A few summers ago, I was backpacking through a glacial basin in the depths of California's Sierra Nevada mountain range. One evening toward the end of my trek, I stood, perched on a rock overlooking a 12,000 foot high lake, watching the sun set over the peaks to the west.  The air was cold, the sky clear.
     As the sun slipped below the horizon of jagged rock, I mourned but I treasured, too.  I mourned at the cold that would drive me into my tent, I treasured what I knew would come the next morning:  the rising sun.  I took in the order and rhythm, I gasped at the certainty of light.  I was deeply grateful that they all happened.
     Basking in our collective post Christmas presence, we can think, again, about light's certainty.  Whatever empires roamed through the lands of the ancient near east, whatever assertions of potency and power they promulgated, we can understand that, in the end, God came.  In the end, God spoke.  God came to earth, God bathed its light in his light.  Long absent in physical form yet continually pervading reality since its very beginnings, God's light made itself unmistakably known.
     As we go forth this week, we remember this light.  We remember the joy of Christmas togetherness, we recall the happiness of opening gifts.  We revel in memories of fun moments.  Though we return to "reality" and its swirl of work and attendant responsibilities, we can continue to walk in the glory, to marvel at the mystery, the profoundity of it all.  We can embrace the light, the light of purpose and meaning.  Even as we trek through the quotidian, we can touch that which enables it to happen and be.
     Inasmuch as I leave this week for a backpacking expedition in the American West, not to return until well after the New Year, I send my best wishes for a wonderful end--and beautiful beginning--to another year spent in God's light.
     Thanks for reading!

     In a few days, in all corners of the planet, literally billions of people, religious or not, will remember Christmas Eve.  Regardless of how they we view the birth of Jesus, for most of these people, Christmas Eve will be a time of remembrance, generosity, warm familial gatherings, and much more.  It's a night unique in all the year, a night in which countless families around the world make every effort to come together and, for at least a few hours, make peace and enjoy the fact of each other. It's a time in which life, for a moment, seems suspended, captured in a hourglass of human bliss.

     And why not?  The event that birthed Christmas Eve is an event on which all of history hinges, a pivot of time, space, and eternity that transformed the entire span of human challenge and endeavor.  Jesus' birth changed everything, absolutely everything.  In Jesus' coming, we sense and appreciate, definitively, that God can--and does--irrupt into our experience, that God, in ways we cannot always fathom, can, and will, make himself known in our lives.  God will manifest himself in our history.  Christmas Eve tells us that we tread on a very thin skein, a achingly slender layer of moment between time and eternity.  It is the richest possible investment of who we are, the most profoundly possible doorway into who we can be.

     Christmas Eve opens our eyes to the totality, the absolute and unimpeded totality, of God, the one who made all cosmos, space, and time, for us.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

     Most of us have heard the "Christmas story" countless times.  Across the world for thousands of years, people have read and pondered, over and over, Luke's account of Jesus' birth.  One might almost think that there is nothing new to find in it.
     But there always is.  As I was reading it this year, I found myself struck, and not for the first time, by the thought that the first people to hear about Messiah's birth were shepherds. In the twenty-first century, most of us do not think much about shepherds.  In Jesus' day, however, shepherds were an integral part of the economy of the ancient world.
     Yet shepherds were despised, viewed as the lowest of the low.  Few wished to associate with them.  They spent their days--and nights--largely apart from the rest of the people, living lonely lives in the fields and hillsides of the nations. 




  
     The shepherds can teach us much about Christmas.  Many of us devote the Christmas season to finding the most expensive gifts we can afford.  We strive to go one better than we did last year.  The last thing we aim for in our gift buying is humility.  But the first group of people to whom God revealed the birth of Jesus were people whose lives were steeped in humility:  lowly shepherds.
     Christmas doesn't encourage greatness; it calls for humility.  It calls us to look not at how we can spend our money on ourselves, our friends, or family, but rather what we can do for others, what we can do for the "shepherds" among us.  Christmas teaches us to reach out to those on the margins.
     Jesus came not to aggrandize, but to serve.  So did he say that, "The Son of Man [a name that he often used for himself and which reflected traditions deep in the Hebrew worldview] did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for the many" (Mark 10:45).  Jesus came to give, not receive.
     So ought we.  So ought we see Christmas as an occasion for humbly recognizing what we can do, not for ourselves, but for the world.

     Lilting about Christmas, overlooked in the holiday rush, winter comes to us softly, lifting us, soothing us, gently ensconcing us in somnolence and silence, carpeting the land, and our lives on it, with multiple auras of peace and quiesence.  Before its darkness and aphonia, we bow, riveted by its power, captured by its beauty.  We weep, we rejoice; we delight, we mourn.  We may love its beginning, we may look to its end.
     But winter comes just the same.  It's predictable, it's poignant, it's sure.  It reminds us of rhythm, it tells us of change.  Winter speaks to order, winter underscores pattern, bequeathing point, enabling irruption, shaking us, pushing us, showing us, potently and clearly, that life remains marvelous, incomprehensible, and deeply unseen.
     Wrap yourself in winter, drape yourself in its presence.  Touch the truth of God's remarkable and delightfully befuddling world.

     As we remember the fourth and final Sunday of Advent and look towards its culminating event, the incarnation, God's appearance in human flesh, I think frequently about its origins.  As the gospel accounts make clear, Jesus was born in Bethlehem (literally, "house of bread"), a town that we might today call a hole in the wall, a little village largely forgotten by the rest of the world.  Few people cared what happened in Bethlehem.
     Nor did few people care when, after God told Joseph to take Mary and Jesus and flee the country to avoid King Herod's deadly predations, Jesus lived for a time in Egypt.  Mary and Joseph were likely viewed as just one more set of refugees, one more group of aliens moving through the flotsam of the Empire, their lives a mirror of countless migrations before:  no big deal.
     But this is precisely God's point.  Though Jesus was an alien and refugee, born in obscurity and forgotten and overlooked by the rest of the world, he was the one in whom God chose to make himself known to all humanity.  Jesus was the one whom God would use to manifest and reconcile himself to his human creation, the one whom God would use to draw all people to himself.  In Jesus, the poor and forgotten refugee, was the greatest hope of all time.  It's the ultimate irony, the greatest surprise.  It's God's way of demonstrating to us that just when we think we have everything figured out, be it our views about immigration, aliens, refugees, or anything else, we really do not.
     But isn't that what God is all about?

