Perhaps you've heard of the Jesus Seminar and its efforts to extract or distill the “true” historical essence of Jesus from what has been written about him.  At present, its chairs have made known that they are finding less and less reason to believe that the Jesus as we know him ever existed.     

When, recently, I was asked to respond to a few of the Seminar's claims, I did so, albeit briefly.  The issues to which I was asked to respond centered around the mentions of Jesus outside the Bible; the reliability of the eyewitness accounts; why the apostle Peter allegedly did not like the apostle Paul; why the gospel accounts differ; and whom Jesus believed himself to be.  I reproduce here the finished text.  Again, I address each issue briefly; a full response to each question could occupy many pages.
On Jesus' existence, at least three, if not four historians, three Roman and one Jewish, mention a certain “Christus” (the English translation of the Greek word for “messiah,” which in turn means “anointed one”) who appeared, attracted a following, then was crucified on a cross by the Roman authorities.  To this, although the Romans crucified literally thousands of people, only one was called “Christus” by the people of the time.

     The role of the eyewitness in the ancient world is one that is of course fraught with difficulty.  On the other hand, given that in this world the eyewitness was regarded as the sole source of information about a person or event, unless those listening to them had good reason not to, they generally believed them.  Certain details, particularly in Mark’s gospel, about the color of the grass when Jesus fed the 5,000; the words between Jesus and the centurion; and more, seem to indicate that the gospels represent the accounts of those who actually walked with Jesus.  As to the contentions that Paul despised Peter and John, we need to look at the Council of Jerusalem as it is described in Acts 15.  Here, the three men argued about how much Gentiles who converted should do to emulate Jewish (the first converts were of course Jews) customs of the time.  But as the Council progressed, they resolved their differences and each went his own way.  The church remained unified.

     Yes, Luke makes clear that he was not an eyewitness.  But he’s the only one who does. In line with the Greek historian Herodotus's methodologies, Luke indicates that he talked with eyewitnesses extensively before composing his account.  To a person, Matthew, Mark, and John intimate or state that they are writing about events they had witnessed.

     On point four, it’s no secret that the gospel accounts differ from each other.  They should:  they were written by four different people with four different approaches and agendas.  However, although each writer presented the material in his account differently, the essence of a given event is the same in all four accounts.  Each gospel was directed to and written for a different audience, so it’s logical that the writers would use different material or present the same material in a different way.  It’s clear that Matthew, Mark, and Luke drew from a common source (generally regarded as “Q”), whereas John, given his personal proximity to Jesus as well as the later date of his writing, presents many stories that do not appear in the other three.  He had a different perspective.

    This applies to the resurrection accounts, too.  Yes, they differ, but they are uniform in confirming the basic facts of the event.  In addition, we moderns must remember that the ancients had no problem with holding and telling four different accounts about the same person.  It was akin to different tribes telling variations of or taking different approaches to a common story about a certain person or event.  Everybody did it.  Many in the Middle East do so even today.

     Finally, sure, we could see Jesus in varying ways, but it seems to me that Jesus spent the bulk of his time presenting himself as the Son of Man, God in human form, who had come to invite all who wished to enter into the kingdom community of God.  While I’ve studied the evidence for Jesus being a revolutionary, Zealot, misguided Jewish prophet, or anything else, I’m still not convinced, not yet anyway, that he was anything other than what he consistently claimed to be, that is, the son of God.  He matched and fulfilled the Hebrew prophecies about Messiah and, all allowances for the supernatural character of the gospels aside, did things no one else had done.  Moreover, it seems to me that Paul and Peter, writing a couple of decades (which, in the ancient world, is an instant; Homer composed his account of the Trojan War 500 years after it ended) after Jesus was gone, repeatedly affirmed that Jesus was more than an insightful man.  They agreed that he was God.
     As I was sharing this information with a person who does not believe that Jesus is God, I added at this point that of course it is one thing to agree that the accounts are historically accurate and true.  It’s quite another to accept the theological claims they are making.  After all, that's the question every human being faces:  if the evidence for the divinity and work of Jesus is reliable and true, what are you going to do about it?

