As Halloween, the night that, in ancient tradition, the spirits and goblins of the inner earth escape, for one bone chilling evening, their chthonic imprisonment and roam about the planet, weaving magic, confusion, and mystery into the lives of those still living, approaches, we might think of it in another way.  We might think of Halloween as a night not of goblins, but as a night of God, a night in which God is newly afoot, on the loose, tearing open reality, overturning assumptions, undermining the obvious, and unfolding an otherness, a beyondedness, a somethingness which we might not otherwise see.  On this night, we might imagine not deceased spirits wailing about their ignominy, but God, a living God who is presenting himself and making himself known, making himself known as a presence of the more, a herald of the future, a proclamation of a new life, a richer hope, a new dawn.
     Think about God as one who eclipses and overcomes the tangible and apparent, who overwhelms present form and long ago imagination to promulgate and usher in a new day, a new day of insight, wisdom, and truth, a day in which he appeared as we are to show us who we could most be.
     As the psalmist writes in Psalm 36, "In your light [Lord], we see light."
     And light always overcomes the darkness.

     One of the things my wife and I do to mark the coming of autumn is to purchase a couple of bales of hay to set among the mums on our patio.  We also buy a corn stalk to set in our front hallway.  As I sat on the patio the other morning, looking at the beauty of the changing autumn colors on our trees, I glanced at the bales and noticed that they had begun to sprout grass.  Out of what had been very dry and seemingly lifeless bundles of hay had come dark green grass, thrusting into the air as though spring had arrived, six months early.
     Looking at the grass, grass a color with which I normally associate the months of April and May, I found myself struck by the resiliency of existence.  These blades of grass didn't know that autumn had come; they didn't know that winter and its snow was coming; they didn't know that dry, dead hay should not sprout fresh greenery.  But there they were, pushing themselves into the world, brumal inevitability be damned.  They were determined to be.
     Understanding the mechanics of existence is relatively easy.  Science has enabled us to know a great deal about how the world works and comes together.  Grasping the fact of existence, however, is considerably more difficult.  Why do all things want to live?  Why is every animal reluctant to die?  Why, despite all odds, does life keep going?
     Life of course is not aware that it is living or going; it simply exists.  It cannot define its truest purpose.  So it is with us.  We're here, of course; but why we are here, and why, generally speaking, we continue to want to be here, well, those are another questions altogether.  They are questions that, try as we might, we will never fully answer.
     In the end, it's either us or God.  We can know ourselves, we can know God, or we can know both.  But unless we know God, we'll not know, fully, ourselves.
     We can't see past our own selves.

     What's so good about gray?  For some, particularly those who are growing old, gray is an ominous sign, a physical development to be avoided, a hair color that signals, yes, one really is old.  (On the other hand, the book of Proverbs lauds those with gray hair, saying that gray hair is a sign of wisdom.)  For others, those of a political bent, gray indicates failure to take a stand, an inability to distinguish what is really right from what is really wrong.  Similarly, for those who inhabit the halls of religion, gray is viewed as retreat, a refusal to recognize that the things of God are qualitatively and forever different from those of the world and will never be compatible with them.  Finally, for people who may view life as an open book, gray is the only way to view reality.  We should endeavor, such people say, to be always willing to embrace another perspective, experience, or viewpoint.  Life is incredibly diverse and no one has a monopoly on what it might mean.
     A highly interesting book, The Luminous and the Gray, by a British artist called David Batchelor, takes a different position altogether.  He presents gray as a useful counterpoint to color.  The latter, he says, bursts the world, makes it less understandable, renders it less hospitable to meaning.  Gray, he contends, offers a an appraisal of the world that pushes it into a kind of blurry uniformity which, rather than making it tedious, makes it more real.  Unless color is presented without any lines (which he asserts breaks it and, by extension, the world, up), it lacks any capacity to encourage meaning.  We find meaning, he suggests, in gray.
     The world is of course replete with colors, colors which many people find vastly meaningful.  Color infuses us all with a sense of existence.  In addition, there are things that can only be black and white, for instance, the existence of God.  Either God exists, or he does not.  On the other hand, black and white doesn't always explain things fully.  It makes a statement without giving solid evidence that it is true.
     That's the role of gray. When we look at the world as gray, we come to understand that the most profound--and seemingly rigid--delineations permeating existence communicate mystery, mystery that we cannot always solve in color or black and white. We must get used to the gray--and accept the reality and presence of the unknown.
     We are so finite.

