I just finished writing a letter to a friend of mine who is in the U.S. Army.  Though he has yet to tour Iraq or Afghanistan (he entered only recently), he is well aware that he will likely do so soon.  As a result, he also knows, he may soon be asked to kill another human being.  Yes, he will do so under orders, and yes, he will probably do so to deter aggressive attacks or defend himself but, regardless, he will be put into a position to end another person's life.
     Granted, the context of war is extremely complex, and difficult to understand from one standpoint alone.  We judge it with caution and care.  On one hand, as Barack Obama noted when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, sometimes war may be necessary.  On the other hand, as Civil War General William Sherman put it, "War is hell."  It's a two edged sword.  If we ever come to enjoy, to genuinely enjoy war, however, we step into a moral abyss from which there is no return.  Sometimes death is welcome, sometimes it is not.  But it's never normal.  It's never the way things ought to be.
     God surely weeps at the wars in which humanity has engaged (and in which it continues to engage).  He weeps for those fighting them, he weeps for those killed by them.  Above all, God wants peace.  Above all, God wants shalom (Arabic shalim), that wonderful and ancient word for harmony and well being.  The global calculus we face is of course extremely complicated, but God wants us to approach it with wisdom and compassion, to live for the greater good of all.  So does the New Testament letter to the Galatians urge us, "Do good to all people."
     By the way, I will be traveling next week, off on another wilderness adventure.  I'll catch up with this blog when I return.  Thanks so much for reading!

     A couple of years ago, I wrote about the death of Patrick Edlinger, a French sports climber.  In his prime, Edlinger dazzled the climbing world with his ability, traveling across the globe to scale rock face after rock face, and winning countless climbing contests.  His peers marveled at his endurance and speed.  A recent issue of Rock and Ice, a leading climbing magazine, contains an article about Edlinger that describes not his prowess but his personal angst.  Driven, torn, and often desperate for meaning, Edlinger, while amazing climbers around the planet with his skill, wrestled with innumerable personal demons.  His was a life divided in two.
     Similarly, Dougal Haston, one of the greatest British climbers of his generation, tangled with intense personal angst.  His journals speak frequently about his desire to fight the walls that he felt were always before him, his longing to break free of all constraint, his burning wish to let go and step into the unknown.  Like Edlinger, Haston struggled with his angst until the day he died.  (He perished in an avalanche in the French Alps.)
    Two highly gifted men, two tragic lives.  How sad that such ability was consumed by such angst.  How sad that too many gifted human beings are fractured by their dark sides. We all have dark sides, we all struggle to balance passion, ability, and desire.  It's our lot as human beings:  personal perfection will always elude us.  On the other hand, we are marvelous and wondrous creations, and it is this on which God wants us to most focus.  He demands repentance for transgression, yes, as he should; he is a moral God.  Yet the only reason he does is because we are such valuable creations to him.  He made us, he trusts us, we trust him.  As the writer of Psalm 130 observes, "There is forgiveness with you [God], that you may be feared [trusted and revered]."
     It is the fact of God and our humanness, giftedness, darkness, and all, that ground our hope of moral forgiveness and meaning.

     Since the Seventies, Buddhism has become highly popular in the West.  It's not hard to see why.  It promises a path to inner peace and contentment, a way to deal with the multiple stresses that seem to afflict so many in the West, a doorway to set oneself in harmony with all living things.  Buddhism offers a way to find personal satisfaction and wholeness without having to entangle oneself in various permutations of religious dogma.
     I thought about this, again, as I  attended a talk given by a friend of mine at a Unitarian Universalist service recently.  For her, Buddhism has provided solutions to the angst of her life challenges.  It has improved her life considerably.  She has found her way forward.
     Periodically, I get together with a Buddhist monk.  Born in Sri Lanka, he has been in the U.S. for over twenty years.  He meditates hours each day and radiates peace in his every word.  Although we differ greatly on what constitutes God and truth, we enjoy getting together.
     That's the point.  While I would like for the monk and my friend to take hold of, in a personal way, the tenets of Christianity, I genuinely enjoy them as fellow human beings who are created in the image of God.  God has made a remarkable world and filled it with remarkably diverse human beings.  Each one of us is extraordinary and amazing.  We all can learn from each other, we all can help each other.  And we all can come to understand that, in the big picture, none of us would be here if the universe were not infused with love as well as holiness which, together, constitute the essential ground and nexus of purpose and meaning.
     Indeed, only if God is both will the universe ever make sense.