     "Without revelation, the people perish."  So goes the King James translation of the first part of Proverbs 29:18.  In a day when we are besieged by numerous proclamations about what constitutes the truth, be it religious, cultural, or political, this verse is worth pondering.  It tells us that any truth that we in ourselves try to develop or elevate above all others will inevitably collapse on itself.  Finite people cannot hope to ever agree on what constitutes an absolute truth.  We are creatures of relativism who are living in a relative world.
     The point this proverb is therefore making is that humanity needs to assess itself and its mores and behaviors by a standard other than what its broken beings can devise. While humanity has succeeded, usually admirably, in developing fairly universal moral standards to this point, it is in the end constructing them on the basis of an incomplete picture of the world.  The presence of God, however, changes everything.
     If God is there, and we have every reason to believe that he is, he constitutes the absolute standard by which all things worldly can be measured.  Relativistic morality ultimately founders.  Only revelation, that is, communication from the transcendent and divine, communication that humans could not possibly conjure on their own, provides us with the key to understanding this relativistic existence we lead.  While it is an entirely good existence filled with many entirely good things, it is an existence that has no real basis to promulgate morality.  Even if randomness becomes, as it inevitably does, order, unless this order has a teleological point, it is simply more of the same.  It cannot say what is right and wrong because it doesn't know why it's even here.

     Earlier this week, our Jewish friends celebrated Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It's a joyous time, for it remembers the creation of Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, and God's call to them (and, by extension, us) to live and steward the earth.  Yet it is also a somber time, the day that begins the ten days of repentance that culminate on Yom Kippur, the great day of atonement.
     On the other hand, it is this dichotomy, this interplay of choice and responsibility, that frames the meaning and point of existence.  We are born into an extraordinary world, a world whose wonder often exceeds our imagination.  Yet unless humans master interplanetary travel, it will remain our only world.  And we must care for it, not just for ourselves, but for all those who follow us or, as many a Native American tribe put it, "for the seventh generation to come."
     Because humans are the creatures most fully endowed with choice making capacity, however, it is humans who, in turn, possess the greatest capacity for abusing themselves, this world, and God.  It is humans who are most able to destroy what God has created. Rosh Hashanah underscores that we walk a fragile path between glory and cognizance that this glory is not  our own.  We only have it because we are here, and we are only here because we could not be anywhere else.
     The New Year is God's, but its meaning is us.

     Although I would not call myself a sports aficionado, I do keep up.  Given this, it was not difficult for me to miss the furor erupting in the National Football League over the actions of some of its players toward women and children.  Clearly, significant abuse has occurred, and clearly, the League needs to address it.  Moreover, the League needs to ensure that such behavior is not endemic.
     Yet I wonder if this will ever be possible.  For better or worse, sports that involve violence tend to attract people, some of whom, given certain situations or conditions, behave violently, and not just during competition.  Not to say that everyone who participates in such sports is so inclined; just to say that these sports tend to give such propensities greater reign.
     Yet there is violence in all of us.  None of us is immune from engaging in deeply aberrant behavior.  A book called Shantung Compound by theologian Langdon Gilkey, his account of his time in a prisoner of war camp in China, makes this painfully clear.  Most people, he observed, looked out for themselves, usually with whatever means they could find.  While most of us manage to control our potential for violence, some of us do not. And things happen, in sports and elsewhere.
     So what should the NFL do?  Balancing healthy competition and excessive and unhealthy fervor is highly difficult.  Maybe the real problem, however, is bigger than the NFL. Maybe it's a more human problem, one that afflicts all of us, every moment of every day.  When we make arrogance, brashness, and chauvinism, broadly speaking, the centerpieces of an activity, moral decay, of any kind, is inevitable.
     It's good to play, it's good to win.  It's not good, however, to abuse human magnificence, the remarkable athletic gifts which God has given many of us, for the fleeting evanescence of human glory.
     God, and life, deserve more than that.

