Today, my "little brother" is sixty years old.  It's hard to believe, really, as it was for me when I passed that milestone a couple of years ago.  Like most baby boomers, we once only dreamed about turning sixty; we never imagined we would ever actually experience it.
     As I contemplate aging and the flow of existence today, I think of many things.  One that comes to me repeatedly is the fact of the connectivities which we experience, the many communal links we establish with each other and our fellow human beings.  Whether we believe the world is open or closed, whether we believe the universe is accidental or created, and whether we believe that God is there or not, when we finally reach our earthly end, it is these connectivities that will be ultimately all we have.  And in the hourglass of resurrection, eternity, and God, it is these connectivities that, given their source, ultimately affirm purpose and point in our existence:  the permanence, as the psalmist said, "of the work of our hands" (Psalm 90).
     Happy birthday, brother!

     I recently wrote about the challenge of dealing with God's grace.  To those who preach a so-called prosperity gospel, of course, it is no challenge:  God earnestly desires to bless you materially and vocationally.  Grace, however, is more complicated than this.  To wit, why isn't everyone who believes in God, however she conceives him, wealthy?
     God's grace is that the world is more than a set of random events, that the universe has genuine meaning, that we are valuable and important, and that life is bigger than our experience of it.  God's grace is that regardless of what we may think about ourselves, our lives, or God, he loves us, anyway.  We may not want it, we may not like it, we may not understand it, yet we are foolish not to accept it.  When all else fails, God and his grace remain.
     In this, God's grace stands before us all, grounding and pervading the universe.  It speaks to us every moment of our lives.  But we have to listen to hear it.  We need to live with an open mind and heart.  In God's grace, the biggest questions of existence, that is, who we are, where we came from, why we do bad things, and where we are going after this life, have been answered.  God's grace means that the cosmos has purpose.  It doesn't mean that we all will be millionaires, nor does it mean that we all will be poor. God's grace is that when we trust God for his presence, he responds, collapsing the mundane and unpacking the real significance of existence:  Jesus as God in the flesh.
     As the psalmist said, "Your [God] lovingkindness is better than life."

     "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  Possibly the most depressing words ever spoken, they come from Psalm 22 in the Hebrew Bible.  We tend to think about them most intently during Lent and Easter, when many of us recall that as he hung on the cross in agonizing pain, Jesus yelled them out to God.  Betrayed by one of his disciples, condemned by a farcical trial, scourged until flesh hung like ribbons from his back, nailed to a wooden cross, and abandoned by his friends, Jesus had nowhere to turn but God.
     Yet in Jesus' hour of deepest need, God, his father, the father who had loved him, as Jesus put it, "before the foundations of the world," abandoned Jesus, his only son.  He turned his face away from him, unwilling and unable to look upon him as he endured God's penalty of hell for sin.  It's an unbearable picture:  total isolation and unremitting darkness and despair.  Jesus was separated from life itself.
     If we read the rest of Psalm 22, however, we see that after those words of horrific angst, the writer says to God, "But you are holy and enthroned on the praises of Israel."  The writer is voicing his conviction that even if God appears to have abandoned him, he remains a good, worthy, and loving God.  Because Jesus died, he rose, and because he rose, every human being can experience, if she wants, union with God.  Although we often suffer terribly in this earthly existence, God remains good.  His love pervades all things. Recognizing this is indeed the supreme challenge of faith:  we do not always know what will happen next.  And we do not always know why.
     If God's love is not present, however, pain and despair have no real conqueror.  And the universe, as the atheist Jean Paul Sartre pointed out, is darker and lonelier than we can possibly imagine.

     How do we deal with God's goodness and grace?  One of the Jesus' most well known parables, the story of the Prodigal Son, explores this question in a most poignant way.  As Luke 15 presents it, the story begins when the younger of a father's two sons asks his father for his half of the family estate.  After receiving it, he leaves home and, traveling to a distant land, soon blows everything on "riotous" living.  As a famine subsequently sweeps across that land, he finds himself destitute and broke, and decides to return home.
     As he approaches his family's estate, fully intent on apologizing to his father and hoping that he will take him back, his father sees him from afar.  Before the son can say a word, his father runs to him, embraces him, calls out to all who was there that his lost son has returned, and orders a vast celebration.
     Meanwhile, the other son, who has been working in the field, hears the noise of the festivities.  When he learns why the celebration is happening, he rushes to his father and tells him, "I have worked all these years and you never have done such a thing for me. Now your other son, the one who has squandered half your wealth, returns, and you hold the biggest party we have ever seen!  Why have I been so good?"
     "My son," his father assures him, "one day, all that I have will be yours.  But now, your brother who has been lost, your brother who has not done good, has returned.  My lost son has been found!"
     If we are like the older brother and try to do everything right to please God, we miss grace's point.  On the other hand, if we are like the younger brother and do nothing right, miss the point, too.  We find dealing with God's grace difficult because we cannot imagine how whether we do everything right or whether we do nothing right we still end up in the same place:  apart from God.  God's grace is a matter of faith, what we believe, and not what we do.  God's grace only comes alive for us when we realize that it is a gift, a gift that, for us, is absolutely and totally free.  There are no strings, there is no catch. All we need do is believe it.

