peoples of the world, we wonder why the group continues to insist that it is in the right.
     Sadly, every religious group, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, and many others, has its share of extremists.  Muslims are not alone in this regard.  Why, we then ask, does religion seem to breed extremism?  The easy answer is to point to the dogmatic character of most religions, that most belief systems assert that theirs is the only right one.  Such dichotomous perspective inevitably leads to conflict.  More often than not, however, the deeper answer is that religious extremists have, for various cultural and political reasons, abandoned the original foundations and principles of their faith.  As the psalmist observed, "When the foundations are destroyed, the people are lost" (Psalm 11).  When people ignore their starting points, they invite moral disarray.  Not that every starting point is accurate, worthwhile, or true, just that most religions begin with every good intention for the world.  Unless these good intentions are preserved and retained, however, the most beautiful religion will soon look like a moral cesspool.
     As we continue to pray for the safe release of these girls, we continue to pray as well that the members of Boko Haram will realize that they have indeed forgotten their foundations, that they have rejected the starting points which affirm the compassion that, according to the Qur'an, marks the essence of Allah.  We pray that all of us will remember that transcendent foundations must undergird our view of reality.
     

      After I had an interesting conversation with a Buddhist monk last week, I came upon a vignette about Buddhism in a recent issue of Christian Century.  A Zen Buddhist master was asked if he had ever read the Bible.  When the master indicated that he had not, the questioner began to read it to him.  As the reader got into the Sermon the Mount (Matthew 6), Jesus' words about possessions caught his attention.  These words, toward the end of the chapter, go, "And why do you worry about clothing?  Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these . . . so do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself.  Each day has enough troubles of its own" (Matthew 6:28-34).
     So the Century's account goes that after the master heard these words, he said, "I would say that the man who spoke these words is enlightened."  The master's remarks affirms and underscores the necessity of privation--giving up--for a meaningful religious experience.  Although Buddhism and Christianity are very far apart on basic questions of existence and God, they both realize that unless we let go of the things in this life and hold them, as I said earlier this week, loosely, we will never be happy.  If religion is a matter of faith, we will not necessarily find its core by living as we always have done.
     In Luke 12, Jesus tells a story of a certain rich man who, having produced a great deal of grain, resolved to store it in massive bins to fund what he believed would be a very long retirement.  Well, the parable continues, that very night the man died.  He would never enjoy the fruits of his labor.  So does Jesus conclude that, "What if a man gains the whole world and loses his soul?"
     In the end, it will not matter how much we have accumulated, for possessions will never liberate us from the angst and fleetingness of existence.  What will matter is how much we have given up, in trust, to find that which the world will never produce:  peace of soul.  It's a journey of faith.
    

     Is God incomprehensible?  It's an age old question, one that has occupied many, many books.  The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, long known for his deeply measured thoughts about God, asked this question constantly.  Buried at the heart of his questions was his notion that life itself was incomprehensible.  If we can't comprehend God, how can we expect to understand the life he has bequeathed us?  So,  asked, how do we live?
     Rilke's answer was to embrace, in living our lives, all that is beyond our control, particularly death.  To fully understand life, he suggested, we must wrap it in the specter of death.  To ignore death is to ignore the fullness of life.
     Though Rilke's position may sound rather morbid, it is, on the other hand, decidedly cognizant of the framework of our mortal existence.  We all will die.  If we believe there is no afterlife, however, then we may conclude that death, though it be necessary and inevitable, may not so much affirm the fullness of life as underscore its assumed (but not provable) meaningfulness, as well as, for some, its futility.  What has it been for?  But for Rilke, as one who has placed a degree of credibility in the supernatural, to embrace death is to embrace the incomprehensible, that is, God.  In this is the fullness of life, to know that from which it has ultimately come.  Life has meaning beyond itself.
     We may agree that God is incomprehensible, but if we believe that life is incomprehensible, too, we have missed the point.  If we reject the idea of God, we are still faced with the grim reality that life is incomprehensible.  And what will we then do?

     Have you ever seen or heard someone pray?  Have you ever seen or heard someone singing songs to what she believed was God?  If you have, have you asked yourself why she is doing it?
     More often than not, this person is doing such things because she believes someone out there is hearing her songs and prayers.  As the psalmist pointed out many centuries ago, "I believe, therefore I spoke" (Psalm 116).  Faith is asking, faith is speaking, faith is acknowledging and trusting in the presence of the divine.  People who believe in a divine speak to it.  They believe someone is listening.  People who do not believe in a divine do not.  To what, from their standpoint, would they be speaking?
     Speaking affirms and expresses the fact and experience of faith.  If you believe, if you really believe, you will speak.  Why otherwise would you bother with faith?
     Faith is only faith if it uses the visible to acknowledge and invest in the invisible.  It is an act of defiance, and it is an act of rebellion.  Faith takes what is rational and normal (speaking) and transforms it into something equally normal, in a world pervaded with the spiritual, but which validates it.  Faith makes what is real into something that makes the real become even more so.