     Perhaps you read about it.  Last week, a father in Florida, for reasons perhaps only he knows, killed his daughter and her six children (his grandchildren), along with himself.  It was a tragedy of unbearable proportion.  Worse, the daughter had for years been living on the edge of existence, having one baby after another, living on food stamps, eking out a life on hinterlands of conventional society.  Her father had struggled with various issues for years.  Their demise was the painful end of already painful lives.
     When I read about such things, I ache.  It's a beautiful world, but it's a broken world, populated by broken people, who too frequently do deeply broken things.  Senselessness runs rampant, and capriciousness reigns.  It's hard to know where to turn.  Even God seems silent at times.
     Those of us who believe will pray.  Those who do not will not.  Either way, we look for some way to make sense, if there is any to be made, of such suffering, some way to find a place for it in our categories of mind and heart.  Either way, we may not get ready answers.  God or not, we may never know why, we may never know reason.  We may be able to explain the "how" of such events with science or religion, but neither science nor religion always knows why. 
     Faith is believing, even in a dark world.  In truth, however, faith means little unless there is more than just this bewildering world, unless, when we set everything before us, there is God.

     Ah, the autumnal equinox!  Although in our modern age, a time when we do not go outside as much as our ancestors did, a time in which we do not always take a few moments to glance up at the sky--because we spend more of our time indoors--the autumnal equinox is still worth pondering.  It tells us of harvest, of surplus, of halcyon past and  brumal future to come.  In autumn's change is the renewing spring.
     When I looked at Orion this morning, the three stars of his belt shining brightly amid the nearly moonless night, I thought about the legend that surrounds him.  As the story is told, Orion was a mighty hunter who offended Artemis, the goddess of the moon, by shooting one of her sacred stags.  She sent a scorpion after him.  Despite Orion's best efforts, the scorpion eventually bit him.  He died quickly, earth bound no more.
     Today, Orion walks with the stars.  His massive figure dominates the winter sky. There's a bit of Orion in all of us, rippling through our minds and hearts as we roam the planet.  We seek adventure, we seek insight, some of us seek glory.  We tangle with existence, we struggle with God.  But we keep going, passing through our life's summer, autumn, then, one day, its winter, in which all things come to rest.  We expect, we anticipate, we plan, we conquer.  Yet as autumn whispers of winter to come, so we whisper about winters of our own.  Eternity awaits.
     I hope we all grow to love the falling snow.

     A few days ago, I heard a song on the radio whose chorus was, "When time was young."  That got me thinking: does time get "old"?  In other words, once time began--and how can time just "begin"?--however, did it ever have age?  Could it be young, then old?  It's not as if time experiences entropy, becoming progressively more corrupt as it "ages."  Although whatever may experience time certainly ages, time itself, it seems, does not.
     A number of years ago, a philosopher named Jim Holt published a book titled Why Does the Universe Exist?  After interviewing the finest minds on the planet about this question, he concludes that he really doesn't know.  One "day" the universe began, and one "day" it will end.  And that's all.  So said the great British philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell, too:  the universe "just is."
     But this doesn't answer the question:  how can time suddenly "be" and then, eventually, "not be"?  It's funny:  although we are creatures of time, we really know very little about what it means.  We live, we die, we are no more.  And "time" remains.
     Where, in a universe unable to birth itself, does it go?

     I recently finished reading the runner Dean Karnazes's autobiography.  For those of you who are not familiar with Karnazes, he has achieved significant fame with his running prowess.  Karnazes is not ordinary runner; he is an ultramarathoner.  This means that for him a marathon is child's play, the mere beginning of what often turns out to be runs of 100 miles, 200 miles, or more.  He has completed the grueling Western States 100 mile run a number of times; once ran 229 miles non-stop; completed the arduous 135 mile Death Valley run; ran a marathon in Antarctica; once ran a marathon a day for fifty days, one in each state of the Union; and on and on.  The guy is amazing.
     What struck me while reading the book is Karnazes's oft repeated admission that he runs to find his meaning.  If he couldn't run, one might think that he would be a very unhappy and unfilled person.  His comments reminded me of some made many decades ago by Dougal Haston, a Scottish mountaineer who perished in an avalanche in the Swiss Alps in 1977.  In his journals, Haston remarked that, "I still feel the urge to fight with the forces of unknown walls.  It has almost become a necessary part of life for me,” to always be "looking for the next challenge, the next triumph, the next conquest, to feel happiness again, even if only for a moment," thinking, “history may never have been, shall we always remain suspended in the present,” and that all that remains is “to embrace the obstacle and the unknown,” to fight for "meaning, to encounter and fight through fear and dread, to conquer all."
     Though all I know of Karnazes's heart is what he has revealed in his book, and while I definitely respect and admire his running ability, I hope that he will, unlike Haston who, from all accounts, died, in his thirties, as frustrated with life's angst as he was when he began climbing as a teenager, find a life meaning that eclipses the evanescent character of athletic accomplishment, a power of living that exceeds the hope we all tend to, consciously or not, set in the transience of existence.
     We owe it to God, of course, to make optimal use of our gifts and talents.  We also owe it to God to recognize that what we've been given or what we accomplish with what we've been given is not all that life is.  Life is what we make it, yes, but life is ultimately bigger than we will ever be.  We are but a moment.

