Like many of us, I regret that, driven by various competitive pressures, some retailers in the States have chosen to open their Black Friday sales on Thanksgiving evening.  In many ways, this represented one of the nadirs of capitalism:  doing whatever it takes to make a profit, basing one's motivation solely on whatever opportunity the market will bear.  Such obsession should cause us all to pause and ask ourselves about how we conduct not just ourselves but how we manage our desires.
     Desire is good, yes, and desire drives us to do many great and wonderful things.  Nevertheless, we do well to remember the essence of the moment before us.  It is not about shopping, it's not about supplying our loved ones with as many material goods as we can afford, it's not about draining out bank accounts to throw a lavish party, it's not about diverting every thought into an experience that in most households lasts barely an hour, if that, but rather it is to recognize that, as Jesus put it in Mark 1:15, "The kingdom of God is at hand."
     Though we may cringe at the idea of a kingdom in the largely democratic West, we miss the point if we summarily dismiss Jesus' words.  He is not talking about a kingdom in the sense of knights and castles and physical hegemony but rather a kingdom of the heart, a kingdom that calls us to love, to care, to move ourselves toward inner transformation of mind, body, and soul, and be better citizens of the planet and the greater realities in which it sits.  Jesus' kingdom is not one of arrogance and might, nor one of dogma and exclusivity, but a kingdom of welcome and grace and community, a community rooted in a profound truth:  God, the ultimate and overwhelmingly real beginning and repository of existential meaning, the great and longed for Emmanuel, the Christ, is with us, with us now, tomorrow, next year, and forevermore.
     We live for and live in immeasurably more than ourselves.  I trust that as we go into this Christmas shopping season, we all realize this, realize it in our minds, our bodies, our hearts.  God is real, God is there, God is the resolution of all desire, obsession, and expectation.
     "The kingdom of God is at hand."

     As Americans celebrate Thanksgiving, we all, I think, find ourselves being thankful for many things.  I talked yesterday about Beethoven's Ode to Joy and its profound paeans to the wonder and power of existence. I am indeed thankful for life and how every human being has the opportunity to live it.  Even more, I am thankful for the God from whom life comes and in whom existence and the cosmos in which it dwells find meaning and sense.
     On the other hand, all of us are aware, I suspect, that countless people across the face of this vast planet do not have the opportunity to live life as they wish or please.  Too many people spend their days, the only days, I might add, that they will ever have on this earth, living lives bent by tyranny and oppression.  For this, I weep.  For this, I cringe, trembling at the inhumanity of humanity.
     Though little I or anyone could say can ameliorate the immediacy of these terrible situations, I will say, on this Thanksgiving Day, that we can be thankful that those of us who are not in subjugation, of whatever kind--religious, political, cultural, or economic--are given a moral sense that enables us to define and address and respond to these tragedies.  We can be thankful that we care, that we are moral beings who live in a moral universe.
     And for this, we can give thanks ultimately that we are not plops, as one person put it, of matter without a point or meaning.  We can give thanks that, ultimately, there is a God, a God from whom all morality comes. We indeed weep at oppression, we rightly cringe at human pain.  Yet because there is a God, we can also be thankful that no one, absolutely no one is totally ignored or forgotten.
     Wherever and whoever you are this Thanksgiving, be grateful for the grace and ubiquity of God.
     And live in it.