     Whether it intends to or not, much of religion tends to breed exclusivity, along with, unfortunately, cliques and enemies.  Its divisions are usually based solely on what the members of a division believes and, we hope, subsequently puts into action.  If you believe, you're in; if you do not, you're out.
     Of course, religion could not function without sets of beliefs.  What otherwise would be the point?  The issue is the conditions on which these beliefs are based.  Arbitrary conditions create arbitrary religions, religions that create and rarely examine their own presuppositions.  Genuine religion, however, doesn't determine presuppositions on the basis of what it thinks; rather, it roots presuppositions in what it sees.  Yes, it thinks, but it doesn't think before it sees.
     If religion is arbitrary, it does little for us.  Nazism killed millions of people in the last century.  So how do we decide that a particular religion is genuine?  Though it can be tricky, perhaps one way is to ask ourselves first how we would choose to approach God, then ask ourselves how God would choose to approach us.  They likely won't be the same. If we think we know before we start, we've probably missed the point.  We have to let God be God.  After all, he was here first--and we would not be here if he were not.

     In its most recent issue, Atlantic Magazine discusses human creativity.  Why are some people more creative than others?  Why is it that creativity frequently comes at the expense of sanity?  What is the essence of the creative mind?  From looking at the riddle of the movie Beautiful Mind, the astounding musical collaboration of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and more, this issue thinks about the marvel of human dream and imagination.
     Fundamentally, the creative person is the person who thinks outside the box, the person who is willing to imagine and ponder in ways that have not been done before.  The mathematician of Beautiful Mind could see patterns that no one else could.  Lennon and McCartney could visualize music in a way that no one else could see.  Albert Einstein could develop ways of viewing reality that no one else had thought about.  In every instance, creativity was looking at everything in a fundamentally different way.
     This is why creativity is often stifled; this is why the creative person is often rejected or scorned; this is why new ideas are frequently ignored.  As lovers of control, humans are slow to accept anything that bursts their safe and proven categories of what is possible and true.
     And that's the point.  Be it new ideas about ourselves, our world, or God, we will never grasp them unless we are willing to admit that the way we have always done things is not right after all.  And that's hard, often unbearably hard.  We are loathe to give what we know.
     One of the greatest lessons we can learn as human beings is that when we think we know, we really do not.  At some point, we need to embrace faith.  We need to recognize that ultimately we do not so much live by what we know but by what we do not.  We are constantly knocking on the door of knowing.

     Are you familiar with Amnesty International?  I've long admired its tireless efforts to remediate and end torture and unjust punishment across the globe.  Over its fifty year history, Amnesty has earned an international reputation for its campaigns to seek justice for those who have not had it.  It was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977.
     I mention Amnesty because a couple of months ago, my wife and I were invited to join fellow Amnesty supporters in our area for a evening of discussion about women's issues.  It was a delightful, stimulating, and informative evening.  We left greatly encouraged about Amnesty's outreach to oppressed women around the world.  Although the reasons for the oppression of woman are varied, many of them seem to center, as I see it, on the threat that many men believe that empowered women pose to their historically imbued hold on power.  Way too many men do not wish to give up the power they have enjoyed over women and, by extension, every other living being, during the many millennia that humanity has occupied the planet.  Sadly, due to sundry misinterpretations of their sacred texts, too many men of religion have been particularly complicit in this.
     From the day Adam and Eve chose to disobey God, man and woman were set on a collision course, forever striving for power over the other.  Both want to be in charge and, as anyone who has played king of the hill knows, it will always be the strongest who prevails.  For the time being, this will be the man.
     How ironic and fitting, then, that when he set out to redeem humanity from its metaphysical confusion and sin, God did not do so with physical power.  Indeed, he did just the opposite.  It was when God was at his weakest that he was strongest, and it was when God was most oppressed that he set the most people free.  When men insist on retaining their power, they are, consciously or not, trying to undo the most fundamental truth in the cosmos:  genuine power is letting go of it.