     Can we divorce ethics from behavior and thought?  Such was the contention of someone with whom I was talking a few weeks ago.  This person believed that we could engage in behavior, thought, and inquiry without any reference to ethics, that we could live as intelligent and rational beings apart from ethical foundation.  Ethics, he argued, should be kept separate from everything else.
     It's an interesting thought, but it's difficult to see how it could work.  To make such an observation is in itself an ethical position, for it is a value judgment, an assessment of the relative worth of particular forms of human expression.  We really cannot do anything without taking an ethical position on it; indeed, to chose one thing over another is in itself an ethical decision.
     An existentialist would of course disagree, averring that the choice is not as important as that a choice be made.  Yet even this is an ethical statement.  Sure, it may be in our interest to suspend immediate ethical judgment when evaluating a particular situation. Similarly, we may benefit from reviewing our ethical positions periodically, but few of us can live with an entirely fluid system of ethics.
     A friend of mine who unfortunately died (much too soon) a few years ago once told me that he was a nihilist, meaning that he did not believe in meaning.  Yet even this is a statement of meaning.  Ethics can be cumbersome, and ethics can bind unduly, yet God made us as moral beings.  We are made to find and construct value.  Better that we strive to do that rather than try to escape who we are.
     For that matter, isn't living an ethical statement?  Maybe that's why God chose to live, in the person of Jesus, as one of us.

     At this month's meeting of the atheist group which, as you may recall, I attend once a month, we watched a video of a speech which Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, Free Will, The Moral Landscape, and Letter to a Christian Nation, along with countless articles and blogs (plus a new book coming out in about a week), offered some thoughts on labels. Although he professed himself to be an atheist, he suggested that he would rather not have to identify himself as one; he would rather be known as a person who believed in the virtue of scientific experimentation and rational thought.  Like most labels, atheism, he contended, rarely contains or presents the full spectrum of a particular person's systems of belief or truth.
     As we talked about this afterwards, I indicated that I agreed.  Though I consider myself to be a Christian, I often hesitate to present myself as one.  Why?  Given the too numerous ways that Christians around the world embarrass themselves with improper behavior, ill-chosen words, expressions of violence and intolerance, and the like, I'm reluctant to be considered as one who stands in common position with them.  As has atheism, the word Christian has become a very loaded term.  On the former, no one ought to think that atheism is the sole cause of Josef Stalin's depredations upon the Russian people and, similarly, no one ought to conclude that Christianity is the only reason that a few church going people kill abortion doctors.  As any sociologist will tell us, correlation is not causation.
     So what to do?  Because we tend to think in categories, we cannot help but develop labels.  Nonetheless, without agreeing that atheists are the only people capable of rational inquiry, I will say that we all would be better off if we endeavored to listen--to listen very hard--to people before we draw any conclusions or construct any labels about how they think or what they believe.  God sees each one of us as an uniquely individual and glorious human being; we should strive to do the same.  We may not all agree, but we can at least celebrate the mutual humanness in which we have been made.
     Jesus didn't die and rise again for categories or labels; he died and rose for individual human beings.