     Have you heard Beethoven's Ninth Symphony?  The nineteenth century German composer's last symphony, the Ninth is perhaps most famous for its final movement, the so-called Ode to Joy, a glorious paean to the glory of humanity and its existence in the world.  Although I've heard the movement many times, I heard it again the other day, and came away, struck again, by its deep passion for life.
     When I consider the context in which Beethoven wrote this magnificent symphony, the aftermath of the European Enlightenment and the emerging Romantic movement in the West and the vast shifts in worldview that these engendered, I marvel at the drive, the unmitigated drive of humanity to find its place, its meaning and purpose in the cosmos.  With the Enlightenment, the Western intellectuals abandoned the idea that God was a legitimate path to truth, and in the Romantic movement proceeded to develop a new idea of what truth might be.  Ironically, the Romantics averred that truth may yet be found in some sort of eternity--but not a personal God--while the rest of Europe, soon caught up in the technology of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, concluded that truth might in fact never be found at all.
     Nonetheless, people continued to look for meaning.  They do so even today, usually settling for finding it in the richness of existence, the fullness of living, or the encompassing wonder of being alive in a vibrant world.  Whether they know it or not, they live in the spirit of the Ode to Joy every day.
     Whatever else we may think about the Enlightenment or the Romantics, we can thank Beethoven who, despite his inner torments, gave us an anthem for all seasons, a fervent shout of joy to all that is beautiful in the world.  As Thanksgiving approaches, we can rejoice in our existence each day.  We can be thankful that we are here, that we are loved, that we have life.  We can delight in the beauty of knowing that we are alive, every moment of every day.
     It's a wonderful picture of the heart of God.

     I first read about Dorian Paskowitz about a decade ago.  A surfer and doctor who died last week at the age of 93, he made his mark by leaving his profession behind and raising his family in a 24-foot camper on the beaches of California.  He insisted that his children would benefit more from reading books and traveling across North America than sitting in a conventional educational setting.
     Paskowitz may well be right.  Conventional schools often tend to stifle or inhibit the creativity of many people.  Moreover, far too many of us seek (often for perfectly legitimate reasons) what is safe or secure rather than the adventurous and uncontrollable.  We may be more comfortable, but we may also miss on something bigger and, in the big picture, more meaningful.
     We can fit this into a number of scenarios, ranging from vocation to family to religion. It is often the people who take the most chances, intellectually, artistically, culturally, physically, or spiritually who reap the greatest existential rewards.  We might observe, however, that this is how God intended for us to live, for ourselves, and for him.  We're born to be, and become.  God and life are profound mysteries.  They may be dangerous, they may be hard, they may be joyful, they may be easy.  But they cannot be mastered fully.
     And we wouldn't want it any other way.  Nor would God.  Just ask Jesus.

     In a recent interview, Larry Ellison, America's Cup winner, technology magnate, and one of the richest people in the United States, said that, "Death makes me very angry.  It doesn't make any sense." Katherine Kubler Ross, best known for her highly influential dissection of the processes of death, might respond that Ellison is merely encountering the initial stages of the human awareness of death.  In the end, she might add, he will accept it.
     Ellison, however, sees it differently.  He is spending millions of dollars (pocket change to him) to develop ways to sustain life indefinitely.  If death is nonsense, he wants no part of it.  A biologist might argue that death is an inevitable, even necessary part of life, for it enables the creation to renew and refresh itself; a theologian might suggest that death is the inevitable result of a sin which has fractured the entire created order and was not originally meant to occur; a psychologist or philosopher might add that death is simply another experience which fuels the richness of the human adventure and that we should not strive to avoid it.  And so on.
     So maybe death is not necessarily nonsense, but rather an experience, an inevitable, even essential experience that can be best understood in the full compass of who we and the universe are.  Few of us want to die, yet almost all of us comprehend that one day we will.  We may not like it, we may abhor it, we may get angry at it, but most of us are reasonable enough to understand that we cannot stop it from happening.
     Would we want to?  I would think that we would want to stop death only if the rest of the cosmos was equipped to deal with an experience of indefinite and undefined existence.  Otherwise, we would be living among people in a universe not always prepared to accommodate us. Eternality and materiality do not always mix well.
     Except once:  in the person of Jesus Christ.  If we are to understand Jesus as he presented himself to be, we understand that he was the eternal born into and living in the temporal.  More than anyone else, Jesus fused that for which we instinctively long (endless life) with that which many of us (particularly Larry Ellison) vehemently hate (death)--and came out the better for it.  But Jesus had to die before he could experience it fully.
     As must we.  Though this may sound like a cliche, I'll say it:  only in death will we see genuine life.  Only in death will we see life as it was meant to be, an eternal existence in an eternal setting, not an endless adventure in a temporal fishbowl.
     It's the most real dream.