     It's an age-old question:  does God exist?  Without taking sides, Amir D. Aczel, a mathematician by training, recently set out, in a book, to establish that regardless of where we stand on the issue, we cannot expect science to definitively resolve it one way or the other.  In other words, as he writes in his Why Science Does Not Disprove God, "The greatest mystery of all--Is there a God?--may be one of those truths that are unattainable to us from a purely logical-mathematical framework."
     Before coming to this conclusion, Aczel explores an array of fascinating mathematical approaches to the problem, including probabilistic analysis, chaos theory, and set theory, along with various ideas of physics, principally quantum theory and the multiverse concept.  He emphasizes the impossibility of asserting existence from nothing; the difficulty of explaining consciousness arising from materiality alone; and the notion that probability can be used to predict God's existence as much as it cannot.  He also stresses that although evolution is the best way of explaining why the world and its animal species are the way they are, it does not explain why some animals, including human beings, practice altruism when there is no evolutionary or survival need to do so.
     But Aczel's final conclusion, the one I quoted above, is the one most worth pondering.  It's also the one most true to the nature of the human exchange with God.  If God is there, we will not find him, the ultimate and absolutely infinite, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being, through the confines of our human experimentation.  How could we?
     One response to this might be that we only find God by faith.  But this doesn't get us any closer to knowing him or proving that he exists.  The fuller response is that, yes, we need faith (after all, we are finite) to grasp what exists beyond our material world, but also that what is beyond this world, that is, God, must make himself unmistakably known in this world.  And so, from my standpoint, he has:  the person of Jesus Christ.  In other words, if you can't find the infinite in the infinite, look for it in the finite.
     Bottom line, if you're reasonably open minded, you won't miss seeing God.

     Is nihilism possible?  A book by theologian Hans Kung, Does God Exist?, which I read many years ago but had occasion to reread recently, suggests that it is.  Life's ennui and uncertainty, he suggests, make nihilism possible.  It is possible, he goes on to say, that this life is meaningless, a chance and random occurrence without any point.
     Though in theory Kung is right, in practice, he is not.  To assert that there is no meaning is to insist, ironically enough, that some level of meaning exists.  We can't have our cake and eat it, too.  Meaning or no meaning, either way, how do we really know?  We can't see outside ourselves.
     Many years ago, the British band Traffic wrote a song that began with a question:  "On the one door is truth, on the one door is lie; which one will you answer to, you really must decide?"  It's a paradox:  how can we decide between truth or lie if we do not know what they are before we open the door?  So it is with nihilism and meaning.  Absent outside input, we do not know which one is true and which one is lie.  So how do we decide?
     On the other hand, if meaning does not exist, why do we still think about it?  Though we may try to live atop the skein of existence, blithely denying that it is anything other than a twist of quantum fluctuation, its deeper truths eventually surface.  If we are to make the material world mean anything, we must embrace more than its randomness.
     Cosmic accidents don't need a reason to happen, but meaning and purpose do.  And we would not know this unless we, quite apart from ourselves, are meaningful beings.

     Weep for the world today. Weep for the Gaza strip, its people caught in a maelstrom of jingoism, authoritarianism, and revolt; weep for the Ukraine, its people unintentional witness to the Malaysian airline tragedy that has unfolded before their eyes.  Reading various newspaper accounts about these events, I cringe at the now far too banal detritus they left behind.  Scattered plaster and rubble, blood stains on a door, bullets lodged in a concrete wall, a child's notebook, a tour guide to Indonesia, a pair of pants, a container of hand cream, an I-phone, sundry and assorted evidences of lives now forever gone.  Some reflected persons who had lived long, others persons whose lives had barely begun.  No matter:  each is a tragedy, an immensely moving tragedy, a tragedy that unfortunately is now spawning others, creating gaps and crevasses in other lives, the lives of those now left to continue without the person who is gone.  It's a picture of a creation fractured beyond belief.
     God is weeping, too.  He is weeping for the deaths of people he made, weeping for the end of lives before their time.  He weeps for the tragedies that afflict human beings.  While in the wake of these tragedies--and countless others--we can argue for days about the precise exchange between divine sovereignty and human will, we can certainly agree that death is not what God wants.  Above all, God wants us to live.  He wants us to live and trust, to trust and see that he is there, always and forevermore.