     A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I had opportunity to invite some friends of ours to join us for a walk through the local botanical gardens.  We couldn't have picked a better day:  temperatures in the seventies, constant sunshine, a slight breeze, beautiful flowers and verdant trees everywhere we looked.  Amidst the beauty, our friends, both of whom are Muslims from Pakistan, remarked repeatedly at how much many of the flowers resembled those they knew in their native land (they've been in the States since 1975). They added that even though they were well aware of the problems Pakistan is facing currently, they would both return for a visit if time and finances permitted.  And, they said, they would love for us to come, too!
     I hope that the four of us can follow through on this idea.  As anyone who has been overseas knows, aside from a few well publicized exceptions, rarely is a country as lawless or chaotic as Western news reports make it out to be.  To step into a culture so very different from that of the West, and to do so with people who were familiar with it, is always a treat.  Most of us become accustomed quickly to where we are and, try as we might, we often cannot avoid becoming provincial about it.  It's never easy to look beyond the moment, and it's difficult to leave the familiar
     Of course, as any adventurous person will tell us, that's the essence of discovery.  I wondered, as I watched our friends, each in turn, take time that afternoon to pray, to bow before and worship Allah as we sat together on the bank of one of the lakes in the gardens, what those passing by were thinking.  Most religious people choose to worship their god(s) in private, safely away from disapproving looks and prying eyes.  As we left the gardens, I found myself hoping that those who saw our friends worshiping and praying would perhaps come to a different conclusion about culture as well as the idea of God. The beauty of the gardens certainly spoke to the creativity of God, and our friends' decision to pray openly to Allah wonderfully affirmed the possibility of another dimension of human activity and discovery.  Although we all tend to gravitate toward the familiar, it is in its counterpart that we may find the meaning we really seek.

     "What has been is remote and exceedingly mysterious," opines the writer of Ecclesiastes in, again, chapter seven of his meditations, "who can understand it?"  These words were of course penned many millenniums before we of the twenty-first century grew accustomed to various historians unearthing the smallest detail of the past lives of our fellow human beings.  Is what has been really exceedingly mysterious when historians today can reproduce nearly every aspect of what has happened in the past?
     On the other hand, even though we today would like to think that with sufficient method and time we can come to understand almost every dimension of humanity's past, we will not.  Try as we might, we cannot use physical and objective evidence, alone, to discern, fully, what people were really thinking and feeling hundreds of years ago.  Like our own memories that with each passing year fade ever more from our immediate purview, so will the individuated emotions, longings, and spiritual experiences which have run through our ancestors' lives and hearts ebb steadily away from us.  Though we can come very close and, in some instances, become very precise, in the broad picture, we will not succeed fully.
     We humans are only one species that is living on the planet, one species whose immediate ken is restricted to what we can hear, taste, touch, and see.  What we decide is meaningful, and what we decide anything means is the fruit of a finite being.  We can't fully know what the past really means or, for that matter, the present as well.  We walk in shadows.
     Continue to seek understanding of reality; continue to endeavor to unpack ultimate meaning; yet know as well that, as the writer insists, you will never know it all.  Outside of a larger presence of purpose, that is, a personal and living God, you will never know, fully, the answer to the biggest question of all:  why are you or anything else here?
     It's "exceedingly mysterious."

     Midway through the seventh chapter of Ecclesiastes, the writer observes that, "Do not long for the former days, for it is not from wisdom that you do this."  We could interpret this verse in a number of ways, really, as its implications will vary for each of us.  Yet one thing we can say is that it is not decrying nostalgia or a desire to remember the good times of the past.  We all enjoy thinking about good memories, and most of us have fond remembrances of at least some part of our past.  It's part of being human.  Memory is intrinsic to sentient existence.
     On the other hand, given the immediate context of the verse, part of which we will explore tomorrow, we can say that it is encouraging us to recognize that however great the days past were, they are now gone, physically gone forever.  They'll never return. Though we live with our memories of them and walk in the shadow of their influence every day, never again will we physically experience them.
     To the point, the prophet Isaiah talks often about how God is a God of newness, how God is constantly making things new.  And the writer of Proverbs observes in chapter 27 that, "When the grass disappears, the new growth is seen."  Even in loss and privation, hope remains.
     So it is that though we are products of our past, our future journey, the journey we constantly envision and create for ourselves, rests in the work of God--and it's always bright.