     Amid the controversy that some expressions of Islam are stirring across the world, it's instructive to think back over one thousand years to the relationship between Europe and the Middle East and Asia during the Middle Ages.  Western Europe's emergence from the "Dark" Ages into the intellectual splendor of the Renaissance was encouraged and aided in part by the extensive learning, scientific, mathematical, and philosophical, it absorbed from the Arab Muslim countries of the Middle East.  Even as today the largely white West and the largely Islamic Middle East seem locked in interminable conflict in almost every way, neither side being openly willing to admit that the other may have learning or thinking that it might find useful, we long for a repeat of world history past.  Over a millennium ago, for a few golden decades, West and East, Europe, China, and Middle East interfaced in harmony, learning from each other, embracing each other, and working with each other for a greater good.  Setting religion aside, they strove to think the best of each other and proceeded accordingly. And the world was immeasurably better off.
     The God who created this amazing world and every person in it (consider Psalm 24:1) knows very well that we will never agree on absolutely everything.  He made all of us different, sometimes radically different from each other.  And that's good:  we grow best in a dynamic world.  To do so effectively, however, we need to love and appreciate this dynamism, and to try, however difficult it may be, to live and deal, indeed revel in, with its effects.  It's a beautifully colored world, a wonderfully woven tapestry of experience.
     We just have to find the most appropriate blend.

     A few weeks ago, October 9, to be precise, a full page advertisement appeared in the New York Times.  It said simply, "Imagine all the people living in peace."  It was placed by Yoko Ono, widow of former Beatle John Lennon.  October 9 was Lennon's birthday.  He would have been 74 this year.
     As most of us know, these words are drawn from Lennon's classic recording, "Imagine." Aside from reminding me of the enduring tragedy of Lennon's abrupt passing on December 8, 1980, Yoko's ad made me think, again, about one of the central tenets of Lennon's existential vision:  peace.  It is a vision to which Lennon devoted much of the last decade of his life.  Although we may question or debate some of his methods (sleep-ins in posh hotels; shaving off most of the hair on their head, to name just a few), most of us can hardly quarrel with their ultimate objective:  global peace.  Like the rest of us, Lennon was acutely aware of the near impossibility of achieving such a thing, but he nevertheless did his best to push the planet in that direction.  He used the accouterments of his wealth and fame to give peace a "hearing" in the discussion halls of the world.  For this, we cannot fault him.
     From most standpoints, political, religious, scientific, philosophical, cultural, we can conclude that permanent and lasting global peace will likely never happen in our lifetimes, nor the lifetimes of our very distant descendants.  There is too much baggage working against it.
     Furthermore, even if everyone on the planet is able to achieve a permanency of inner and personal peace, this will not necessarily translate into world peace.  We will remain captives of ourselves and our desires.  We cannot escape who and what we are.  Nor should we.
     Many of us find personal peace without believing in God.  However, if there is no God, our universe is a vast, empty composite of space and time.  Personal beings will never tame the meaningfulness of an impersonal universe.
     Peace needs a context beyond itself.

     When encountering the unusual or unexpected, many religious people like to remark, "Well, the Lord works in mysterious ways."
     So he does.  Why would he not?  He's infinite, we're merely finite.  For us, nearly everything God does is a mystery.  Frequently, this mystery is quite confounding.
     The other day I watched, as I had several times before, the 1982 Academy Award winning movie, "Chariots of Fire."  "Chariots," which is a true story, presents the lives of two British runners, Harold Abrams, a Jewish student at Cambridge, and Eric Liddell, a Scottish missionary in China, and how their lives come together and intertwine at the 1924 Olympics in Paris.  Each of them wins his race:  Abrams, the 100 meter dash; Liddell, the 400 meter run.  Throughout the movie, we are shown how for Abrams, running is an existential quest, what he does to affirm his existence.  As he states before he runs his race, "I have ten seconds to justify my entire existence."
     For Liddell, his running is what, as he sees it, gives God pleasure.  God, he believes, has made him fast, and he wants to run his races for God.  He likes to win, but he likes for God to win more.  As the movie draws to a close, we are told that after the Olympics Abrams returned to England in triumph, married an opera star, and became the "elder statesman" of British athletics.  He died in 1978.  On the other hand, Liddell, we are told, returned to the mission field in China, where he died of a brain tumor in a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War.  All Scotland, the movie tells us, "mourned" his passing.
     Christians of most every ilk loved this movie, and many believed that its winning the Academy Award for best picture demonstrated that God was blessing it for his use. Perhaps this is true.  It later came out, however, that Ian Charleson, the actor who so capably played Eric Liddell, was in fact a gay man when he did the role. (Regrettably, he succumbed to AIDS in 1990.)  Considering the opprobrium that some Christians heap upon the gay community, this is perhaps the ultimate irony.  Despite everything we might say or think, it seems clear that God used a person with whose lifestyle many Christians vehemently disagree to definitively proclaim the fact and worth of his name to the world.
     The Lord indeed works in mysterious ways.  And may we never suppose or think that we know completely how he does so.