     Light.  Most of us enjoy the light, most of us appreciate seeing a new day.  Unless we are like Anna Lyndsey, the pseudonym for a British woman who actually becomes ill when she is in light (and who wrote Girl in the Dark, a poignant memoir about her experience), we like illumination, natural, artificial, or otherwise.
     Religion speaks powerfully to this likely innate desire for light.  In the course of my contemplation about Jesus being the "light of the world" this Advent season, I have read some of the Lakota Sioux stories about the role of light in the human experience.  As the Lakota see it, light is seminal to reality.  One Lakota story tells of Fallen Star, the offspring of a Lakota woman and a star who, after his mother unfortunately passes away shortly after he is born, is raised by a meadowlark.  Because Fallen Star fused in his being the celestial and earthly, he carries the weight of all things in the light that he subsequently brings to the world.
     This story's parallels to the Christian picture of Jesus as the one who brought together the divine and human in one person are striking.  They underscore a universal religious understanding that "true" light only comes from one who grasps and holds together the union of all things, that genuine insight into reality is gained by encountering and experiencing the one who has made it.
     In this Advent season, this is the central message of light.  Light is the beginning, light is the end.  Because of Jesus, in God, throughout the world, light is the compass of all things.

    Today, at least in time zones east of the International Dateline, it's Beethoven's birthday.  What can we say about Ludwig van Beethoven?  The famous portrait of him below captures how many of us see him:  a brooding, brilliant composer.  When we think about Amadeus Wolfgang Mozart, we think of the Enlightenment and how it liberated the human mind and imagination from the constraints of a Church struggling with its response to impending modernity.  We see his music as poetry, lilting and dancing its way across our lives.

     Beethoven's music, however, strikes us with its passion.  It comes to us almost as a force of nature, barreling its way into our hearts, taking them apart, making us contemplate the deeper forces that drive human existence.  We swoon over Beethoven's melodies and the viscerality with which he endowed them, and we wonder about the power of the universe which his songs describe.  A Romantic in the purest sense, Beethoven reminds us of the presence and possibilities of transcendence.

     I thank God for Beethoven.  I thank him for giving him to us, for giving him to show us as we are, beings of mind and creatures of heart, living, personal, and dynamic entities made to grapple bravely and meaningfully with the weight of life, to take hold of everything that is before us.  I thank God for using Beethoven to open and unfold for us glimpses of what we, and life, can be.

     All of us have experiences in which we feel we have become a part of something bigger, times from which we come away thinking that we have stepped into a plane of situation, circumstance, or thought above and beyond what we normally know.  Writing in Cloister Walk, her reflection on a year spent in a Benedictine monastery, Kathleen Norris, after watching some of the monks do their prayers and recitations, observes that, "Sometimes these people who live immersed, as all Benedictines do, in the poetry of the Psalter, are granted an experience that feels like a poem, in which familiar words that have become like old friends suddenly reveal their power to bridge the animal and human worlds, to unite the living and the dead."
     Norris has captured the heart of the "essential" experience.  When we see and touch life as poetry, when we enjoy our existential experience as a poem, a poem woven into the poetry of God's creation, we indeed gain a deeper picture of reality.  We come into new insights into the bridges that connect us and the gaps between us, new pathways crossing the span of physical and divine.  We see ourselves as we are.
     Sure, life be hard and cold at times, but if we endeavor to view it as a stanza in a much larger poem, a verse in a enormously lilting sonnet, we understand that life has boundaries and borders and openings of which we are not always aware.  We grasp that to exist is to live in a very large world, a world well beyond our intellectual and spiritual ken, and that to "be" is to take hold of the infinity, the personal and eternal God from whom all has come.
     We find the seminal meaning of human heart:  God with us, God for us, God before us.

          Grace.  For some, it's a name; for others, it's a feeling; for others, it is the face of God.  So does the apostle Paul write to his colleague Titus, "For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all people" (Titus 2:11).  In Jesus, Paul is saying, we see the visible expression of God's grace.  In Jesus, he is telling his readers, we see the physical manifestation of God's favor toward us.  In Jesus, God's grace bursts theological rhetoric and doctrinal dogma:  it is made palpably real.  Jesus presents the fullest possible picture of God's kindness and benevolence, his enduring compassion for his human creation.  Jesus' appearance tells us that, above all, God loves us, and wants to us to know him, fully and intimately.  Jesus is the grace of God.
      We grant each other grace every day, as we should.  Yet it is God's grace that enables us to see and understand that amidst the frequent senselessness of the world in which we live, there is a grace of hope, a grace of hope that transcends what we see, a grace of hope that frames and orders and gives meaning, now and eternally, to our lives.  Jesus' appearance tells us that whatever else we may think about God, what we ought to think most about him is this:  God is for us. God is for us today, tomorrow, and forever.  The creator of the universe is on our side.
     As we enter into this third week of Advent, rejoice in the grace of hope, this perduring picture of divine favor.  Then ask yourself:  God is on your side, yes, but are you on his?