    What is contentment?  The writer Peter Matthiessen, who passed away recently at the age of 85, devoted much of his life to finding contentment.  Famous for a number of novels and nonfiction books that dealt with a wide range of human and ecological issues, Matthiessen, early in his life, found Buddhism to be his path to peace and contentment. 
     One of Buddhism's virtues, one which I suspect all of us can appreciate, is that we are unhappy because we crave or long for things that are impermanent.  Because we lust after the material artifacts of this world, things that, while perhaps grand and wonderful for what they are, eventually cease to provide us any happiness, we spend our days, as the Buddha put it, suffering.  We long for what will never fulfill us.
     The Buddha's observation turns up, of course, in almost every other religion of the world, usually framed against the backdrop of a God who, these religions insist, is the only source of permanent and lasting happiness.  God or not, we can certainly agree that it is the wise person who learns to hold all things in this life loosely, that what we have today could just as easily be gone tomorrow, and that that for which we crave can quickly become that which we abhor. 
     As Matthiessen remarked toward the end of his life, " . . . I've had a pretty good run of it [life], and I don't want to cling too hard.  I have no complaints."  Matthiessen realized that in the end it was more important to look at what he had experienced rather than  what he had not, and that in our final hours we are better served to accept the end rather than struggle or moan about the inevitability of our destiny.
     On the other hand, we can perhaps learn a different lesson from another of Matthiessen's remarks, these in his The Tree Where Man Was Born.  " . . . I have found what I was searching for without ever having discovered what it was."
     Precisely.  God has spoken; the universe speaks, too.  Always.

     Many of us remember former U.S. Vice President Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth, Gore's presentation of the global ecological challenges with which he believed human beings must deal if they hope to continue existing on the planet.  Many people liked the movie, probably just as many did not.  Ours is not to pass judgment on it here, but rather to consider how we deal with fact or, even more challenging, truth.  There are facts which most of us have no difficulty accepting, such as the conclusion that the moon moves the ocean's tides or that gravity is what holds the cosmos together.  But there are other facts which many people have more difficulty accepting, more often than not because they do not regard them as facts in the same way as those who propound them do.  One example might be the existence of God; another might be the historicity of the Qur'an.
     We might also say that there are some facts which some of us we might consider inconvenient.  These might include the possibility of a ticket if we run a stop sign; the change of losing money on an investment; the realization that if we have no money, we may not be able to buy what we need to live.  We find them inconvenient because they tell us about things we would rather not acknowledge or think about.
     From a religious standpoint, one such inconvenient fact might be the existence of God.  Why is this an inconvenient fact?  If God in fact exists, we must look at the world in a profoundly different way.  Another inconvenient fact might be the historicity of Jesus.  If Jesus really lived, died, and rose again, we must view ourselves and our lives from a very different standpoint.  Moreover, even if one does not believe these facts to be facts, one must recognize that many people do, and, to be absolutely honest with oneself and one's fellow beings, endeavor to learn why.  We owe it to ourselves not to blink at what might be facts, but, worse, the truth.

     One of the last lines in "Here the Birds' Journey Ends," a poem written by Mahmoud Darwish, reads, "And we will etch on the final rocks, 'Long live life, long live life.'" That's quite a wish.  On the one hand, we know that unless something extraordinary happens on earth, none of us will live indefinitely on this planet.  One day, we all will die.  As much as we may treasure life, this life we live in this present moment, we know that we will not be able to enjoy it forever.  Eventually, it will end.
     On the other hand, we know that our lives are but one manifestation of the life that grounds the lives that all of us live, that undergirding and fueling our individual lives is life, the life that animates and enlivens us all.  Without this life, none of us would be here.  That we are born, live, and die is the fruit, the outward and visible individuated expression of this "life" that pervades the planet.  We live because there is life, not just as a concept but as palpable and concrete reality.  Without this life, we would have no reality.
     So, yes, indeed, may life live.  May we always be part of and experience this vast bios, this teeming movement of existence that gestates and ripples across the universe and, specifically for us, sweeps and pervades planet Earth.  May life always be here for us.
      Now if this "life" came about through evolution and circumstance, then, yes, we would expect it, like all other things, to end.  That's just the way things are.  We are born, we live, we die, then other people are born, live, and die, and so on until the bios in which we all find existence dies, too.  Tragic, perhaps, but it's reality.
     But it also leads us to ask:  what, really, was the point of anything?
      Yet if life is not the product of random variation and circumstance, but the work of God, everything changes.  The universe has purpose.  It has a point.  Moreover, if God created life, then it follows that God can create it again.  And again.  And again.  God brings life to be.  Hence, even if we lose this present life, as we one day will, we will live again.  An eternal God who creates a finite existence can also create an eternal one.  Life will continue to live, but it will be lived forever.
     Long live life:  God's life for us.

     Beauty is a slippery term, really, covering everything from a good looking human being to a work of fine art to a piece of symphonic music to a sunset over the ocean, and more.  It's definable, but it's not, apprehensible, but not.  We all see it differently.  The French memoirist Marcel Proust, famous for his lengthy, insightful, and voluminous In Search of Lost Time, once observed that beauty occurs when our perceptions of present reality remind us of some long ago and now lost experience.
     Proust had a good point.  We build our present on our past, and we live on the basis of what we remember going forward.  Sometimes beauty surprises us, sometimes we expect to see it.  What we find genuinely beautiful, however, we find to be so largely because it speaks to us in a way that other things do not.  It seems to encompass and enlarge our ideas, like tentacles of an octopus, remembered from recently or long ago, about what is most pleasing or remarkable about the world.  Whoever we are, we find beauty to be singularly special and unique.
     Long did the Greek philosophers debate over the meaning of the beautiful, trying hard to discern exactly what it is.  They only succeeded when they agreed that it is rooted in some sort of ultimate point, some sort of final definition.  But what would this be?  We're still looking.
     The greatest beauty, however, is that which is new, radically new, and in no way dependent on the old.  Although it builds on and connects to the old, it has not been produced by the old.  It's never been before.  The prophet Isaiah once recorded God saying, "Behold, I create something new; even now it will spring forth."
     The greatest beauty is that there is beauty at all--and that we can know that it is so--the beauty of the absolutely new, the inexhaustible newness of God.
     It's a wide open universe.