     You may have figured out by now that one of my favorite books in the Bible, the Hebrew Bible in particular, is Ecclesiastes.  Today, I offer what I consider to be a pearl of wisdom from chapter seven of that text.
     "It is good," the writer says, "to grasp one thing and not let go of the other.  For the one who trusts God will come forth with them both."  Many years ago, I served on the board of a church in our area.  Every spring, we worked out the budget for the following year.  For all the previous years of the church's existence, the board had based the budget on the amounts that parishioners pledged to give during that upcoming year.  Hence, as I saw it, the church board was structuring its vision for what it could do on the basis of what it received.
     Thinking about this verse, I suggested this:  why don't we sketch out our vision for the next year, not worrying, within limits, about the costs, and trust that the money will come through?  Oddly enough, no one had thought about this before.  But everyone was willing to try it, to "take hold" of what we thought we could get, yet "not let go" of what we really wanted to do.
     It worked.  We had enough to fund operations, plus plenty more to underwrite the implementation of our broader vision.  What's my point?  If God, the infinite and inexhaustible God, undergirds the universe, it would seem that the cosmos's potential for newness, boldness, and adventure is virtually unlimited.  Not that the cosmos would not possess nearly unlimited potential without God, but that without God the cosmos is still no more than a twist of physicality, here today, and gone tomorrow, without a purpose or a point, its possibilities forever gone.  Purpose looms largest in the hourglass of eternity.

     I recently finished reading a novel by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow.  Spring Snow is the story of a young man born into a fairly low social station who craves the affection of a beautiful woman of a much higher level in society.  By a twist of fate and circumstance, the young man has frequent opportunity to interact with this lovely young woman, heightening his expectation and fervor.  He finds himself falling in love with her--but he is highly hesitant to tell her.  What will she say?
     As the story draws to a conclusion, the young man does tell her.  With this, the spell is broken.  She rejects and shuns him, and he retreats to a place deeply within himself, never to return.  His life is over, his time spent.  He has nothing more to do, nothing more to think about.  Love has proved a fraud, romance a myth.  It's a tragic tale of obsession on the scale of The French Lieutenant's Woman or Lolita, a tale that can never turn out well. Once made vulnerable and dismissed, love often never returns.  Obsessions only rarely result in personal peace:  life is a race for nothing.
     Compounding the angst of this story is the story of Mishima himself.  A fervent advocate of extreme right wing politics in Japan, when Mishima was not writing he was busy involved in various radical nationalist activities against the government.  He seemed obsessed.  Unfortunately, as the characters in Spring Snow crater into emotional or social holes, so does Mishima fall into the pit of his own obsession.  In 1970, he committed sepuka suicide, slashing open his stomach and dying, seemingly twice, as he passed from the planet.
     So we wonder how this happens, how people come to this, how the world breeds this type of response to it.  Humanity is so unpredictable.  We all long for things, be they emotional or physical or material, and most of us desire, in some form, existence.  Only when desire and longing prove futile do we reject them. Tragically, however, in rejecting them we reject purpose as well.  Yet purpose is the only reason we exist.  And purpose is only purpose because we say that it is.  But absent an explanation for existence, how do we really know? 

     The other day I heard a song I had not heard in some time, the Stone Ponies'
"Different Drummer," featuring lead singer Linda Ronstadt.  As you may know, the Stone Ponies split soon after they recorded this song, some of them going on to form the Eagles; others, including Linda Ronstadt, moving into highly successful solo careers.  As the Seventies looped their way across the West, the Eagles sold millions of albums, and Linda Ronstadt achieved international fame with her music as well as her highly alluring figure and persona that made her, in the view of many people, the "sexiest woman" in rock and roll.
     That was over forty years ago.  Today, things are very different.  Although the Eagles continue to make music and tour, reaping ever larger financial rewards, Linda Ronstadt sits in her house in Los Angeles, no longer shapely, and largely alone, unable to make much money at all.  A number of years ago, she was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. For her Parkinson's has been particularly cruel:  it robbed her of the ability to sing.  As she put it in a recent interview, "I'll never sing again."  No longer will her powerful voice rock the airwaves, no longer will she fill vast arenas with her remarkable musical talent.  It's tragic.
     As I reflected on the song and where Linda is today, I thought, once more, of life's unpredictability and caprice.  Who could have imagined, at the height of her fame, that forty years later Linda would be an operatic cripple, forever robbed of the very thing that made her such a presence on the musical scene?  As Ecclesiastes observes, "Who can know what will come after her?"  Who can know what will happen next?
     No one, absolutely no one.  We weep over life's seeming randomness, and well we should:  we live in the nexus of forces we only rarely fathom or measure.  We struggle with circumstance, we wrestle with mortality.  We strive against things we will never defeat or overcome.  We live as human beings, and we die as human beings.
     So is God really there?  That's up to you.  Everyone must decide this:  are we here because we are here or are we here because we are in a "here"?