     Does being religious really make a difference in how we behave?  A fascinating survey that appears in the current edition of Christianity Today, the flagship publication of the evangelical Christian world, puts this question in an intriguing light.  Conducted by the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, the survey asks self-identified "evangelical and born-again churchgoers" about what sorts of things they might do for hard, cold cash.  One that caught my eye was that 40% of those surveyed indicated that they would, for money, throw a rotten tomato at a politician.  Another was that 33% indicated that they would, for money, "flip off" their boss or teacher.  Two others were that 24% indicated that they would, for money, cheat at poker, and 12% indicated that they would, for money, kick a dog "hard" in the head.
     So, the unbeliever might now ask, what difference does religion really make?
     Much depends, I think, on the reasons people come to believe.  If we believe in say, Jesus, out of fear; if we believe in him on the basis of what we should or should not do; or if we believe in him because we think we will be a "better" person; we will likely be disappointed.  Conversion or not, we will still have the same personal baggage, and conversion or not, we will still have to live our lives.  Granted, we can overcome what is in us, and granted, we can carve out a new life path, but we will never be anything more than a sinful--yet marvelous and valuable--human being who has been created in the image of God.
     And that's the point.  As people who have not made themselves, as people who are frightfully contingent, as people who do not know what will happen in the next moment, we ought to recognize that we are very limited beings.  We believe in Jesus not necessarily because he will make us better people but because he and his life's work best explain, ameliorate, and resolve why we are here, why we are the way we are, and why we are going where we are going, in this life and beyond.  We should not believe, however, because we hope that we will be perfect people.
     Those who believe in Jesus ought to be the most abjectly humble people on the planet.

     How do we believe a miracle?  For some a miracle is the birth of a baby; for others, a dramatic and unexplainable improvement in one's health; for others, a rainbow; for others, peace in the midst of a lengthy and seemingly intractable conflict.  For still others, those of a religious persuasion, a miracle is the appearance of an extraordinary prophet or a god or, for Christianity, the resurrection of Christ.  In many ways, what constitutes a miracle depends on what a person already believes.  We tend to see according to how we see the world, that is, our worldview.  If we do not believe that a particular event could happen, we will be far less likely to believe, even if given evidence, that this particular event did in fact happen.
     David Hume, the leading skeptic of the eighteenth century, agreed.  For him, the issue was not so much that a miracle could not happen, but that we will never have sufficient reason to believe that one did happen.  He said that he would believe a miracle happened only if the likelihood of it happening exceeded the likelihood of proving that it did not.
    Therefore, according to Hume, the issue is the credibility of the reasons we have for believing a miracle could happen.  Do we believe someone's testimony?  Do we believe scientific evidence?  Do we believe general cultural consensus?  In the end, it seems that we need to balance all of these, and more, when deciding whether a particular miracle did indeed happen.  If we reject one of these pillars, we do injustice to human integrity; if we reject all of them, we reject ourselves.  Ultimately, we will not believe a miracle has happened unless we are willing to admit that we can learn from many vantage points beyond our own.  Ultimately, we will not believe, for instance, that Jesus rose from the dead unless we are willing to look at the evidence through the lens of others as well as our own.  It's hard to justify believing anything to be true solely on the basis of what we think we already know.
     It works both ways, of course.  If one already believes in Jesus, then she will be more likely to believe he rose from the dead.  To be therefore totally fair, this person must be willing to examine any evidence raised against the historicity of this event.  Only then can her belief be justified.
     On the other hand, think about this:  if God in fact exists, is it really too much to suppose that he raised Jesus from the dead?  For better or worse, we will only believe anything, anything at all, if we already believe in belief.
     And if we are human, we already do.

     In this month's meeting of the atheist group I attend, we discussed free will.  Some, citing recent research that seems to indicate that we are merely "victims" of our chemical selves, unable to independently make decisions, argued that we do not have free will.  Others, while not rejecting the research, contended that even if we are chemical and neuronal constructs, we nonetheless possess choice making capacities and that we do in fact make independent decisions.  As one said, "Even if I do not have free will, it feels good to think that I do."
     And so it does.  We like thinking that we control ourselves and our choices.  We like thinking that we determine our destiny.  Yet whether we believe that our choices are neurologically determined, overseen by the sovereignty of God, or something else altogether, choice remains, it seems, a mystery.  We know that we are deciding, and we know that we are choosing.  We know (at least we think we do!) that it is us who is making a choice.  Whether this choice is the result of our chemical make up, God's preternatural choosing, or our inner sovereignty is not nearly as important as realizing that, big picture, we are here and, as the existentialists never tire of saying, must make choices.  We cannot escape the fact of our will.
     And we cannot the escape the fact of us living and having a will in a world without one.  We spend our lives in a tension, a tension that fuses the fact of chemical determinism and the presence of divine superintendency with the ineluctableness of our human freedom to will.  It is a tension with which we will always wrestle, a tension that circumscribes our finite existence.  We do not always like living with it, yet we will never be able to live without it.
     In the end, as Jewish theologian Martin Buber observed, it is either us and and us only, or us and God both.  A will in a vacuum is no will at all.