     One day a couple of weeks ago, on a beautiful summer afternoon, I got together, as I often do, with a rabbi friend of mine for a chat.  A Conservative and Reconstructionist Jew, Jonathan has an intense loyalty to his tradition.  For him, the Torah is everything, the foundation and frame of all that he thinks, says, and does.  Without the Torah, the eternal law, he is lost.
     At one point in our conversation, Jonathan suggested that whereas Christianity has but one commandment (presumably, to believe in Jesus as Messiah), Judaism has six hundred and thirty-five.  "We have 635 ways to love God," he said, "you Christians only have one."
     Ah, but what a difference this one commandment (if it is indeed the only one) makes! From a Christian standpoint, it is the only one we need.  Jesus said that he had not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it.  In him, he insisted, the Torah is complete.
     Back to our conversation.  "I could never be a Christian," Jonathan then remarked. Why?  Jonathan could never become a Christian because, "Christianity asks me to make a unreserved commitment of faith."  For Jonathan, belief in God is about, by following the Torah, creating one's destiny, striving to obey the commandments, doing what we need to do.  It's about control, not necessarily letting go.  Though he doesn't always understand God (for instance, the Holocaust), Jonathan is sure that he should believe in him.  But he believes by doing, always keeping his head afloat, pursuing what he thinks he needs to do.  Christianity, he says, believes by letting go, submerging oneself in the puzzle of a indecipherable faith.
     True enough.  On the other hand, if we try to control or dictate belief by doing, we'll never learn what it means to believe by faith.  And isn't faith--reasonable, rational, trusting, and evidential faith (no contradiction here:  what is faith if it has no basis?)--what belief is ultimately about?

     Countless books have been penned on how one finds the truth.  In a clever look at this question, the British novelist G. K. Chesterton wrote, nearly two centuries ago, a story he called The Man Who was Thursday.  It is the story of a government agent who, working undercover, is attempting to infiltrate an anarchist cadre so as to halt its efforts to disrupt and destroy civil society.  As this agent makes his way into the group, he discovers, little by little, that every other member is actually an undercover agent, too.  In fact, the only member of the group who does not appear to be an undercover agent is its leader, a person called Sunday.  The anarchist cadre doesn't really exist.
     Without disclosing too much of the plot, I will say that, by the end of the story, Thursday and his "comrades" find themselves face to face not with a cadre of anarchists, but with God.  Full of terrifying power, hope, and judgment, this God announces that he alone is the truth, and he alone has provided a way for people to find the truth.
     Taken aback, one of the group questions God as to how he can possibly say this and, moreover, as to whether he has ever really suffered.  Rising to his feet angrily, God then tells him, "Can you drink the cup that I drink of?"  As he did to Job when he dared question God's intentions, God makes clear that unless you are me, you have no idea about what truth is.  How could you?  Indeed, the harder Thursday and his co-conspirators looked for the truth, the more they distanced themselves from it.
     We may find the truth, we may find God.  But we will find neither unless we set our preconceptions aside and look beyond ourselves.  Our eyes will only see as widely as our limited minds allow.  Put another way, we'll never find the truth if we think it can't exist.

     One of the most frequent responses of Christians to a sin, homosexuality in particular, is to say, "I will love the sinner but not the sin."  So very easy to say, so nearly impossible to do.  What too many people do not seem to understand is that gay people did not ask to be gay.  After some honest analysis, thought, and introspection, they came to find themselves to be so.  It's who they are.
     Those who believe homosexuality to be a sin must remember that gay people are as much people as they, and that their sexual feelings are as evident to them as theirs are to them.  People may not like what gay people do, but they will never be able to fully separate that from who they are.  As I told a friend of mine who recently realized that his favorite niece is a lesbian, that even if he does not share his niece's perspective on sexuality, he should treat her as he would treat anyone else:  with love.
     Love of course is not love without encouragement as well as admonition, and God's love is indisputably bound to and implicit in his holiness, but those who believe themselves to be speaking for God ought to speak carefully.  Understand the demands of scripture, yes, but understand as well that when all is said and done, only God knows a human heart.