     "I look at all the lonely people," the Beatles once sang in their Eleanor Rigby, "where do they all come from?"  I thought about these lyrics as I was moving through the security lines at the Denver Airport a couple of weeks ago.  Because TSA personnel had us lined up in aisles formed in the shape of a snake, I had ample opportunity to observe my fellow passengers who were, as was I, slowly parading around and around as we moved toward the check-in people who sat in front of the scanners.  I was struck by the incredible diversity of humanity before me, the different skin colors, heights, weights, facial expressions, hair colors, and more flowing through the terminal.
     All these people, I thought, are going somewhere, be it to a place where they are loved, a place where they would be challenged, a place in which they struggle, a place out of which they might find something new, and more.  But they're all going somewhere. Every one of them is living a little life, a little bundle of hopes, joys, pains, and dreams, a sliver of existence in a world that seems at once big and small, a trek of days and weeks of concomitant drivenness and surcease.  It seemed simultaneously totally and absolutely true as well as entirely depressing and opaque.  Where would we all end up? Where would it all end?  Whereof the human race?
     Without any larger point, and without any larger plan, humanity is of course destined to live out its time and subsequently vanish, forever gone and absent from the cosmos. While each of its lives were vastly important in their time, when the last human takes her dying breath, none will really matter.  It will be as though nothing had ever been there, nothing at all.
     In the final scenes of the original Planet of the Apes, as the human and his "wife" leave the apes to start a new life, they come upon a most discouraging sight.  Rising out of an immense pile of sand, a battered Statue of Liberty stands before them.  The once mighty human civilization from which this monument came is now gone, buried in its own waste and debris.  Did it matter for anything?
     It does, yet it doesn't:  absent a creator, there is no absolutely no reason why it should have happened.  Though it indeed happened, we have no way to prove its worth, for all we have to do so is our accidental selves.
     Ah, look at all the lonely people.

   When, a few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to spend a day hiking in the mountains of Colorado, I leaped into it.  I had not been to Colorado's mountains in some time.  I started early, leaving Denver before 8:00 A.M., headed to Rocky Mountain National Park.  Once there, I caught the trailhead to the crest of the Continental Divide.  I had not been to the top in eight years.  It was a relatively short hike, four and a half miles, with an elevation gain of nearly 3,000 feet.  It was great to be back, great to be in the heights, wonderful to breathe in the crisp alpine air, the oxygen thin wind that, on this day, powered over the divide at over sixty miles an hour.  As I ascended, I watched the boreal forest fade into the stunted spruce trees of the sub-alpine zone, then the treeless expanse of the high altitude tundra that sprawled across the lower edges of the peaks that thrust themselves into the nothing but blue sky.  Magnificence unleashed.
     Thinking about the years that had passed since I last stood on top, I marveled that the land had not really changed, that the features I had seen eight years before remained today, that the vistas I had seen in years past still lay before me, that the sun was still illuminating the same shadows on the same mountains.  On the other hand, everything had changed.  I had changed, the animals had changed, the world had changed.  Many years ago, as he lay dying on the battlefield, an Native American warrior remarked, "Nothing lives long but the sun and the mountains."  So true, so very true.  However, as any geologist or astronomer knows, one day even the mountains will no longer be, and one day even the sun will no longer shine.
     So will anything last?  Not really:  as the cosmos came out of nothing, so it will fade into nothing.  But the question remains:  where will "nothing" be?