     Have you seen "Tracks?"  Based on the true story of a woman who in the middle of the Seventies trekked 1700 miles alone through the inhospitable country that stretches across central Australia, "Tracks" is a portrait of determination, heartbreak, and profound passion for the unknown.  Bent on probing the riches of solitude, this woman, Robyn Davidson, now 64 years old, spent two years acquiring and training three adult camels, along with a baby camel, then set out into the incredibly vast Australian Outback.  She passed by Ayer Rock, the largest "rock" in the world, met and walked with, for a while, many native elders, shot down some charging wild bull camels, encountered a number of people who treated her with immense kindness and, sadly, lost her beloved dog one night along the way.  It was a remarkable journey.
     Anyone who has spent weeks and months in wilderness alone (as I have) can, I think, relate.  We love the allure of setting off alone into the wild, we delight in waking up to a sky that seems made only for us, we revel in our ability to shut ourselves off from the emptiness and vagary of the civilized world.  We like being alone.
     As those of us who, whether we are spiritually inclined or not, have experienced such moments can attest, solitude opens windows into the soul.  It lets us see things we would not see in the company of others, discloses to us insights we would not have seen had we remained in the thick of human community.  We see life in a new and richer light. Moreover, even a cursory look at the lives of the great spiritual masters, Buddha, Mohammad, Zoroaster, Confucius, Jesus, and countless others tells us that they grounded their lives in times of solitude and contemplation.  It was out of these hours and days of prayer and reflection that they emerged to bring the world their often life changing observations.
     Whether you use it to call more deeply to yourself, the "Great Spirit" (as singer Neil Young says), Brahman, or God, step into solitude.  Step into being alone.  Step into the fact of a universe that speaks, even if we are not, a cosmos that has been made to teach us when we do not know, a world that is powered by a truth that we are all made to find. Step into the inexhaustibility of a creation grounded in an infinite personal God.

     At one point in the atheist discussion group that I attend once a month, someone distributed a list of various verses from the Qur'an which this person had collected so as to set its observations about women, unbelief, and life in, he readily acknowledged, a decidedly disparagingly light.
     Granted, this person is not a fan of religion; he rejects the Qur'an, along with the Bible, as Bronze Age mythology.  Unfortunately, he ignores that the bulk of both documents were written many centuries into the Iron Age.  Moreover, the Qur'an, in particular, appeared on the cusp of the remarkable Arab Renaissance, whose scholarship influenced and, in some cases, impelled the rise of the Scientific Revolution in Western Europe.  While we may disagree with the Qur'an's contents, we should not dismiss it as the product of a primitive culture.
     Ironically, I therefore found myself in the rather unusual position of being a Christian who was defending Islam at a meeting of atheists!  While I do not agree with everything the Qur'an says, I do believe it is supremely vital to understand what it says in the fairest light possible.  This person relied entirely on English translations to convey his views of the Qur'an, when any scholar of religion knows that the Qur'an can only be properly understood by examining the Arabic in which it was originally written--and as any devout Muslim knows--is still used today.  Moreover, he read the Qur'an solely to criticize it, hardly the most impartial way to approach a document which over 1.6 billion people around the world consider to be sacred.
     We may not agree with everything religion--any religion--says, but we should at least make our best effort to understand it.  Religious people are as human as the rest of us. They deserve a fair hearing.  So does, for that matter, God.