     Last weekend, my wife and I were privileged to attend a Jain dance recital given by the daughter of a friend of ours.  Called the Bharatnatyam Arangetram, two Tamil (a language similar to Hindi and Sanskrit that is spoken in parts of southeast Asia) words which mean roughly "debut of an expression of dance," the BA crowned many years that our friend's daughter had devoted to mastering dance traditional techniques of the Jain culture.  Over two hours long, it featured eight distinctive and colorful dances.  To be invited was an honor; to watch the performance was a delight.  We of course were the only non-Jains (indeed, the only non-southeast Indians/Asians!) in attendance, which increased our interest and intrigue.  As I watched, I thought often of how privileged Americans are to welcome every type of nationality, ethnicity, and religion to their shores, and how wonderful it is for us to learn from the tremendous diversity of thought and imagination that courses through our culture.  Even if we do not agree with all of the views among us, we can usually find something of value in all of them.  To wit, as one writer remarked many decades ago, "All truth is God's truth."  Because all of us are created in the image of God, we all possess the capacity to find truth, and we all possess the capacity to believe in God, even if we all do not believe in him in quite the same way.  As theologian Karl Rahner puts it, we are historical beings who are "made" to hear the divine.  Indeed, if we dig beneath the surface of religious belief, we find that it ultimately rests upon one simple thing:  the willingness to admit that we need more than ourselves to find and understand truth. While we may well identify things that are true, we in finite ourselves will never fully grasp the truth.
     Belief is acknowledging that life is far bigger than we can imagine.

     Yesterday I talked about a movie, The Company You Keep, which I found rather meaningful, in a good way.  I talk today about another movie I saw recently, a movie which I found meaningful, though in a different way.  It is This is the End.  Starring a phalanx of actors whose comic roles have endeared them to countless Millennials, actors like Seth Rogan, Jonah Hill, Craig Robinson, and James Franco (although to be fair, I should say that Franco was superb in the drama of 127 Hours, and Hill quite impressive in the perilous plot lines of Wolf of Wall Street), This is the End presents a Los Angeles teetering on the edge of catastrophe, its streets torn up by monster earthquakes, demons roaming through the ruins, widespread lawlessness, a city in its final throes of existence.
     In the midst of this chaos, our intrepid group of actors struggle to survive.  As the movie travels to its conclusion, we see them learn that survival lies in self-sacrifice, to willingly die for the good of the others.  So it goes that at the end of the movie, the three (and I won't say whom) who sincerely done this wind up in heaven, replete with halos and white robes.  They had met the requirements.
     Unless one is astonishingly consumed with himself, it's difficult to argue that sacrificing oneself, even to the point of death, for the good of others is a bad thing.  After all, Jesus said that, "There is no greater love than that a person gives his life for a friend."  Even if we believe that we are going to heaven (indeed, even if we do not!), we should still be willing to give ourselves totally for the good of others.  Ultimately, however, heaven is not about doing, but believing, believing in what heaven means.  Heaven means that God is love, and God is love means we can trust, absolutely and totally, our belief in him.  that of course is the essence of faith.  That's why Jesus died, that's why Jesus rose again, and that's why we will see God most clearly when we let go of what we think we can or should do and simply believe that he is true.
     Is this easy?  Not always:  it will change your life.  But that's OK.  To paraphrase a memorable line from Star Trek, however, I will put it this way:  "Faith:  the final frontier."