     Perhaps you know, perhaps you don't:  December 8 was Bodhi Day.  What's Bodhi Day? It is the day (the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month), remembered by Buddhists around the world, on which the Buddha is believed to have attained his enlightenment, that moment when he came to definitively understand the nature of life and suffering.
     And what did the Buddha decide?  Life, he concluded, is about suffering.  And this suffering, he added, is caused by our craving for things of impermanence.  But we can eliminate this craving, he insisted, by following the Eightfold Path (the most important of these being right mindfulness).
     On many points, the Buddha was right.  Suffering is intrinsic to existence, and we all seek things that do not last.  As to whether all of our suffering is due to this craving, well, maybe not.  But the point remains:  we tend to desire the impermanent things of this world.  Even if we wish to be more "spiritual," we often frame this in the context of the present world, not in what may lay beyond it.
     The Buddha was also insightful in his solution:  right mindfulness.  We must train our mind to focus on things that matter, to concentrate on what lasts.  Mental discipline is essential to personal wholeness.
     On the other hand, history has demonstrated that Socrates' contention that knowledge is virtue, that knowing the right thing is to do the right thing, will never, in this life, be true.  While cultivating right mindfulness is good and proper, mental discipline will not prevent all moral transgression.  Moral error requires a moral response, and morality is not the product of chemical exchange.  It is the fruit of transcendent activity in the human being.
     Real enlightenment requires a real God.

     A few nights ago, I had dinner with one of the people from my atheist discussion group.  A former Catholic (like me), this person described for me her gradual journey from a schoolgirl frightened of God and his prophecies of hell and destruction to a now rather elderly woman totally committed to life and the present moment and thoroughly unafraid to die.  She has, she said, written off God.  For her, life is better without him.
     Before she came to this point, this person told me, she decided to read the Bible.  She didn't get far.  After reading the numerous instances of God's vengeful attitudes toward the enemies of Israel, and his seemingly unremitting desire to kill off anyone who didn't believe in him, she concluded, "I'm more moral than God."
     Unfortunately, she has a point.  The Hebrew Bible overflows with stories of what seem to be divine cruelty, historical moments in which God commands the decimation of everyone--man, woman, and child--who does not believe in him or who is opposed to his chosen nation, Israel.  Even the most devout of believers must acknowledge that these are indeed difficult passages of scripture, not amendable to pleasant interpretation.
     I suggested to this person that, given these accounts, we might conclude that it's far easier to not believe in God than to believe in him.  Faith will always be an ambiguous experience.  It's fraught with tension.  It is not something we can wrap neatly in a box.
     But that's the point.  Yes, it is easier to not believe in God.  We resolve, or so we think, all our epistemological concerns.  On the other hand, we have every reason to believe.  The world is ambiguous and, in many ways, so is God.  That's why we need faith. Faith recognizes the ambiguity of the world, faith acknowledges the ambiguity of God. Faith doesn't ignore life's uncertainties.  It embraces them.
     Faith is the challenge of knowing that recognizes life for what it is:  the greatest of all epistemological challenges.
     It's hard to escape the fact of God.

     If God is everywhere, and if God has made all of us in his image, we can conclude that all of us may, if we choose, engage with him.  We can all find a way to connect with our creator.  Regardless of the religion or spiritual perspective, we can admit to the ubiquity of the human pursuit of the divine.
     I thought of this often as I read Witches in America recently.  It's a compendium and meditation on the various expressions of Wicca currently sweeping through the West.  It faithfully records the efforts of hundreds of Wiccans to commune with their perception of the divine, to connect with the "oneness" they believe is there for them.  I found some parts quite moving, struck by the passion with which the Wiccans strive to find "it."
     Are these Wiccans wrong to pursue the divine?  Are they wrong to seek wholeness?  Of course not.  Would that we all seek God our creator.  On the other hand, many Christians, particularly those in the West, are quick to recite John 14:6, in which Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father but by Me."  Jesus is the only way to God.
     This I do not dispute.  For those ignorant of Christian theology (not a Wiccan excuse), yet who earnestly seek after God, however, the picture gets more complicated.  But it does not for God.  He knows everyone's heart.  God knows where every person is at.
     I hope we encounter many surprises on the other side. I hope that, in the end, we will all see that when everything is said and done, only thing will remain:  God.  And in this life, this is a God whom we will never know everything there is to know about him in full. Eternity is there, yes, heaven as well as hell, and, yes, one day the cosmos will be no more, but how can we, from our present finite vantage point, know, fully, what all this will look like--and what it all, really, means?

     "Everyone asks for firmness in faith, but few firmness in love.  They ask for faith and are ashamed of love, such arrogant hearts; faith has no idea of the place where love transports you."  So said seventeenth century Sufi Muslim Bahu.  What does he mean? 
Perhaps he is suggesting that however much we believe in God (or, for Bahu, Allah (the Arabic word for God) in this life, we really do not have any idea of the glory that awaits us in the hereafter.  We cannot, on planet earth, comprehend God's fullness, we cannot, in the here and now, grasp fully the ultimate richness of God's love for us.  Though we believe it, we cannot see it; and while we live and die by it, we will not experience its completion until we leave this world.
     As Paul notes in his first letter to the Corinthian church, "Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and which have not entered the heart of humankind, all that God has prepared for those who love him" (1 Corinthians 2:9).
     How can we measure such things?
     This, I think, is Bahu's point.  In this life, we cannot.  All we can do is trust, in faith, in God's love, to believe in its certainty, to hold to its permanency, to hold to its ultimacy.  
     And how do we know this love?  In this second week of Advent (to jump from Islam to Christianity!), we have our answer:  Jesus Christ.  Because Jesus was born in history, died in history, and rose again in space and time, we have reason to yes, be firm in faith, but even more to pursue the firmness of love.
     As Paul notes later on in the same letter, "But now faith, hope, love, abide these three, but the greatest of these is love."
     