      A few weeks ago, someone posed this question to me.  If we are in heaven and one of our loved ones is not, and if heaven is supposed to be a place of endless joy and bliss, won't our remembering this loved one be less than blissful if he or she is not in heaven with us?
     It's a difficult question.  The prophet Isaiah quotes God as saying that one day, a day on the other side of the divide between temporality and eternity, the "former things" will not be remembered, that what we had previously known we will know no longer.  This assertion begs more questions.  Does this mean that we will not remember everything that we had loved about this earthly existence?  Doesn't memory make us who we are? Who we are today, we are because of who we were yesterday, and who we were the day before that, and who we were the day before that, and so on.  Given this, what will we be like on the other side if everything, good or bad, that had made or brought us to this point is vanished and gone?  And what does God mean when he says that, "I am making all things new"?
     Though it is hard to say with certainty, I will note that God's newness is different from newness as we think about newness.  God's newness is something that is so radically new (and this is the thrust of the Hebrew and Greek words for "new") that it is totally unlike and not dependent upon anything that came before it.  It is the new in the truest sense of the word.  It is not the paradigm shift of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, not Europe's discovery of the Americas, not a birthday we have not had before.  All of these build upon what had preceded them.  God's newness does not.  While it recognizes the past, it is a future totally apart from it.
     This applies to memory, too.  What and how we will remember on the other side will be new, new in a way we cannot imagine, new as we cannot conceive newness in this broken yet purposeful existence.  It will be blissful, it will be wonderful, and it will be new.  God loves us, and God loves our loved ones.  But how he brings all this together we cannot now fully fathom.
     That's why like Job, we can only say, "I know that you [God] can do all things and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.  Speak, and I will listen."
     Sometimes, that's all we can do.

     Yesterday, as my siblings and I reminded each other, marks another year, another year since the passing of our father over thirty years ago.  Despite the span of those decades, we still miss him, and our mother as well.  Time may heal some, yes, but time will never fully overcome the scars its events imprint on our lives.  There are  losses that, try as we might, we cannot completely assuage.  Although we learn to live with them, though we may even come to develop a measure of acceptance about them, we will never totally erase them from our hearts.  For always and forevermore, they are embedded in the innermost patterns of our soul.
     But as one of my uncles said to me as my siblings and I prepared to leave our mother to return to our lives after saying our final good-byes to Dad, "Everyone is going back to their things." Yes, we were.  But we'd never look at them in the same way again.  Nor should we.  We're personal beings who respond to our lives in personal ways.  And our lives continue.
     Yet the universe remains, an inscrutable mystery, heading to its final denouement, its ultimate destiny.  As are we.  And what then?  Almost inevitably, death makes us wonder: what lies on the other side?
     Thanks, God, that there is more.

     In Waking Up, his latest book, Sam Harris, prominent atheist, author and, in some circles, person of significant notoriety, writes eloquently about his conviction that humans can engage in spirituality without investing in religion.  There are indeed questions, he writes, that science cannot answer, but questions for which we do not need religion to study, ponder, or examine meaningfully.  Spirituality--but not religion--on the other hand, Harris contends, provides a way to explore the "deeper" things of life in a more rational way.  Certain aspects of spirituality, such as the meditative techniques of Buddhism, he says, are testable, measurable, and verifiable, and can be employed by the person of "reason" to good effect.
     What is this "good" effect?  It is, as Harris puts it, to live in the moment.  It is to live in what is going on right now, at this very point in time, to set aside the past and future to focus exclusively on the "now."  It's a subjective response to an objective reality.
     While I am happy that Harris has found meditation to be a useful way to deal with life's contingencies and that he has achieved a measure of meaning in this precarious existence, I nonetheless believe that his assessment of what is subjective is misplaced. By its very nature, feeling is subjective.  This applies to positive feelings one experiences through personal interaction, surfing, or drag racing, for instance, as much as it does to those which one experiences in religious worship or a-theistic meditation.  Harris seems to imply that although the positive feelings one gains through meditation can be measured empirically, those that one finds in religious worship cannot.  Science, he notes, has established the empirical validity of the subjective benefits of meditation.  But it has not--and cannot--do the same for those of religious experience.  Why?  Well, the latter are of "supernatural" origin while the former are not.
     Though I do not dispute the supernatural origin and character of religion, I do question that this means that we cannot establish or measure any of its benefits empirically. Subjectivity is subjectivity.  While we may not believe such benefits have a supernatural origin, we cannot say that they cannot be measured.  We live in an objective reality to which we respond subjectively, yes, but we should be able as rational beings to measure such responses--all responses--objectively.  We cannot have it both ways.