     In a blast from the past, I recently watched the movie The Company You Keep.  It's a movie based on a novel, which is in turn based loosely on a real life incident in the lives of the Weathermen, the radical faction of the Students for a Democratic Society who, for a brief period in the early Seventies, perpetrated a campaign of bombings and other violence to bring down what they viewed as the oppressive and established order in the United States.  Central to the plot is that one member of the Weathermen who had eluded capture for over thirty years and is now a settled and productive member of society is exposed by an intrepid newspaper reporter.  He immediately goes even deeper underground.  As he does so, he makes contact with another former comrade whom he knows can clear his name (it turns out that contrary to what the FBI thinks, he was actually not present when the incident in question, the killing of a bank guard, occurred), a person who, like he, has been living underground for all these years.  So the question becomes this:  will she decide to turn herself in and exonerate him even if it probably means spending the rest of her life in prison?
     I won't give the ending away, but I will say that almost everyone has an opinion about the protest movements of the Sixties.  Some decry them, some appreciate them, some would rather forget about them, but everyone, whether she believes it or not, has been affected by them.  For better or worse, they definitively reshaped Western society and, by some measures, the entire world.  As one who was involved in these movements (read my Imagining Eternity), I still believe the motivation behind them was a positive one:  to end war, eradicate governmental tyranny, and mitigate the West's obsession with money, affluence, and individualism.  We wanted to create a world based on unity, harmony, and peace, a world in which governments and rulers genuinely care about those whom they govern, a planet on which people care about everyone on it.  A world in which people believe that the individual right to life and well being trumps unilateral and self-seeking corporate and governmental power.
     Writing some decades ago, a theologian named Francis Schaeffer observed that the protesters of the Sixties were correct about the decadence of Western government and the corporate obsession with individualism and material bounty.  But their methods, he went on to say, were flawed.  On the latter point, it is hard to disagree.  Though many protests were orderly and peaceful, many were not.  Later in his life, Schaeffer, who died in 1984, wrote that in the coming years people living in the West will be concerned with only two things:  personal peace and affluence.  As we look at Western society today, it's difficult to disagree with this, too.  People in the West want their peace, and they want their affluence.  The irony of this, as the protesters pointed out, is that if we value personal peace as much as we do affluence, we will never be satisfied.  If we want personal or spiritual peace, we must set aside our interest in material wealth and consider the ultimate questions of existence.  If we want affluence and wealth, however, we must do just the opposite.
     That's why, as I look back on the Sixties from the other side of spiritual conversion, I see that after all these years, the same problem remains.  How do we determine and enjoy what matters most?  Put another way, how do we balance living to meet our material needs (not wants!) with living to understand why we live in the first place?  As many religions have demonstrated, such balance is possible.  It is only possible, however, if we agree, before we do anything else, that there is a reason, a reason beyond our finite and limited scope of purpose and ken, to see life as more than a random accident or quantum whim.  Only when we let go of the immediate will we see essence of our deeper existential purpose.

     Are you a fan of Surrealism?  I'd wager to say that more people are not than are.  Nonetheless, the Surrealists have something to tell us today.  I say this because a few weeks ago I took in an exhibit of the works of the Belgian artist Rene Magritte.  Like his fellow Surrealists, Magritte painted some rather bizarre and occasionally disturbing images.  His intent, as he often wrote, was to make everyday objects "shriek" with twists and terror.  And so he did.  Magritte also talked about the importance of dream, even noting at one point the "omnipotence" of dream.  Finally, he made mention of the enigma which every human being faces, the fact of existence, a certainty with which every human being should confront and deal, even if, as he further remarked, it was unknowable.
     And that's the point.  When we make the ordinary and commonplace "shriek," when we allow ourselves to fall into dream, when we confront the enigma of existence even when we may think we will never resolve it fully, we make ourselves as human as we can possibly be.  We step into our world with eyes open.  We admit to the extraordinary malleability of the objects before us, we acknowledge the hope and benefit of looking past the obvious, and we recognize that we cannot avoid wrestling with this curious, troubling, and marvelous thing we call life.  We take hold of what our reality, our present moment, most is.
     Moreover, if we understand that, as Magritte noted in one of his paintings, most of us try to understand with "limited means," we also understand that there's much more to existence than we can possibly divine on our own.  And we can, though Magritte didn't, as far as I know, do so, begin to consider the fact and power of transcendence.  We can open our minds to the possibility that we need more than ourselves to figure out who we are.  Although most of the Surrealists did not believe in God in a conventional Western (and, indeed, Eastern as well) sense, they, wittingly or not, encourage us to think about the possibility of him being there, inviting us to consider that reality is much more than a quick glance reveals it to be.  Inexhaustible possibility demands an inexhaustible universe, and an inexhaustible universe demands an inexhaustible God. Infinitude doesn't spring out of nothing.