     As the world continues to recoil over the recent shootings in Paris and San Bernardino, California, bombings in Syria, and a stabbing in the subways of London, as people around the planet wonder out loud who will be next, and as peace loving beings the world over seek to come to grips with what seems to be, for most present lifetimes, unprecedented waves of evil, we rightly ask:  what about God?  What does God think?  What is God doing?
     Though I do not pretend to know all answers in this regard, I can say that, as I consider the shape of the Advent season through which we are journeying, God is working. Thousands of years passed from the time of God's initial promise to send a Messiah to the day on which Jesus "finally" came into the world, thousands of years of war, crime, pain, suffering, and uncertainty, thousands of years in which people wondered:  what is God doing?
     But in the "fullness of time," as Paul puts it in his letter to the church at Galatia, Messiah came.  In the crowning moment of kairos, the culminating confluence of human and divine destiny, Jesus appeared on earth.  At the prophetic point of truth, God came. When people least expected it, God appeared.
     In the face of the horrors we have witnessed recently, it's exceedingly difficult to believe in God's presence, highly challenging to believe in the fact of divine love and compassion.  But we must.  We must believe in God's fullness, we must believe in God's time. We must that even if we do not seem to see him, God is there.
     Why?  Because we can.  We can believe that God is, as the writer of Hebrews asserts, the same "yesterday, today, and forever."  Of this, the evidence is clear.  God is here, and he is working, his sight unclouded, his vision intact.  
     And he's inviting us to believe it.

     Have you heard Donovan's (a singer popular in the Sixties) song, Catch the Wind?  A rather melodic piece replete with dreamy lyrics and an aura of otherworldliness, it sings of a person's desire for his lover.  For all these desires expressed, however, the singer cannot seem to reach her inner heart.  It's like, he says, trying "to catch the wind."  So he says, "For standing in your heart is where I want to be and long to be; ah, but I may as well try and catch the wind."
     Many of us spend our lives trying to "catch the wind," seeking constantly to capture the deeper heart of our existence, ever striving to penetrate beneath the surface of what we see, to find the richer piece that makes life meaningful and worthwhile.  Some of us find it; others do not.  Most of us, however, find something.  In his Wind, Sand and Stars, (published in 1939), French aviator and explorer Antoine de Saint-Exupery observes about the enormity of the Sahara Desert, "Let it form, deep in the heart, that obscure range from which, as waters form a spring, are born our dreams."
     Indeed.  To love and seek meaning amidst the various deserts and winds, the mountains and valleys of our lives is the most noble of pursuits.  It is to find the center of our existence, the core of who we are, our heart of hearts, our place in God's personal universe.  We live to dream.  And even if we "catch the wind," even if we do not meet, fully, in this life, that which we love most, we seek anyway, for we know that because God has made--and, in Jesus, validated--the world, its present, past, and future, we will one day find it.
     Happy trails!

     Although we can argue about Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan's motives or timing for pledging to give away %99 of his Facebook stock, we ought not to impugn their implications and effects.  Zuckerberg and Chan may not be familiar with the verses from Paul's second letter to the Corinthians which I shared a few days ago, but they certainly embodied and expressed its spirit:  to give far more than the 10% of one's income that many people of religion assume they are obligated to give.
     It makes sense, culturally, spiritually, and politically, to give, and to give much.  If everything we have and own is a gift from God, and we have had no say in enabling our presence in the world, we have no call to withhold what we have from our fellow human beings.  We did not come into our lives or possessions by accident.  The world is purposeful, and so are we.  We must take care of ourselves, yes, but as British poet John Donne pointed out many centuries ago, "No man [or woman] is an island."
     Because God created the world, we all have a point.  We all can participate and share in the bounty of the earth we are privileged to inhabit.  Indeed, did not God, in Jesus, give all of himself for us?

     If you've ever seen the movie Woodstock, you know the song.  It's a song by Canned Heat of San Francisco, Up to the Country.  Sung in a high pitched voice by lead singer Bob Hite, it describes, in very upbeat tones, the adventure of going to the "country," of dancing in the forest, of playing in the water, of getting out of the city to a enjoy, for a while, a new home.  Hite makes the prospect of leaving a city seem a dream fulfilled.
     Contrast this with Neil Young's words in Here We are in the Years on his first solo album that "the people of the city can't relate to the slower things that the country brings."  Maybe so.  Maybe one must have lived in the country to appreciate it most fully. More of us, however, live in the city than not.  And almost all of us enjoy or at least appreciate the natural beauty of the world, whether we live in the country or city.  Hite and Young's words seem to tell us different things; the one, to go into the country with abandon, the other to go into the country acutely aware that we will not be able to relate to it fully.
     Perhaps they're both right.  Yes, the country, in all of its various manifestations--mountain, prairie, forest, desert, tundra, and sea--offers enormous prospects for fun and discovery.  Yet unless we go into it wanting or expecting to find something, we may not find such things.  We may never connect, fully.
     Theologians talk about natural revelation, the idea that the natural world, its beauty, order, and balance attest to the fact of God.  Across the planet, the creation testifies to the presence of its creator.  God speaks in what he has made.  Hence, any time we go into the "country," we will find something, sometimes big, sometimes small.  Moreover, since as many observers have noted, all truth is God's truth, we will always find inklings and intimations of God.
     Go to the country!

     As we move through the Advent season (this past Sunday was the first Sunday of Advent), our thoughts turn often to memory.  We think about Christmases past and the joy they gave us; we think about those with whom we enjoyed those  Christmases but who are no longer with us; we think about things as they were, we think about things as they now are.  We ponder the present moment.
     Advent is a work of memory.  It remembers millennia of divine promise, it recalls centuries of messianic prophecy.  And it centers and fulfills them in the present time. Advent brings time and memory together.  It does what Gary Schmidt and Susan Felcher, compilers of Winter:  A Spiritual Autobiography, say of memory that, "memory can preserve in a very real way those things that have disappeared."
     Though this seems obvious, in the light of Advent, it's worth thinking about at length. When we consider how Advent culminated and fulfilled hundreds and hundreds of years of memory, hundreds and hundreds of years of preserving those things that "have disappeared," we see that it in fact validates everything about how we remember.  It tells that we can remember with hope, and we can remember with faith.  Advent reminds us that we can believe in the worth of the past, and that this worth portends goodness for the future.
     Advent says to us that what has disappeared hasn't disappeared at all.  In the person of Jesus, the point of Advent, it is here, completely and wonderfully present and new.