     A few weeks ago, I noticed a Facebook posting from a Muslim friend of mine saying that, sadly, his mother had died.  "I pray," he wrote, "that Allah will forgive her sins and that she will go to the Jannah Firdu."  [Jannah Firdu is the highest level of the Muslim Paradise.]  How simple (in the richest sense) is my friend's perception of reality.  When we live, we live being obedient to Allah, and when we die, we die falling into Allah's arms.  There's no gray.  Whether we live or die, we are Allah's.
     Writing from a different standpoint yet voicing similar sentiments, the apostle Paul said in his letter to the church at Philippi, "To live is Christ, to die is gain."  Whether we live or die, we belong to God.  Whether we are here not elsewhere, we do so in the arms of the Creator.
     I sent a card to my friend, telling him how sorry I was and that I would be praying for him.  Having lost my own mother a little over four years ago, I know firsthand how difficult a loss it can be.  Indeed, it is one from which I--and he--will likely never get over.  But we carry on, believing, trusting, bending ourselves to a reality which we will never undo.
     Whether we are Christians, Muslims, or adherents of other faith traditions, we know and believe that life is at once immensely complex and innately simple:  it comes, it goes, then, singularly and profoundly, it comes again.  When death therefore comes, all that will be left of us is that from which we and everything else have come:  God.
     We know we're coming back.

     Yesterday, I wrote about my experience of watching a production of the Diary of Anne Frank.  Today, the play still very much on my mind, I think about an observation of French philosopher Theodor Adorno who, writing about the Holocaust, said, "The Holocaust means that we cannot forget memory."  Although the memory of the Holocaust can be highly debilitating, he noted, it is a memory which actually revives and strengthens.
     Adorno is right on here.  We all have things in our lives that we would like to forget. On the other hand, there are things that have happened to us, things whose impact has been so profoundly painful and negative that they in fact produce positive returns for us, as well as our fellow human beings.  The few Holocaust survivors who still walk the earth live as daily reminders to the rest of us of the necessity of all memory, good, bad, or otherwise, in that it is often the most awful remembrances that yield the richest of present return.  While we certainly do not say this in the midst of the experiences that produce these memories, when I listen to Holocaust survivors recount their experience, then reflect on their lives today, I realize that I am hearing people who have been to a hell, an earthly hell beyond imagination, and back--and are still here to tell us about it. They know, know in the most profound sense, deeply and clearly and passionately, in ways the rest of us simply cannot.
     Nor would some of us want to.  So we stand in awe before a God who, in the person of Jesus Christ, endured the Cross.

     Have you read the Diary of Anne Frank?  If you have, you know it is the recovered diary of a young Jewish girl who, along with her father, mother, and sister, and another family (and one more man) were hidden in an apartment during the Nazi reign of terror in World War II Europe.  Unfortunately, not too long before the war ended, everyone was betrayed, removed from their hiding place, and shipped to various concentration camps to the east.  Most of them lost their lives.  Anne's father, however, survived, and after the war returned to the Netherlands and retrieved her diary.
     I read the diary decades ago, but had occasion to think about it again when I saw a play production, The Diary of Anne Frank, recently.  Though dozens of thoughts flooded my head during the two and a half hours of the play, one to which I kept returning was the bittersweet nexus of familial love and abject terror in which everyone constantly moved.  Ensconced in love, they were also trapped in terror, unwilling to leave the one, unable to abandon the other.  They lived with a profound and unyielding tension, physical as well as spiritual, a tension which most of us may never experience, their lives as fragile as gossamer yet potent as the mightiest army to stride the earth.
     All the people had was love, love for each other, and love for their creator.  They lived in the former, they rested--and trusted--in the latter.  No doubt they were familiar with Psalm 46:10, which reads, translated from the Hebrew, "Relax, let go, and know that I am God."  In the end, this trust was all they had.  Did it let them down?  Some might say yes:  nearly all of them died.  Others will say no, for they died believing that they had lived, and would continue to live, a life larger than life itself.  Caught in a most painful tension, they set themselves free.
     As many a rabbi will say, "The eyes of God are everywhere."