     In a world that begs to be experienced, those of us who like to explore it engage frequently in what the Canadian author Robert Service terms wanderlust.  We set our sights on parts unknown, be they physical, mental, or emotional, and set forth, entirely open to what we find.  We're ready for anything.  Or as Service puts it, we respond to the call of the wild.
     For Service, this call entails nights of frigid cold and little fire, tangles with wild animals and encounters with the unexpected, people gyrating between one wild place to another, caught up in the horizons of the harsh magnificence before them.  For the rest of us, though our call could include these things, it could include countless other things as well:  we all explore limits differently.
     Whatever it be, It is in this call of the wild that we confront ourselves and our world most fully.  We bump against the dichotomy that governs all of existence, the grand balance between beginning, being, and ending.  We step into what we cannot master or tame, the surreal and sightless edge of this enigmatic experience we call life.
     As we should.  We cannot find ourselves, and we certainly cannot find the world if we don't take them apart.  It is the call of the wild, whatever we understand it to be, that fractures what we know so as to show us what we do not.  It's like God:  a wildness that undoes everything else.

     How much will a person do to survive?  It's an age old question.  I thought of it anew when I read Stephen Crane's Maggie, A Girl of the Streets recently.  Most of us know Stephen Crane as the author of the Civil War drama, Red Badge of Courage.  In Maggie, however, Crane presents us with a very different dimension of human experience.
     Maggie chronicles the sordid life of a girl named Maggie who, with her mother, father, and brother, try to survive in New York City's underside during the Industrial Revolution. It describes an extremely difficult world, one of poverty, pain, and despair, a world that, like the world of Emile Zola's Germinal, leaves one wondering why anyone in it even bothers to live.  It is a world without hope, a lonely and arduous world into which one is born with absolutely no way out.
     When Maggie comes into puberty and realizes that her father will never be able or willing to take care of her, and that her alcoholic mother will soon drink herself to death, she, like too many other young women of the time, leaves home to make her way on the streets.  Though the novel doesn't state this explicitly, we are given to understand that she eventually resorts to prostitution to survive.  It's ugly and demeaning, but it is the only way that Maggie, whom the novel repeatedly indicates is an extraordinarily pretty young woman, seems to think she can get by.
     As the novel draws to a close, the reader is asked to weigh all the factors in Maggie's situation--the unrelenting poverty, her emotional darkness, her parental abandonment--and ask himself whether she has done the right thing.  Some will insist that Maggie is being pragmatic; others will say that everyone has a choice and Maggie could have done something else; still others will point to the novel's lack of mention of God and say that perhaps God would have provided a way out.  Unless we stand in Maggie's shoes, so to speak, however, we may not really know.  Ethics become highly opaque when we face seemingly closed situations; precise knowledge of certainty is difficult.
     So should we always ask ourselves:  what would we do?  How would we integrate our sense of ethics and morality with situations that seem beyond hope or change?  We will not change without hope, yet we will not hope unless we believe in change.  Yet even though I believe in a hope in God, I would say so to Maggie with tremendous caution.  It's hard to see outside the belly of the whale.
     Sometimes we have to deal with the whale first.

     Ah, work!  Given a choice, many of us would not work, at least not at the job in which we are engaged currently.  Moreover, even if we genuinely enjoyed our job, we would not mind terribly if we woke up one day and learned that we no longer had to do it.  If we did not need to insert ourselves into a tiresome world of competition, supervision, and activity simply to earn a living and pay our bills, we would probably not.  Ask anyone who has retired!
     On the other hand, because when God set Adam into the Garden, he instructed him to work, to till and cultivate the land before him, we, too, work.  To work is to be human, and to be human is to work.  Working enables us to discover ourselves.  It challenges, engages us, fills us.  Working gives us a more complete grasp of who we are in our world.
     So why do so many of us dislike working?  Unfortunately, once Adam and Eve plunged the world into a state of entropy and disrepair, the existential meaningfulness of everything their descendants (you and me) would do would not be as a meaningful as it was originally intended to be.  Though humanity continues to work, we do not find it to be as meaningful as it could be.  It never completely satisfies.
     On the other hand, because God is there, whatever we do in the marketplace has a point.  God created it, God endowed it with meaning.  However we may feel about our job, by doing it, we, believe it or not, become more human.  We come closer to becoming whom we are created to be:  beings who are finding themselves, beings who are contributing to the common history of humanity, beings who are eloquently and passionately using and communicating what they have been given to further the greater good of us all.  Because God is there, work has purpose.  And we all benefit.
     Thanks for working.