     Ah, Black Friday.  For many, it's a time of excitement and glee; for others, particularly retailers, a time to dramatically increase revenues; for still others, a moment to express disappointment or, in some cases, disgust at American materialism.  For most of us, however, regardless of how we feel about it emotionally or philosophically, Black Friday signals the beginning of the Christmas shopping season.  It tells us that it's time to shop!
     Maybe so.  I'd like, however, to offer another perspective.  In the middle of his second letter to the church at Corinth, Paul writes about giving.  Thinking about the congregations in Macedonia (many miles north of Corinth), Paul observes that, "according to their ability, and beyond their ability, they gave of their own accord, begging us with much urging for the favor of participating in the support of their brethren" (2 Corinthians 8:3-4).  Consider:  these people didn't wait to be asked to give; they instead begged for the opportunity to give. Moreover, they gave beyond what anyone thought they could give (in other words, considerably more than the "standard" biblical tithe of 10%).  Trusting in the God who had given them everything they needed, they stepped up to do even more. They understood that, as Paul adds in chapter nine, "God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed" (9:8).  Because God is continually gracious to us, we can never give enough.  We can always give more.
     Let the retailers worry about what we should get.  Let us concern ourselves with what we can give.  As you go forth to "conquer" the stores before you, realize that it's no challenge to "get."  We can always do that.  The far greater challenge is to give.
     God has given us life itself; surely, he can give us more than enough to give.

     As most of us know, tomorrow is Thanksgiving.  Though we all have much for which to give thanks, perhaps the most important thing for which to give thanks is that we can give thanks.  That we can consciously rejoice in who we are and what we have been given, that we can be aware of the gracious bounty of the universe, that we can know, really know, that we are beings who can create moral lives.  We give thanks because we can give thanks.
     In addition, if, as many theologians have observed, all truth is God's truth, then we can give thanks for the incredible range of ways that those of us on the planet have found this truth, God's truth, that has defined and shaped their lives.  So give thanks most of all to God.  Give thanks to God that, despite the fractured state of modern spirituality, he is nonetheless able to communicate and present himself, the eternal fount of truth, to us, that in Jesus Christ, God has made himself known--everywhere.
     Whatever else you do this Thanksgiving, be grateful for the ubiquity of God.

     Perhaps you know the story of the Tower of Babel.  Recounted in the eleventh chapter of Genesis, it tells of how at one point in its early history humanity decided, as the text puts it, to build a tower to "heaven," and to make for itself a "name," lest "we be scattered over the face of the earth."  Subsequently, according to the account, when God looked down on his human creations, he said, "Behold they are one people, and they all have the same language.  And this is what they began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them"
     So God went "down" to the earth and "confused" the peoples' language (literally, "lip"), and "scattered" them across the "face of the earth."
     Although we can look at this story in a variety of ways (for instance, the beginning of linguistic diversity) and likely wonder and debate precisely what it means, I will say this much.  As I noted yesterday, to address God as the "Name" is to recognize his role as the ultimate originator and promulgator of the universe and, by extension, to assert our value as "names" of our own.  In the Tower of Babel account, we see that the people wanted to make a "name" for themselves, lest they be "scattered" over the face of the earth.  Put another way, the people sought to establish their identity as individuals who have no real connection to God.  They wanted to abandon the "Name" and "name" themselves.
     Not that we should fail to affirm our individuality.  Unshackled from belief in the primacy of God, however, any name is only a signifier of form and passion.  When people began to speak in different languages ("lips"), they were set free, free to think, act, and discern.  They were set free to roam the planet.
     Ultimately, people were set free to learn that despite the plethora of tongues running across the globe, tongues that speak of multiple generations of thought, ambition, and angst, only in God are they truly "one."

     Some of you may know that, out of respect, many Jews choose to address God by, simply, "Shem," which means "the name."  Christians and Muslims may find this odd, most of them choosing to address God by, alternately, "God" or "Allah" (the Arabic name for God), supposing it to be a more personal form of address.  On the other hand, our Jewish brethren may have it more right than we think.  When we consider the theological enormity of God, that in God is the ultimate source of life as well as the beginning of communication and speech, we see the wisdom of addressing him as, simply, the "Name." As does the "Name" identify God, so do our names identify us and set us apart.  Our names are our face to the world, the starting point of our entry into interpersonal exchange.
     Yet we were to suppose that there is no God, and that the cosmos therefore has no overriding purpose and meaning, then our names would mean little.  Though we would still name each other, we would really have no reason to do so:  in a world devoid of purpose, how can we?  But if God, the ultimate "Name," is there, and if God the "Name" is communicating and grounding the universe with purpose and point, we have every reason to identify ourselves.  We have meaning.
     To address God as the "Name" is to therefore affirm that we have genuine distinctiveness and presence, and not that we are, as Paul Sartre put it, "useless passions" running around with nowhere to go.

     Singularly striking, the plastic sculptures of Mihich Vasa belie what some might consider to be the inherent opacity of a sheet of plastic.  Whereas in most contexts plastic is used to connect and reinforce, with Vasa plastic takes on multiple dimensions, opening us to new windows into what color can be.  As the artist puts it, he is "interested in placing color in open space."  And so he does, hanging color on seemingly nothing, layering a multiplicity of hue and pattern in various polygons of plastic.  The finished product conjures thoughts of dark energy or matter, things we believe are there but which we cannot see, the inchoate and hidden dimensions of space and time.
     I stumbled on Vasa's work almost by accident as my siblings and I were sorting through the contents of my late aunt's residence.  Though we had always admired the cubes, cylinders, and other shapes and colors set on one of her etageres, we rarely had really examined them.  But now we did.  As I look at one of the pieces I kept as a memento of Jeanne, contemplating how the rising sunlight reshapes and realigns its colors, then, later in the day, as I set it in the glowing light of the setting sun, I think about the mystery of creation, human and divine.  I think about the human artist, meditating, creating, and I ponder the divine and its seminal energy of existence.  As Vasa's plastic polygons take us into new images and depths of life's possibilities, so does the artistic impulse, human and divine, unpack for us the greater agency that informs the cosmos with purpose and meaning.
     If color, of any kind, can be suspended in open space, there is always more to see.