     In one of his many essays, the English writer C. S. Lewis, who died nearly fifty years ago, November 22, 1963 (the same day, I might add, that John Kennedy and Aldous Huxley died as well), pondered the meaning of the German word Sehnsucht. Although Sehnsucht is generally translated as a longing or wishing viscerally for something, Lewis chose to describe it as a “inconsolable longing” for “we know not what.”
     At first glance, we might wonder how we can long for something we “know not what.”  On the other hand, I suspect all of us have found ourselves, at one point or another in our lives, wishing for something, something intangible, something unimaginable, maybe even something unspeakable, yet something we feel that we must have, something we believe we cannot live without—but we do not always know why.  We may not be able to describe it fully, we may not be able to define it completely, but we know—we sense—that we long for and want it.  It’s mysterious, it’s elusive, but it’s real, too.
     Some, including Lewis, called this longing a longing for God.  Others, those who perhaps do not share Lewis’s Christian sentiments, would call it our natural human bent, our natural human inclination to know more than what we know at the moment.  Maybe, in their own way, both sides are right.  Unless we long, we are not really human.  But unless we long for something beyond ourselves, we are not human, either.  If we never longed for anything beyond ourselves, we would be complete.  But we all know that we are deeply fractured and damaged beings.  We are far from complete.  So we long.  As the Buddhists might say, that which is impermanent cannot be permanent.  Yet permanence, lastingness,and wholeness are those for which we all long.  For only what is permanent can satisfy the longing of what is not.

     Is faith believing in something without evidence?  Many, including some in my atheist discussion group, believe that it is.  According to every dictionary definition they can find, one but, significantly, not all definitions of faith is a belief or conviction without any evidence for it.  Fair enough.  What many people overlook,however, is that according to dictionaries that present the full etymology of words, in its most original sense in the English language faith was construed as a sense of trust.  Drawn from the Latin word fide, faith connotes a willingness to trust what one cannot necessarily, at least for the moment, visibly hear, touch, taste, or see.
     So why do people choose to trust in this way?  People choose to trust in this way because they have sufficient reason, based on reasonable research and experience, to do so.  No thoughtful religious person would choose to believe for no reason.  No rational and spiritually inclined person (by the way, despite what one might think, rationality and spiritually are not antithetical) would elect to trust if she could see no credible reason to do so.  People who choose to have faith do so because they have good reason to trust the objective historical evidence for its object.  They believe in God because they see no good reason not to trust the objective historical witness of his activity in the world and the human heart.
     Can we see God?  Can we hear God?  Although some people insist they have, most of us have not.  Yet we have ample and credible historical testimony as well as the present experience of those who believe in him to conclude that he is there and, as the late Francis Schaeffer said, is not silent.
     Faith is exceedingly complex, but it is also exceedingly simple.  To repeat, in its most basic form, faith is trust.  We all trust, all the time.  We all trust the future, that it will happen, and we all trust the past, that it indeed happened.  We trust ourselves, most of the time, and we trust each other, most of the time.  Why?  We have good reason to do so.
     So it is with faith in God and, from a Christian standpoint, Jesus Christ.  We trust them because we have good reason to do so.  Perhaps we cannot see them, perhaps we cannot hear them.  But others have.  History testifies amply to this.  We trust, we believe. We trust and believe because others, people who had far more reason (for they were eyewitnesses of the risen Christ) than we to do so.  And we trust because all things considered--scientific, philosophical, and otherwise--we have no good reason not to.
     But we have to trust.