     In a recent op-ed piece, T. M. Luhrmann, a Stanford sociologist whose work I have discussed before, talks about faith.  "Faith," she says, "asks people to consider that the evidence of their senses is wrong.  In various ways, and in varying degrees, faith asks that people believe that their minds are not always private; that persons are not always visible; that unseen presences should alter your emotions and direct your behavior," and so on.  Before readers of faith jump on her for these remarks, consider how she finishes her piece.  "In the fact of your own uncertainty," she observes, "being precise about what you don't believe in can shore up your confidence in what you do."
     What are we to make of this?  I respect Luhrmann and her work greatly, and have learned much from both.  She is on target in noting that degrees of unbelief will highlight degrees of belief:  we may indeed tend to believe according to what we do not.  But not always.  In regard to faith, those of faith believe largely because that in which they believe offers what is for them a better way to think about the world and their lives in it. Ideally, it's not so much what they reject as what they embrace.  In truth, if we trust what we believe based on what we do not, we've spinning our wheels.
     In regard to faith and the evidence of our senses, perhaps Ms. Luhrmann means faith and our preconceptions.  Jesus' resurrection is an affront to most of our ideas about life and death.  Yet if Jesus really rose, and multiple people saw him do so, then what kept people from believing was not the evidence of their senses but the degree of their willingness to accept it.
     As the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, no friend of Christianity, observed, it is in the end all about the will.  It is the will that makes us human, it is the will that drives us forward, and it is the will that, despite Nietzsche's protestations to the contrary, is what will ultimately drive us to God. 

     For decades, cities (and countless freight train companies!) around the world have wrestled with the issue of graffiti.  Is it art?  Is it vandalism?  Is it both?  As anyone who has looked at graffiti with a dispassionate eye can attest, some graffiti is indeed art, some very fine art done by some very talented people.  Other graffiti is of course not worth remembering.  It's often an expression of personal displeasure or scorn, fit only to be painted over.
     What to do?  God's creative, we're creative as well.  God's imaginative, we're imaginative as well.  In the story of Jesus' raising of Lazarus, recorded in the eleventh chapter of John's gospel, we read that before Jesus raised the dead Lazarus, he asked one of his sisters, "Did I not say to you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?"  In other words, Martha, let go of what you think and focus on what you believe.  Allow your imagination to run freely, to run even beyond you.
     Clearly, the raising of Lazarus is many miles from the intentions behind graffiti, but they both speak to the same point:  we must learn to look at what we see through the lens of imagination and belief.
     With our eyes only, we'll never see it all.

     Have you seen the movie Twelve Years a Slave?  Winner of the 2014 Academy Award for Best Picture, Twelve Years is the unfortunately true story of a free man living in the American north who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in the American South.  It's an awful story, really:  the abuse and injustice he endured is almost beyond imagination. Even more awful is that his fellow slaves were not as fortunate as he was.  When he was finally released, those with whom he had lived for twelve years continued on, oppressed and brutalized until the day they died.  It's almost unfathomable.
     Even worse, as I write this blog, thousands, perhaps millions of people across the world are in slavery, sexual, political, or otherwise, living their lives under the iron hand of another human being.  They have no recourse, they have no hope.  All they have to look forward to is a life of drudgery and pain.  It's horrific o contemplate.
     Most of us know that many of the American slave owners believed they were doing God's will in enslaving the Africans they bought.  Today, slavery is not done for such "noble" reasons.  Even more than the decades leading to the Civil War, slavery today is a purely economic enterprise.  It's about the money.  And that's the worst part of it.
     In this light, it's difficult to think about Jesus' words that, "The truth will set you free and, if the Son [Jesus] sets you free, you will be free indeed."  If one is free, this is easy to believe.  If one is not free, belief is much harder.  While Jesus is talking about spiritual freedom, a not unimportant thing, in the present age, physical freedom seems equally significant.  The challenge, it seems, for those who believe in Jesus, is to see freedom holistically.  That is, to not hide behind spiritual platitudes, but to rather engage in the arduous work of preaching with words and deeds, rich, active, and fulfilling deeds.
     Jesus didn't set anyone free to enjoy her freedom only.  He set people free to lead others to freedom--in every way--too.

     How unbearably tragic that one who has made so many people laugh has taken himself away from the world.  We feel for Robin Williams, we feel for his family, we feel for the painful dilemma of humanness.  So much are we given, so much can we give, yet so much can we take away, lost forever.  We also feel for the planet, for the vast sweep of creation who remain, often joyous, often struggling, always looking for the way forward in a world that often seems to offer none.  Finitude tends to do this.  We confront our limits constantly.  And it's hard, terribly hard.  Existence is not futile, but it can certainly be empty, going nowhere, going somewhere, but often never to a home.
     Do we really live in a blank universe?
     