     As some of my western journeys brought me into contact with the culture and religious sensibilities of Native Americans, I had much occasion to consider the contributions that the American Indian perspective can make to our own.  I do not think I need to remind anyone of how white America has abused, terribly, its Native counterparts, and how even today far too many Indians continue to eke out battered and forgotten lives in the hinterlands of one of the richest nations on the planet.  This is tragic in many ways, of course, but one denouement of particular note is that many of us have missed what the Indians have to say about social and ecological harmony.
     Whereas many Westerners tend to view the world in black and white terms, that is, it is humanity against the rest of the creation, and to believe that, under the spell of centuries of misconstrued religious fervor, they are destined to dominate all things, the Native Americans view life very differently.  Rather than seek domination, the Indians seek harmony.  Rather than strive to divide, Indians pursue comity.  A Lakota phrase, wolakota, puts this well.  It means, "to ensure the harmony of all things."
     Would that we all would take this to heart.  Whether or not we believe that God created the world, we should understand that we did not decide to put ourselves here, nor did we have anything to do with why anything else is here.  We are recipients of the gift of life as much as any other living thing.  Indian or not, we all live in a world we did not make.  For this reason, Indian or not, we do well to live not to grasp, but to let go, to treasure, not exploit the world, and to nourish, not abuse the planet:  to seek harmony and peace, with ourselves and every other living thing. 
     After all, that's the essence of being whole:  acknowledging and learning from the fullness of reality.  We'll never find who we are if we are constantly ignoring that from which we have come.  And we'll never achieve inner peace and outward harmony if we continually denigrate the total web of life that sustains us all.
     Also, we'll never know what is possible unless we admit that we are not possibility's end.  It's hard to find meaning if we are always running from it.
     So does Jesus say in John 3 that unless a person is "born again" (that is, willing to let go of the idea that she is the end and formulator of all things), she will not see (experience) the kingdom of God?

     As some readers know, I've been traveling for a while, exploring some of the mountains of the American West.  As always, I reveled in being in the wild once again, waking to the sounds of the forest, walking atop high peaks, looking at picturesque lakes, taking in sunsets over rolling hills.  And as always, I found much time to meditate and ponder this thing that we call life and the God whom I believe is its source, impetus, and sustainer.
     Along the way, I found time to read Gabriel Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.  I had been meaning to read it for some time and was thankful that this trip afforded me some hours to do so.  It's a marvelous book, one that blends real with fantastical, magic with rationality, mystery with present imagination.  I came away newly impressed with the need to always look between the lines and be ever willing to embrace dream.
     Given the West's steadfast emphasis on science and logical thinking as the key to unlock all question and mystery, I find it ironic that Marquez's books have sold as well as they have here.  On the other hand, I can easily see why:  we cannot live on rationality, whatever that really is, alone.  We are foremost creatures of imagination.  We wrestle with rationality every day, constantly wanting to think, even if we do not care to admit it, that our emotions and spirit are as real as our brains.  As the Romantics rightly pointed out, even if it means abandoning, if only for a moment, the idea that our minds are the supreme assessors of reality, we want to engage in mystery and dream.  We want to think that life is a surprise.  (After all, as many a psychologist has pointed out, thought always precedes emotion, anyway.  When we emote, we do not reject our mind; we enhance it.)
     Marquez reminds us that maybe, just maybe life will always have a measure of faith, that maybe, just maybe we ought to feel free to let go of the mental constraints that Western rationality has imposed upon us and consider the utility and value of other things coursing through us, things we cannot always explain with reason alone.  In addition, and here I go well beyond what I perceive to be Marquez's original intentions, maybe, just maybe it's perfectly okay to imagine, that is, emote, ponder, and dream, that there could be (or is) a God.

     For many parts of the world, the month of July is a time for celebration, individual, group, and nation.  July 1st marks Independence Day in Canada; July 4th, Independence Day in the U.S.; and July 14th, Independence Day (otherwise known as Bastille Day) in France.  Also, throughout the month of July, at least this year, Muslims the world over will be celebrating one of their most loved feasts, Ramadan.  Finally, unless you are living in the far southern regions of the world, you are likely enjoying July as the high point of the summer, the month in which the season's warmth and carefree character seem to tumble about and come together, effortlessly coalescing in countless moments of thankfulness and joy.
     As we in the north therefore continue to move through our summer and its many celebrations, and as nature's many creatures and plants, free of the throes of winter, continue to give birth, bloom, and shout at the glory of it all, I send my hope and prayer that we all will find fresh occasion to ponder and consider that from which it has ultimately come:  the love of God.