     After running through a forest preserve the other morning, I came home, fixed myself some tea, and sat down to read through the ninth chapter of Ecclesiastes.  I read about its assertion of the futility of existence, that in the end it will not matter what we do, good or bad, for we all will die anyway.  Death has no favorites.
     (And I wondered whether like my father, who died at the age of 63, I would, too. Again:  death has no favorites.)
     Then I read through some chapters in Revelation, the last book of the Bible, wondering about its precise meaning, wondering precisely how John's vision of the end of the world will really be expressed in the span of human history and time.  Will there really be massive lights and flames in the sky?  Will there really be angels sounding trumpets across the planet?  Will there really be a plague of some type of locust that will kill one third of humankind?  Are there really glassy seas in heaven?  How will the world really end?
     No doubt, some of these descriptions are figurative, and no doubt that the person who had this vision lived in a very different time from our own, many historical miles from the abundant scientific technology we possess for exploring cosmological variants today.  Yet maybe that's not the point.  I think most of us can agree that death has no favorites, and I think that all of us can agree that when we die we will no longer be physically attached to our earthly achievements.  Death is thoroughly black and white.  We're either alive, or we are dead.  There's nothing in between.
     Where we might differ is the extent to which, as Revelation sees it, God will intervene in the world as it approaches its final days.  So what can we learn from comparing these very different passages of scripture?  Two things.  One, life means more, right now, because it ends.  We do not know our time.  We therefore strive to make every minute count.  Two, even though the world will one day come to an absolute end, if God, in some way, is working through it, this end means more than itself.  It will also be a beginning. And we likewise endeavor to make every moment of life count, for each moment rests not only in a catastrophic nothingness of stardust and plasma, but in the tangible vision of a personal and infinite God.

     A few months ago, I wrote about musician David Bowie's song, Starman.  When I heard it again last night, I thought about it again.  What strikes me about it is its chorus, which talks about the Starman, lurking and hovering over us on the planet, maybe wanting to come down, but thinking that if he does, it will "blow our minds."  This is so much, it seems, like us and God.  So many of us wonder about God, wonder whether a God exists and, if he (or she) does, what is he like?  What would it be like to see this God, to interact with this "being" whom we think might be lurking and hovering over us?  If we saw him, would he really blow our minds?
     If God is any kind of almighty being, and we were to see him, he probably would blow our minds.  We likely would not know what to do.  How does one deal with a being whose power and grace far exceed our own?  Although countless religions have tried to quantify or reduce God into human terms, to render him into a package to which people can more readily relate, none do so perfectly.  Whether it is the Krishna of Hinduism, the Sosyant of Zororasterianism, the Jesus of Christianity, or countless others, as the Hindus call them, avatars, of the divine, the being (God) whom these efforts present remains shrouded in mystery.  People still cannot understand God fully.
     Of course, given my starting point, I find it easy to commend Jesus as the most meaningful of these attempts, but as anyone who has read the New Testament knows, even Jesus is a person of befuddlement and intrigue.  As he should be.  Regardless of how we try to reduce God to into terms we can understand, he will remain God.  For this, we can be grateful as well as awed.  We can be grateful because we have a point to which to look for some level of ultimate understanding, and we can be awed, and humbled, that we are not so smart and mighty that we can suppose that we know all things.  Besides, how would we know we do?

     We'd have to blow our minds.

     Have you been in the military of any country?  If so, you likely know that most nations of the world have set aside a special day in their calendar year to honor those who have. For the U.S., this day is November 11, the day that students of World War I know marks the day that the armistice that ended that war took effect (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month).  Most municipal, state, and federal offices close, many schools shutter themselves, and a few businesses give their employees the day off.
     I am not a warmonger.  All things considered, I would rather the nations of the world never fight again.  I do not live to engage in and love war and combat, and I do not favor using war to resolve international differences.  Broadly speaking, I do not believe that God does, either.
     Yet wars happen, and many people feel called to or are conscripted to fight in them. Unfortunately, while some survive, far too many do not.  And this doesn't count the untold numbers of civilians who perish, too.  War's tragedy is immense.  So when I think about Veterans Day, I think about the horror of war, and I think about the safety of innocent people.  I also think about the sense of duty many people feel to their country. In addition, I think about the sin of the world, the fact of human compassion, and the beauty of peace.  And I think about God's willingness, in Jesus Christ, to die for us--and the world--so as to set all things right.  And I try to put all of these together.
     It's not easy.  It's not easy to know what, amid the forest, God thinks.  It's not easy to know what eternity, the lens by which all things will be assessed, envisioned, and judged, means.  But it's easy to know that God is present, in peace as well as war, his love for us ever unchanged.  What kind of a God would he be if he were not?