     Last week, the day I didn't post a blog, I visited, again, my friend who is in prison.  As always, it was good to see him.  He is doing well and doing many good things in prison. One of the most beautiful things he is doing is hospice care.  For nearly three years, he has been caring for an inmate who, though he was expected to die at the end of 2011, seems to keep going.  He bathes him, dresses him, changes him, and anything else that this inmate requires.  It is a difficult but rewarding job.  And my friend genuinely enjoys and appreciates doing it.  Even though he is incarcerated (and will be for some time to come), he is contributing, in a small way, to humanity's well being.  With a passion for service, my friend is giving of himself in an place largely inhabited by people who for one reason or another have not.
     Why does my friend give of himself so graciously?  "It's what God wants me to do," he tells me.  "I believe it is my calling."
     Midway through his letter to the church at Rome, the apostle Paul writes that, "God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God and are called according to his purpose."  These are weighty words and elude easy interpretation.  In a ways, they raise more issues than they resolve.  Their central idea, however, is that for people who have committed themselves to God through Jesus Christ, though they may make poor decisions, though they may encounter immense disaster and pain, though they may wander far from God's ways, they remain in the center of God's will.  God will continue to work in them, he will continue to use them.  He will continue to be with them.
     On the one hand, this seems insuperably difficult to understand.  Too many Christians have made horrifically poor choices over the multiple centuries of the Church's existence. Why would God still be with them?  Why would God continue to use them?
     This side of eternity, we'll never resolve these questions fully.  As Deuteronomy 29:29 observes, "The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our offspring forever, that we may observe all the words of this law."  We can only act on what we know; we're powerless to act on what we do not.  God has revealed to my friend what he needs to do at this stage of his life.  But that's all he has shown him. And that's all he will show us.  As Paul notes in his first letter to the church at Corinth, "We walk as in a riddle."
     As we confront the great mysteries of existence, mysteries we may never unravel fully, we bear this in mind.  We cannot divine God's full purpose, and we cannot fathom our total journey.  Like my friend, every human being is called only to be faithful, right here, right now, nothing more, nothing less, to bury him or herself in trusting belief, confident in the secrets of God.

     Though I have written before on the difficulty of determining God's will, I do so again today.  I'm prompted to do so after reading over the last couple of weeks how various Islamic fundamentalists attribute their success in military strategy; obtaining funding money through kidnapping; or finding an appropriate site to stage a suicide bombing to Allah's "good" will.
     Lest I be accused of singling out Muslims in this regard, let me say right off that many Christians are equally guilty of attributing their ideas of "good" fortune to the "good" will of God.  Both sides demonstrate that although people may study their respective sacred texts earnestly to find hints about what God wants for them, so long as they continue to interpret these texts through the web of their politics, ethnicity, or attitudes about anything else, they will invariably emerge with a distorted picture of divine favor. Moreover, more often than not, they fail to see that they are doing so.
     Not that sacred texts cannot offer us credible guidance and advice.  They certainly can.  But sacred texts are only as useful as we allow ourselves to let them, not us, have the final word.  Our perspective will always be finite.  God's, on the other hand, is infinite.  And we must be prepared to undergo often lengthy journeys to find it.  As James observes in the first chapter of his letter, "Listen rather than speak."

     When we look at art, we usually expect to see some sort of reflection of how the artist felt at the time he or she did the painting, woodcarving, sculpture, or whatever else before which we stand.  We expect to get a glimpse of the artist's vision.
     Any student of art history will tell us that much of art lies in the interpretation, the artist's as well as the one who is looking at the artist's work.  Ironically, however, it is in interpretation where things become difficult.  Nowhere is this most true with postmodern art.  If texts (a generic term for all creative work) elude all permanent interpretation, we walk through a land whose boundaries never appear.  The journey is endless, the possibilities unlimited, the expanse wide open.
     On the other hand, as the work of postmodern artist Charles Gaines (currently on exhibit in New York) demonstrates, when we let go of boundaries and contexts, we may often see what things most mean.  If we shed all notions of what things ought to represent or be, if we divest ourselves of all foundation and starting points (though this in itself is a foundation and starting point!), we step into an entirely mercurial and malleable world.  It is a world we make, remake, and remake once more, over and over again.  It's our world, our very own world.
     Fair enough.  Yet we still have not managed to decide what this world really means.  And even if we insist that this is not important, we do so not knowing whether we are right.  Unmade we remain.  Art demonstrates to us that although freedom is crucial to humanness, equally crucial is recognition of the fact of foundation.  Again, even if life is nothing more than a set of random events, how would we know it?