     "How does it feel," goes the famous refrain of Bob Dylan's song, "to be without a home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?
     Most of us reading this blog have a home, a place to which they can go, a base from which they can plan and carry on with their life.  Most of us have a memory of a beginning.
     Too many others, however, do not.  Too many human beings, the flower of God's creation, wander across the planet, alone and forgotten, shorn of beginning, stripped of base, trekking through landscapes, mental and physical, which have no place for them. Too many of us have nowhere to go.
     It's easy to say that home is a state of mind, and it is easy to make home a set of experiences if we have a home already.  Many decades ago, as I tramped alone through incredibly remote stretches of the mountains of northern Alaska, I knew that when I came out, I have somewhere to go.  I knew I had a tangible destination.  I had no trouble picturing home as a concept.
     To be without home, to be bereft of base, lost and deprived of all linkage to the world, is to lose something vital to human flourishing.  It is to lose hold of what, in part, has made us who we are.  We may be here, we may be there, but we are unknown:  like a rolling stone.
     Yet even if we are known, to ourselves as well as others, we remain essentially alone. The transience of this existence guarantees it.  One day, even those whom we consider to be our closest friends will be gone, be it before or after we pass.  Nothing, as someone wrote as he watched lava swarm over the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, lasts forever. We walk in a world that, without any God or eternity to see it, is in truth like a rolling stone, great, amazing, and magnificent, yet fated to forever roam through a trackless cosmos.
     Is this really all there is?

     How inured we are in the West to the fears that dominate the rest of the world.  In reading Infidel, Somali and Dutch activist and speaker Ayaan Hirsi Ali's autobiography, published in 1997, recently, I found myself marveling, again, at how insulated we are. When Ali left her native land, eventually making her way to the Netherlands, where she subsequently applied for refugee status, she saw police frequently.  In contrast to her previous experience with police in her native land, when a mere glimpse of a law enforcement official sent waves of fear rippling through her, she soon discovered that in the Netherlands, unless one has broken a law, one doesn't necessarily need to recoil at the sight of the police.  In fact, police proved to be very helpful to her as she wound her way through the various legal channels to attain refugee status and, after some years, citizenship.  Initially, however, Ali's worldview had no categories for such perceptions.
     On the other hand, not everyone in the West instinctively assumes that the police are on her side.  Just ask a person of color.  Although Paul's epistle to the church at Rome advises readers to obey the authorities, this dictum becomes difficult to swallow when one lives in an authoritarian society.  Why does God allow such regimes to persist?
     Although I cannot answer this question easily, if at all, I like it because it forces we who are ethnically comfortable in the West to realize that more people than not face very different and complex questions about the sovereignty of God.
     Accepting divine sovereignty comes more easily when one possesses political or economic hegemony.  When one is on the other side, however, it poses obstacles which those who have hegemony cannot always readily understand.  But understand we must. We must endeavor to see the world through the lens of every living being:  none would be here if not for the love of God.

     Several weeks ago, I mentioned that one of my aunts had died.  Over the weekend, I was in Los Angeles, attending a memorial service my siblings and I had organized to remember her.  A number of people came, many of whom spoke wonderful words about Jeanne and the impact she had had on their lives.  We were grateful.
     The following morning, I had opportunity to walk to a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean (we stayed at the home of one of Jeanne's friends, who live not too far from the sea). As I sat on the rocks, gazing at the waves washing effortlessly across the beach far below, I thought about Jeanne again.  I thought about how important her faith was to her. For Jeanne, her faith in Jesus was absolute.  It was the bedrock of her life, the foundation of her experience.  Her faith in Christ informed everything she thought and did.  Every time we talked, she mentioned how crucial her trust in Jesus was to her life.
     Before I bid Jeanne farewell for the last time, I prayed with her.  I prayed for a safe journey, a safe journey to the other side, the other side where she will see, to use Dante's words in his Paradiso, "the universal form, the fusion of all things . . . the Love that moves the sun and stars."  Then I told her, "I'll see you again."  For I know I will.  Though Jeanne is gone from this earth, she lives.  She lives with the Jesus to whom she has devoted her life, the Jesus who held her life and hope together, the Jesus who gave her world form and meaning.  Her faith has become sight.

     Although I was traveling over the weekend, I could not help but hear about the tragedy that continues to unfold in France.  My heart sank at the news.  From our vantage point on this finite and confusing earth, though we can ascribe such actions to a combination of hatred and mistaken religious fervor, we still quake before what they suggest about the capacities of the human being.  Are people really this evil?
     Unfortunately, history has made it abundantly clear that the short answer is yes. Given certain conditions, human beings are capable of inflicting the most horrific pain imaginable--and beyond.  Before this certainty, we cringe; yet we should cringe even more if we believe we live in an accidental and therefore meaningless universe.  Although it certainly complicates our efforts to make sense of our reality, religion, particularly one invested in a personal and loving God who made himself known in Jesus Christ, enables us to come to grips with pain in a way that a happenstance cosmos does not.  We may still not understand fully, but we know that in a divinely created and therefore meaningful universe, explanation, now or later, is eventually possible.
     Until this eventuality becomes reality, however (and this is the ultimate frustration of finitude in the grip of eternity), we will not know it completely.  As Paul put it so eloquently (and maddeningly), we live by faith.
     Pray for the people of France, pray for the planet.