     Recently, I saw a very interesting movie called Europa Report.  The astronomers among us will know that Europa is one of the principal moons of Jupiter, known to us since the days of the Scientific Revolution.  As the movie's story unfolds, we learn that a group of astronauts is traveling to Europa, commissioned to conduct a series of experiments to determine whether this moon is indeed suitable for life.  Previous observations had given researchers strong reason to think that it was.  After a journey of nearly a year, this group of astronauts was about to find out.
     Unfortunately, once the expedition lands, one by one, for various reasons, its members encounter situations resulting in their death.  One falls through the ice that covers the moon's surface; one accidentally spills a lethal substance on his space suit and is barred from reentering the ship for fear he would contaminate its ventilation systems (he is left to drift into space, quickly succumbing to the loss of oxygen, saying that, "I thought I was doing a great thing, but now . . . ." as he died); one dies of disease; another perishes when trying to stop the ship from crashing following an aborted take-off. Eventually, only two are left.
     As one of these two, a woman, recounts what happened next, she constantly returns to the phrase, "Compared to the knowledge yet to be known, what does your life matter?"
     In the final frames of the movie, we see that everything we have seen to this point is merely a recording of what has happened.  In fact, not one person on the expedition survives.  We are only left with a video.  In the final frame of the video, however, we are treated to a startling sight:  as the landing craft sinks inexorably through the ice and water rushes in, a massive octopus like creature appears, its tentacles aiming for the woman.  Life indeed exists on Europa.
     So does the person who administered the expedition remark, "This [image] will forever change the context in which humanity understands itself."
     Maybe so.  Pondering the fact of life is always a risky game.  Yet it's here, and we must deal with it.  The deeper--and darker--question then becomes this:  how do we understand that which we do not understand in the first place?
     In an opaque and impersonal universe, humanity's road is endless.
     

     As I read recently an account of the final days of former ISIS hostage James Foley, and pondered how he felt as he sensed his days drawing to a close (for those who have been living in a cave, James Foley was the first person ISIS publicly beheaded, later posting the entire deed on You Tube for all the world to see), I thought often about the riddle of existence.  For James Foley, life is unfortunately over.  He won't be back.  For him, existence is no more.  (On the other hand, as Foley converted, sincerely, to Islam during his imprisonment, he surely died believing that he would soon be with Allah in Paradise.)
     And for us, life goes on.  When I look at James Foley's life, however, I cannot help but see life as an enormous fishbowl, a fishbowl in which we all are swimming, yet a fishbowl into which we did not ask to be.  It's a fishbowl we know nothing about other than we are in it.  Yet we go on living in it.  And one day, we no longer will.
     And even if a personal and infinite transcendence exists, life remains a conundrum. On the one hand, the Hebrew Bible advises, "Whatever you do, do with all your might."  On the other hand, the New Testament commands, "Do your work heartily, as unto the Lord." Two perspectives, the one rooted in materiality, the other centered on transcendence, yet both speaking into one existence.  So we walk, all of us, a fine line between what we see and what we cannot, some of us believing that the former is all there is, others believing that both are present, the one subsisting on the hope of this life only, the other on the hope of one beyond it.  Either way, we live in what we perceive stands before us.
     Therein is the issue:  without transcendence, without an eternal and infinite personal, there is no meaningful, and honest, way to really know.
     Be well, James Foley.