     You have no doubt heard of Wicca and Wiccans.  Incorrectly termed witches (the often dark people who practice real life black magic), Wiccans represent the leading edge of modern paganism in the spiritual sensibilities of the West.  Rooted in a reverence for nature, a belief in a mother goddess, and a call for personal and global harmony, Wicca appeals to many in the West who, although they have become disillusioned with organized religion, nevertheless still wish to explore and enhance the spiritual sides of themselves.  Its lure is broad, its adherents diverse and sundry.
     With the recent passing of Margot Adler at the age of 68 (she died of cancer), I have thought of Wicca often lately.  Many years ago, I read her Drawing Down the Moon:  Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today, the definitive look at neo-pagan religions in the West.  I found much to ponder in the longings voiced by the many people whose views she presents in the book.  Although I don't necessarily share their fundamental assumptions about the nature of God and reality, I do laud them for wanting to integrate themselves more fully with each other and the natural world.  Though it was not intended to be so, religion in the West often becomes highly individualistic, and too many religious people continue to insist that caring for the planet is a useless exercise.  Many of us have missed the idea that, at its best, religion is a vehicle of healing and wholeness, a means to achieve a deeper harmony with oneself, one's community, one's planet, and God.  It should bring together, not tear apart.
     Whatever your religious perspective, I encourage you to read Adler's book.  It's fascinating.  More importantly, however, think about what it is ultimately suggesting:  because we are spiritual beings, we should be making our lives a work not of mechanical skill and physical acumen, but a picture of spirit and soul.  Even if we do all material things well, in a world absent of spirit and soul we will still not understand why we think we do.
     Farewell, Margot Adler.  Thanks for your thoughts, your writings, your life.  We wish you well.

     As I returned to "civilization" after a few days in the wilderness, taking in the traffic, lights, bustle, and noise, I chanced, last night, to see a firefly.  The firefly's time is short.  It appears in late June or early July and is gone by the end of August.  Yet what wonder it brings us!  To look into the night and, without any warning, see a tiny light dancing around in the darkness, flitting here and there, turning on and off and on again, is to be astonished, once more, at the unending surprise of existence.  There is always something new to find.
     Though the wilderness is now far from me, I can still marvel at this little slice of wildness before me.  I cannot cause the firefly to light up, and I cannot control when it lights up.  I can only watch it do so.  While we can control many things in our lives, it is often the littlest things, little things like the light of a firefly that we cannot.  Without all our technological prowess, we cannot dictate the twinkle of those little insects that lilt about for a few weeks come summer.  Maybe, at least for now, humanity is the dominant species on the planet.  Yet as any dictator will tell us, we will never control absolutely everything.  We'll always be contingent.  We're wondrous, but insignificant; beautiful yet as raw as everything else.
     Perhaps we can say that just as the tiny light of a helpless baby birthed Christianity, now the most populous religion in the world, thousands of years ago, so does the even tinier light of a firefly remind us that there are truths that will always be greater than we can create.
     Welcome to life.

     Who's a fundamentalist?  I just finished reading two volumes of a magisterial set of five tomes on fundamentalism.  Although I could say much about what I found in this reading, one thing that struck me repeatedly was the interest (some might say obsession) of fundamentalists in the past.  Tradition is everything, and anything that appears to violate or undermine that tradition is to be abhorred and fought vehemently.
     As I pondered this, I thought back to one of the clarion calls of the Sixties movements across the globe:  we need to get back to the garden (a phrase forever enshrined in Joni Mitchell's song Woodstock).  The garden represented the beginning, the foundation, the original perfection:  the most ancient and venerable tradition.
     Yet many considered the Sixties to be anything but traditional.  They believed it to be radically wrong.  For them, tradition meant something else altogether.  My point is that, either way, countless people seem to look to some sort of foundational beginning, some sort of tradition to frame their world.  More people than not seem to want what can become an almost metaphysical grounding for their lives.  We want a starting point.
     As we should.  The challenge, however, is in balancing the virtues and lessons of the past with the possibilities of the present, in putting, as Jesus said, new wine in new, not old wineskins.  We may struggle with and long for our structures and traditions, yes, but we would struggle much more if we had never had them.  We cannot entirely dismiss the idea of beginning.