     Around this time a couple of years ago, I wrote, using an excerpt from my book Imagining Eternity, about the moment in which I decided that Jesus Christ was undeniably divine, real, and objectively and subjectively true.  This week marks forty years since that moment in the mountains outside of the tiny town of Jasper, Alberta, in the heart of the Canadian Rockies.  Forty years, forty remarkable years that I find difficult to fathom or measure; forty arduous years as well, forty years of believing in and grappling with a person whose fullness I cannot in this life exhaustively assess; forty years of following and listening to a divine being who has never made himself visibly known to me; forty years of living with a single focus, to know and proclaim Jesus Christ, of living this life while believing in one beyond it, one I cannot now see, yet one that I believe frames and explains this present experience.  A life of faith.
     So why believe?  Why live a life that, as the apostle Paul puts it, is one of faith and not one of sight?  Why be a rational being who is living a life devoted to the non-rational (but not irrational)?  Oddly, I live this life because I see that faith, believe it or not (no pun intended!), is, in light of everything that this life comprises, the most rational thing I can do.  Given the fact of my personhood; the fact of my mind and consciousness; the fact of the universes's incredibly complexity and order; the innate longing of every human being for meaning in a supposedly meaningless universe; the presence of love in a reputedly cold and dark cosmos; the fact of the moral sense and the truth of right and wrong; the historicity, veracity, and reliability of the Bible; and the millions and millions of people, including me, who have completely changed, in a positive way, their outlooks on themselves and existence in response to what they perceived to be a divine inbreaking or call; I see no other way to understand, rationally, the undeniable facts of life, beingness, purpose, and presence.
     I believe, by faith, because I cannot believe that, by faith, scientific or otherwise, I can come to believe, rationally, that you and I, and the entire world as well, are all, to borrow some words from Carl Sagan in his best selling Cosmos, that is and all that ever will be.
     And the journey continues.

     At an art exhibit my wife and I attended a couple of weeks ago, I came upon a mixed media work entitled "Running Alone in a Chaotic World."  It depicted a figure running into (or perhaps out of; maybe that's the point) a tangled golden red horizon, the ground looking almost on fire, the sky singularly opaque.  For me, this communicated for me the way that many people feel about existence.  Though most of us live bravely and purposefully, dealing with life's challenges as they come, finding happiness in a host of pursuits, uncovering meaning as we confront the full nature of reality, we do so alone. We may have friends, we may have family, we may have community, we may have God, but we ultimately face existence alone.  It's us and the universe.  And while it may be a highly ordered universe, unless God is in it, it is, at best, an accident.  It's here, but it has no reason to be here.  It happened, it become, and that's all.  It's a wonderful world, but it's a world lilting on the edge of nothingness.
     It's too facile to simply say that if God is there, we are not alone.  Though I do not dispute that this is true, I think it's deeper than that.  We're still running in a chaotic world.  The larger question is, are we running into an existence that one day will end without a whimper or sound, swallowed up in its own destiny, or are we running into an existence that one day will, paradoxically enough, never end?  We run, we run alone.  Yet in a world of opaque skies and shimmering but finite gold red horizons, where are we running to?

     Today, America remembers--or at least makes a pretense of doing so--Columbus Day. By putting it this way, I mean that unless they get the day off from work, most Americans, I suspect, pay little attention to the meaning of this second Monday in October.  It's just another day of life.
     So why does America remember Christopher Columbus?  Extensive research has found Columbus to be decidedly less wonderful than he had been considered to be fifty years ago.  Our best evidence indicates that he engaged in questionable financial transactions; participated in excessive political pandering; mistreated the American natives he met; and used his religion (or at least the idea of God) to justify his frequently debasing actions. Moreover, as many a Native American historian has remarked, 1492, the year Columbus "discovered" the Americas, is one that sparked many centuries of tremendous suffering for the thousands of people who had at that time called the Americas their home.  Although the natives' descendants today benefit, in part, from the material improvements that Westernizing of the Americas has brought them, far too many of them continue to languish on the margins of society.  They remain ostracized and forgotten in their native land.
     So why remember this?  History teaches us many things.  In this instance, it teaches us that when we search for individual riches and glory at all costs, particularly in the name of religion, we too often demean and deny the goodness and glory of everything and everyone else.  In the big picture, the discovery of the Americas has benefited people the world over.  In painting a big picture, however, we too often forget that it is the product of a multitude and often conflicting individual brush strokes.
     While I do not claim to speak for God, I cannot help but think that he would rather have seen things done differently.  He doesn't need brutality to let people know about his love for them, and he certainly doesn't need those who proclaim his virtue and holiness to inflict suffering and pain on those to whom they are "trying" to make him known.