     What about humility?  The other day I was talking with someone about Jesus' parable in Luke 14.  It is the account of a person who, when entering a banquet room, immediately sits himself next to the host.  But when someone else enters the room, someone of higher social stature than he, he is asked to go to the end of the table.  Jesus' point is that if we assume we are great, we will always be disappointed.  Better to be realistic about who we are, he suggests, than elevate ourselves for no valid reason.
     Living in a world, particularly its West, in which many people are bent on hyperactive achievement, we often forget who we are.  We come to measure ourselves by what we do, not by who we are becoming. We forget that, at the end of our days, the latter will be far more important. When we live to achieve, we subsist on evanescence.  We'll never be satisfied.  Not that achievement is wrong, just that it can become a bottomless pit, never offering complete solace for the challenges and vagaries of existence.  When we live to love, and when we live to give, however, we actually achieve far more.  We infuse our world, and everyone in it, with the presence of what humanity can most be:  beacons of hope in an often very dark cosmos.
     The apostle John tells us in the initial verses of his gospel that in the  Word [Jesus] was light, and this light was the life of the human being.  Whether we know or believe it or not, when we shine with love and sacrificial giving, we attest to the origin and meaning of all creation.
     It all began with light.

     Those of us who followed rock music in the Sixties know about Jack Bruce.  The driving force behind the songs of the short-lived British band Cream, Jack Bruce, sadly, passed away late last month, a victim of liver disease.  He left a wife, children, and one grandchild. He also left an incredible musical legacy.  The music he played with Cream will forever endure in the annals of rock and roll.
     Music seems almost eternal.  Its ability to touch us seems inexhaustible.  When a song writer dies, his music lives on, sometimes indefinitely.  For we human beings who often writhe in the grip of  mortality, we find tremendous solace and affirmation in this.  We love the music we invite into our lives, we love that it touches something in us, something that arouses and challenges us as nothing else can.  We love that it lasts beyond our perceptions of earthly permanence.
     Perhaps we also love that music underscores that life is more than the moment, more than the year.  It is unfathomable.  We will probably never know what precisely was going through Jack Bruce's mind as he composed his music, but we can certainly gasp at what he made it into:  imaginings bigger than anything we can imagine.  Like life.  We're here, we live, we die.  And we imagine.  We imagine what is and what can be.  We imagine imagination itself.
     And if our hearts are open to what is possible, we might imagine a reality bigger than all imagination, larger than music, larger than art, a reality fuller than all the transcendence music and art bequeath us, a reality which sounds in every corner of the universe.  The song of the creator.
     Thanks, Jack Bruce.  We will miss you.

     As we consider the fact of All Souls Day, traditionally the day after Halloween, we remember.  We remember our loved ones who are gone, we remember what has gone well, we remember what has not.  We remember existence, we remember life itself.  We ponder the import of memory.
     We also ask, how do we explain what has happened, what has been?  How do we measure the span of our existence?  How do we measure the value of our days?
     In ourselves, though we may take pride in reflecting on a life we believe to be well lived, a life that has made its mark, how do we really know?  We have only ourselves and our fellow human beings.  We measure by what we know.  And what we know is frightfully little.  Rarely do we ever see the big picture.  Rarely do we grasp the full meaning of our years.  We're finite creatures living in a finite world, a world that, one day, according to all cosmological predictions, will be burned up by an expanding sun, gone forever, never to be seen again.  It's over.
     Take heart.  We know our lives have value; we affirm it with everything we think, say, and do.  Do we need anything beyond this?
     Maybe, maybe not.  God indeed said to Adam that, "From dust you have come, and to dust you shall return." Yet even dust only has value if it has a reason to be, that is, if someone thought of and remembered it, someone who birthed it into reality.  Absent this, though dust could well be, and all of us as well, we have, absent anything in us, no reason to believe we and everything else should be.  It all just happened.
     Sure, things happen all the time.  But why?  The rhythms of the world demand it, the patterns of the cosmos enable it.  Yet where did these come from?
     As we remember our loved ones, as we remember what has been, as we look forward, as poet Robert Browning wrote so eloquently, to what is to come, we also remember this:  if nothing, broadly speaking, was meant to be, then there is no reason for anything to be.
     Enjoy the ride, delight in God:  revel in the fact of personal creation.