     A new book has come out about the rock and roll scene in the Sixties.  It's about the groupies, the women who made themselves known, in every way, to the rock stars of that pivotal era in contemporary music.  While many of us may wonder why these women would ever have been willing to engage with musicians in such fashion, we should also recognize that what they did is nothing new.  Women swooned over Ludwig van Beethoven, and women fell hopelessly for Franz Liszt.  Throughout the many ages that men have been making music, any number of women have chosen to give themselves sexually to them, usually with very few boundaries or restrictions.  Indeed, judging from a backstage situation which I witnessed prior to a Rod Stewart concert in Berkeley many decades ago, it's not only people who have been born as women who contribute; it was a group of transgender men who led the rush when Rod emerged from his limousine and walked into the nightclub to perform.
     Although some women have criticized these women for their activities, the groupies insist that they are just doing "what I want to do."  In this, they express one of the most sacrosanct ideals of the West:  individualism.  Although individualism emerged, oddly enough, as a by-product of the Reformation's focus on the one-on-one relationship which every human can enjoy with God, it has taken on vastly different forms since then.  Using the groupies as an example, many of us like to point to the Sixties as being responsible for creating individualism's most perverted historical expressions.  Not so.  Again, rampant individualism is nothing new.  What is new, however, is that today we in the West subscribe to it in the shadows of postmodernity, the idea that truth is no longer absolute and is, at best, relative to the individual human being.  While this is in part true, it ignores its logical outcome:  how do we ever determine what is really true?  The short answer is that we can't.  Ironically, however, all of us earnestly want for some things to be always right.  None of us can live without placing our trust in the unchanging physical laws of the universe, and none of us can live without believing that the world is a good place.  We cannot do without absolutes of truth.
     Though we may wish to wonder about the groupies's motivations, we perhaps should look more carefully at ourselves.  Unless we step beyond unbridled individualism, we have no better response to postmodernity's assertion of the meaninglessness of the universe than they do.  
     As Yeats said long ago, "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction,while the worst are full of passionate intensity . . . "
     There will be nowhere for us to go.

     Have you read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning?  A classic study of human resilience, Search for Meaning explores how people responded to the vicissitudes of Auschwitz, that is, how, despite the horrific conditions of their lives, they nonetheless sought to find meaning.  Frankl's point is that regardless of one's condition, she will seek to understand and pursue a greater significance, purpose, or meaning.
     Frankl's thesis says much about who human beings are.  Even if God does not exist, or even if God seems absent, people will try to make sense of their existence.  Why?  We have two options.  One, we can say that humans developed a sense of meaning in order to make their lives, well, meaningful.  This assumes, however, that people were aware of the notion of meaning before hand.  How could they know it was important?  Two, we can suggest that humans have been designed with purpose, and to therefore seek purpose. This of course demands that we posit the idea of God.  Random beings defy explanation; created beings necessitate it.
     Although we recoil at the issues that Auschwitz raises about the goodness of God, we also must realize that we cannot have it both ways.  If transcendent moral structure exists, however difficult its presence makes finding an explanation for pain, it nonetheless is superior to trying to find meaning without one.  If there is no transcendent moral structure, we are left with only ourselves, our random and indecipherable selves, to explain what we cannot legitimately seek to understand, anyway.

     How do we test personal experience?  This was the question we discussed at the monthly meeting of my atheist discussion group last night.  The speaker with whose words we began stated that although we cannot deny that a person has had an experience which she considers to be religious, difficulties arise when a person outside the faith tries to determine one, the actual content of the experience, and two, whether it actually reflects material foundation.
     The speaker also pointed out that we all bring baggage to our interpretations of events.  No one, he noted, is a totally impartial observer of thought or behavior.  For this reason, he suggested that we should only interpret personal religious experience through the lens of the scientific method, the approach he considers to be the most free from personal bias.
     Unfortunately, though I readily applaud the usefulness of the scientific method, I also say that to elevate it above all other hermeneutical possibilities and insist that it is wholly impartial is to commit the same error of presuppositional baggage of which its user is accusing others of doing.  To be fully fair to all the evidence, the scientific method must understand that although examining subjective experience is problematic, it must nonetheless consider William James's (who did not invest in an orthodox approach to faith) long ago observation that at the heart of religious experience is "something more."
     Like every other hermeneutic, the scientific method must also think outside the box. If the supernatural indeed exists, surely we can find, eyes wide open, evidences for it. Billions of people around the world cannot all share the same illusion.

      "When I see a garden in flower, then I believe in God for a second, but not the rest of the time."  So remarked recent Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich.  A writer who has devoted her career to presenting people's life stories as seeming works of fiction, Alexievich understands well the difficulty of believing in God all the time.  In the face of what she has witnessed in her life behind the Iron Curtain, it's easy to see how God appears elusive:  where could he be in oppression?
     Yet Alexievich also understands how powerfully a single point of natural wonder tends to point us to God.  Theologians call this natural revelation, the idea that God speaks and expresses himself in what he has made, revelation that everyone can see.  Challenging this, however, is the idea that such revelation is in many ways an inference; that is, one must step up a level from the experience to consider that a God may be within it.
     This is the central imperative of faith in times of political darkness and oppression: we must step beyond what we can see.  For a Westerner, this may be easier, of course, but given the universality of the natural world, its possibility lies before us all.

     We all have a birthday, and today is mine.  But what's a birthday?  A birthday is a point on a narrative, another steppingstone on an adventure on which all of us are embarked, every moment of every day.  It's a reminder of joy, it's a recollection of sorrow; birthdays encapsulate the stuff of existence.
     When I think about my earliest years, years when I wondered why I was here, why I was doing what I was doing, why I was being told to believe the things I was told to believe, I often wonder:  how did I get to where I am today?  I have no idea.  Yes, I planned, and yes, I tried to execute intentions, yes, I went here and there, and yes, things happened, but in the end I have no clear idea of how I landed on today.  Who does?  We're all living in a universe we did not make, a universe over which we ultimately have very little control.
     All we know is that life is a promise and expectation, an inkling and anticipation, a river and ocean coming constantly together in a creation we do not really make:  it's the work of life itself.  Moreover, whether we know it or not, life in turn is the work of, if we wish to render the world meaningful, God.  We are poems with a point, poems with a destiny, poems with a conclusion.  We are poems of eternity. Otherwise, it's futility.  
     Here's to birthdays!
     By the way, I'll be traveling for the rest of the week to attend a conference.  See you next week!