     Along with pondering the terrible complexity of belief during my weekend away, I also thought about the perhaps even more troubling paradox of how in life two things can be simultaneously true, but seemingly not.
     I think here about the ageless debate over divine sovereignty and human will.  Unless we totally dismiss the fact of God, this is a debate that we will never solve.  I do not pretend to cover all of the issues in a short blog.  Entire books have been written about this question.  What I'm thinking about is how hard it is to live with some sort of metaphysical tension.  By its nature, the metaphysical invites tension. For starters, we can't see it.  And if we attribute to the metaphysical some ability to confer worldly value, such as human worth or cosmic meaning, we compound the issue.  How do we measure such assertions?  How do we compare what we see with what we do not while believing that they are both true?
     On the other hand, if the metaphysical exists, and if it exercises some degree of activity in this material reality, we will always find ourselves believing simultaneously in some sort of divine sovereignty and the fact of human will.  They're both real, they're both true.  By themselves, they do not always make sense, yet together they do not always do, either.
     So what do we do?  We decide that we can live without knowing everything fully even while we resolve to live knowing everything fully, everything, that is, we can hear, taste, smell, touch, and see, yet everything, that is, we do not.  We cannot escape our finitude, we cannot elude our place.  We're sovereign, yet God is, too.  It's a story both of us begin, yet it's a story only one of us will end.
     The challenges--and joys--of humanness.

     Last weekend, I went camping.  The weather was typical October in the Midwest: crisp, windy, spotty rain, afternoon and morning sun.  The leaves were turning, the squirrels busy hunting, the clouds looking like mountains when the sun rose over them.  As I walked through the forest and gazed at the rock formations rising over them, or as I looked at the evening's stars, I thought often of the terrible complexity of believing in God in such a wonderful world.
     Genesis tells us that after he created it, God called the world good.  He called Adam and Eve good, too.  Many years later, however, he came to regret placing humanity in this world.  Noah knew this well.  Yet many, many more years after the Flood, God set himself into the world, subjecting himself to the full gamut of its vagaries and machinations.  In Jesus, he became a human being.
     In the present moment, however, we do not see God, physically, in the creation.  We do not see God, physically, in the wonder and beauty, and we do not see God, physically, in the turmoil and pain that unfortunately run through it.  We gasp at the joy life brings, we weep over the suffering it engenders.  And we do not see God, physically, in either one.
     But we believe.  Believing is a terrible complexity because it is a complexity that frightens as well as comforts, undermines as much as it upholds, a faith in, as Hebrews 11:1 puts it, the hoped for and unseen.  It sets tension at the heart of existence.  Faith is complicated.  Life is complicated, too.  And so is God.  That is why we keep going, whether we believe or not:  we know that what we see, physically, is more than what we think, materially, it is.
     As Island of Knowledge:  The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning, a recently published book by an astronomer who teaches at Dartmouth College, remarks, there are things that even the best science will never fully see.  We walk in a shadow, a terribly complex shadow woven with knowledge and belief, belief that frightens, belief that overwhelms, yet belief that opens the door of what we do not--and cannot--know.

     Perhaps you've read about the Climate March that took place in New York City a couple of weeks ago.  Over 400,000 people marched through the streets of New York City to advocate for increased political and economic attention to addressing the impact of climate change.  Whether you believe in climate change (known previously as global warming) or not, I do not believe you can dismiss that we are obligated to care for the planet.  It's God's gift to us, and we ought to treat it with care.
     On this note, it's difficult to reject, for instance, that continued use of highly polluting sources of power will not eventually impact humanity negatively.  One look at downtown Beijing should convince anyone of this.  Nor is it difficult to ignore that the number of intense and unusual weather events has increased steadily in the last decade, or that many forests of the world are dying early deaths due to the proliferation of insect pests emboldened by warming temperatures across the planet.  Things do seem to be changing, often in very dramatic ways.
     The larger issue, however, is a moral one.  Why do we wish to preserve the planet?  It is of course our only home, and it is of course all that we materially know, at least at the moment.  But the planet is also, as I said earlier, God's gift to us.  Unfortunately, traditional interpretations of God's mandate ("rule and subdue") to Adam and Eve in Genesis have encouraged human depredation of the world, the abuse of the gift.  Yet the mandate is actually to rule with benevolence and care.  We are called to tend the world, to steward it for the future.
     God is asking us to watch over what we've been given.  He made it; we only occupy it for, in the big picture, a very short season.  As Psalm 24 notes, "The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it."  And what a grand world it is.

     Late last week, the world received word that Jean-Claude Duvalier, otherwise known as "Baby Doc," the one-time ruler of Haiti, had died, victim of a heart attack, at the age of 63.  Few people outside of Duvalier's family, I suspect, will mourn his passing.  All evidence indicates that his was a brutal reign, a time of unchecked secret police activity, unrelenting torture of those whom Duvalier disliked, and widespread governmental graft and corruption.  When he voluntarily stepped down from his dictatorship in 1986, Duvalier reportedly held hundreds of millions in foreign bank accounts, stolen from his native land, and went on to live a "good" life in southern France.
     In recent years, however, Duvalier returned to Haiti, saying that he wanted to help the country rebuild in the wake of hurricane damage and a national ennui.  Although not many Haitians believed him, he stayed.  As I pondered Duvalier's passing, I thought frequently of a verse from the fourth chapter of Ecclesiastes.  It reads, "There is no end to all the people, to all who were before them, and even the ones who will come later will not be happy with him [a ruler], for this too is vanity [futility] and striving after wind."
     Thrust into Haiti's spotlight at the age of 19, when his father, "Papa Doc," died, Duvalier lived a life, though it was marked with influence, wealth, and power, was ultimately a life spent in futility.  The tragedy is enormous.  Duvalier could have done a great deal for his native land; instead, he did a great deal for himself.  Now, neither he nor Haiti are better off for it.
     As the old hymn goes, "Be Thou my vision, Lord, be Thou my vision." 

     I've been amazed at the interest in Apple's new I Phone 6.  You have doubtless seen or heard some of the news reports about it, the thousands of people lined up at Apple stores around the world; the millions upon millions of product that Apple has shipped in a little less than a month; and, perhaps most significantly, the furor erupting over the phone's capacity to encrypt itself against even the most sophisticated governmental scrutiny of its contents.
    This leaves us with an intriguing dichotomy.  On the one hand, we have, in the I Phone 6, the continuing and unrequited promise of technology's ability to bring us ever increasing communicative facility and access to information.  Most of us appreciate this. On the other hand, we have the specter of this ability generating new waves of, alternately, governmental skepticism or governmental embrace.  Governments enjoy informational access as much as anyone, and yet governments, just as many people do, also enjoy, if they need to, abusing such access.  It cuts both ways.
     Therein is the problem.  In a world in which morality is largely construed in relative terms, finding the real good becomes highly difficult.  What is good often becomes what works best for the most people.  It's utilitarian.  But this fails to tell us what real good is. Most of us would agree that, on balance, technology, including the I Phone 6, has been tremendously beneficial.  And most of us would agree that, on balance, governments have some degree of responsibility to maintain order in a given country.  Yet this still doesn't tell us what the greatest good really is.  Technology isn't an absolute, nor is the way we use it, either.
     As we continue to enjoy technology, we need to remind ourselves that the good we see in it is almost always relative to our station in life. When it's all about us, it's rarely the final good.  More than anything else, we need a transcendent lens, a lens in which everything can be set, a lens in which morality is more than the sum of our felt destiny and purpose:  a lens invested in the metaphysical.

     Most of us have heard about the awful inroads that the Ebola virus is making in the people groups of western Africa.  It seems unstoppable.  The latest estimates are that it will kill over a million people by the end of the year.  We have all seen photographs of dead bodies being carried out of homes by workers, and we have probably all heard about the many health care workers who have succumbed to the disease while treating others for it.  And this, most people fear, are only the beginning.

     How do we deal with such horror?  How do we deal with the sight of a father thrashing and coughing up blood as his family watches him die?  How do we deal with the sight of a young man weeping as workers take away the body of his mother?  How do we deal with the dread, the raw, unvarnished dread that is sweeping through village after village?
     (And now, it seems, even in the affluent West.)
     We send money, we support the workers, we pray.  Yet as in the case of the father who, I mentioned last week, in a fit of rage, killed his six grandchildren, his daughter, and himself, we often feel helpless, utterly hopeless, in the face of such unspeakable horror. I'm reminded of the recollections of an Iraqi who was tortured by former leader Saddam Hussein's secret police, strapped to a table deep underground, screaming and screaming and, he said, "No one could hear me."
     Is anyone listening?  Is anyone hearing the cries of the oppressed, the wails of despair that ravage the world?  Such thoughts make positing intimations of God exceedingly difficult.  Is he really out there?
     He is.  But we won't know it until we ask.  And we won't ask until we realize and decide that we can.  And we indeed can.  Jesus didn't die and rise for naught:  in his life, and death, God felt--and feels--our pain.

      "Sickness will take the mind where the mind doesn't usually go."  So sang the Who on their classic rock album "Tommy," released in 1969.  When I hear these words, which I did recently, I think of the American novelist Flannery O'Connor.  O'Connor, who died of lupus at the age of 41, suffered terribly from various ailments, including lupus, for most of her adult life.  And her novels reflected this.  In story after story, O'Connor depicted people on the margins of society, people whose appearance most found repulsive, people whose lives seemed marked by exceptional chaos and pain, people who lived lives that, as the existentialist Jean Paul Sartre might have put it, were abjectly cruel and lonely.  With these motifs as backdrop, O'Connor was able to explore the meaning of pain, a fact of life with which she constantly had to deal.  Tellingly, however, she painted pictures of lives in which pain, although it crumpled many a person, proved, in the end, to be redemptive.  It bequeathed a greater sense of meaning.
     Almost any religion (O'Connor was a deeply devout Catholic) will agree that this is true.  Be it the effects of karma, the virtues of asceticism, the self-abnegation of piety and sacrifice or, to paraphrase Jesus as Luke's gospel records him, letting go of everything for God, religion affirms the redemptive nature of pain.
     We can divide pain into roughly two categories.  One, pain that we invite.  This could include the pain involved in achieving athletic prowess, scholarly acumen, vocational success, or familial comity. Two, pain that we do not invite but which comes anyway, such as O'Connor's lupus or any other debilitating disease.  Either way, we learn from it. We may not always like it, we may not always appreciate it, but in an almost perverted way (given our fallen world) pain opens up our minds to things of which we have not previously thought.  It's almost cleansing.
     Looking at this from another angle, if we hold the world to be a broken but still viable medium of existence, a medium in which pain is inevitable, pain, it seems, may be the only way out of it.  O'Connor recognized that although pain is a terrible thing to endure, the greater pain is that it took God's pain, to wit, watching his only Son die on a cross, to definitively overcome it.  As a holy God well knew, human brokenness--spiritual fracture in particular--cannot heal itself.

     If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that we do not always do the right thing. No one among us eludes our own fallenness.  We all, as many religions, put it, sin.  We all do not always do what pleases or sustains the divine fabric of the universe.
     Few religious groups understand this as well as the Jews.  This week, Jews around the world celebrate Yom Kippur, or the "Day of Atonement."  On this day, Jews acknowledge their sinfulness before God.  They admit their wrongdoing, own up to their prevarications.  And they repent.  They tell God they are sorry for disobeying and violating his commandments and laws.  Then they announce their intention to begin anew to live lives that please their creator.
     So the Jews have done for many centuries, and so they will do for many centuries more.  Their faith remains.
     Although we may not agree with the specifics of the Jewish approach, and though we may not see wrongdoing in quite the same way, we must all admit that, to repeat, we do not always do the right thing.  Every one of us is (or ought to be) aware that, at times, he or she upsets the delicate balance of freedom and order that governs the cosmos.
     If this balance is to be more than relative, there must be a God.  The Jews recognize this clearly.  So do Christians, and so do Muslims.  And so do adherents of countless other religions.  Absolute and therefore genuinely meaningful morality is impossible without God.  Otherwise, repentance is no more than shouting in a relativistic dark, the darkness of an accidental, and therefore, as scientist Steven Weinberg observes, pointless universe.