     Over the weekend, many Americans, and probably many more people around the world, celebrated Halloween.  Most of us know the story of Halloween.  It's a night traditionally viewed as a time when ghouls, ghosts, and other macabre creatures escape their chthonic dungeons and roam freely across the earth, fomenting fright, horror, and panic.  Today, it is a day exceeded only by Christmas in the amount of money Western consumers spend on it.
     However much one may wonder about Halloween's flirtation with the forces of darkness, we can observe that it is a night that might lead us to think about how we really see the world.  Do we see it as ruled by light, by the Zoroastrians' Ahura Mazda, or do we see it as ruled by darkness, the specter of the Hindus' Kali?  The tragedies of life seem to point to the latter; the joys, the former.  
     I suspect we all would like to say that light dominates.  And why not?  No one wants to walk in darkness.  In a fractured world, however, we will always have both.  The world's brokenness and disorder tell us that misfortune will occur, yet its wonder and beauty remind us that, despite it all, sublimity, the matchless marvel of sentience and being, the world is a good place.  If the world just happened, however, we would have no reason to view it in either way:  why would we?  We would have no basis.  There is no morality in an empty universe.  On the other hand, If the world is created, however this happened, we have every reason, indeed, a right, to call it good, as well as frightful. There is a point.
     Light can only be called "good" if God created it.

     Perhaps you've heard of the Sixties rock group called the Monkees.  Many rock critics castigate the Monkees, primarily because they were a band that did not develop organically but rather through the agency of various record producers who wanted to "create" a band.  For many, the Monkees were an "artificial" band.
     Be this as it may, some of the Monkees' songs have proven rather memorable.  For example, the movie "Shrek" used their song "I'm a Believer" to wide effect.  I am thinking, however, of a different song, one called "Daydream Believer."  Sung by Davey Jones, whom the girls who followed the band widely regarded as the cutest of the foursome, it is a poignant dance of love and life and the thought that money does not enhance either one.
     A few years ago, Davey Jones, on tour, as he had been for decades, traveling the world, continuing to draw audiences to hear the songs he did for the Monkees, unexpectedly, very unexpectedly, died, felled by a heart attack.  He was 67.  As I thought about his death then, and as I reflect on it today (having heard "Daydream Believer" recently), I return to the profound mystery of existence.  How we love being alive, and yet how we wonder what it means, particularly when we encounter such abrupt ends.  We search for some sort of purpose to such fleetingness.  We may well find it in living, but this only lasts as long as we live, our bewilderment still unresolved.
     I'm  thankful that such marvel and wonder, the marvel and wonder which all of us are, is not without a point, is not without a reason, is not absent of a reason beyond itself (for a reason in itself only serves to set us into an endless circle of groundless point). Ironically, life is life, and all that it implies, precisely because it is more than itself.  It is the work of God.
     Rest well, Davey.

     In the final chapter of his prophecy, Habakkuk, seeing that the Chaldean's onslaught is imminent, issues a final note of encouragement to his listeners.  It is a paean to faith, in the most difficult way.  "Though the fig tree should not blossom and there be no fruit on the vines, though the yield of the olive should fall, and the fields produce no food, though the flock should be cut off from the fold and there be no cattle in the stalls," yet, he adds," I will exult in the Lord, I will rejoice in the God of my salvation."

     Unless we have watched an army invade our native land, we may not be able to relate readily to the prophet's assertions.  It's difficult to step into the shoes of one with an entirely different experience that we have known.  Nonetheless, we all face circumstances of inordinate difficulty and stress, times when we are not sure what is going on or what to do about it, times when we feel utterly helpless in the face of immense privation and despair.

     How many of us can do what Habakkuk does?  How many of us can look at the depths of our situation and still claim that we "exult" in God?  How many of us can elevate our mind above the immediate and focus on what may be beyond it?

     Why did I use the word "may"?  I used the word "may" because unless we really believe there is indeed something beyond the immediate, we will not turn to it, and even if we turn to it, we still do have not absolute physical evidence that it is there.  We simply trust its presence.

     Faith, faith in a personal God regardless of the circumstance, is a road of looking beyond "mays," to believe in certainty.  It's not easy, and it sometimes does not seem to make any sense.

     It is to trust.

     In the second chapter of his prophecy, Habukkuk complicates matters further.  He talks about a vision that is "yet for the appointed time," and that is "hastening" towards its goal and "will not fail."  Wait for this vision, he counsels, wait, for "it will certainly come."
     Yet to wait, he says in the next verses, one must have faith.  The righteous, that is, those who have chosen to believe in God, he insists, must "live by faith."  They must live without seeing outcome, without witnessing visible goodness.  They must live, and perhaps die, without ever coming into the vision of, in this case, God's victory over the Chaldeans.
     If we can set aside the theological conundrums (and there are many!) that calling this "God's victory" raises for the thoughtful person of faith, we can learn a larger point. Although we use faith in many aspects of our lives, that is, we daily assume things will happen even if we do not now see firm evidence that they will, using faith in the context of God forces us into much bigger questions:  how can anyone spend her entire life waiting, like perhaps the protagonists of Beckett's Waiting for Godot, for something that never, in this life, comes?  The Chaldeans ruled Mesopotamia for over one hundred years, way longer than anyone, in those times, usually lived.  Thousands of people would live and die, still waiting for a vision that never arrived.
     So why continue to believe?  Why continue to wait?
     Why, indeed?  We wait, by faith, because we believe, not so much in the vision, but in the ultimate certainty of God.  In the end, surety, transcendence and synoptic surety, prevails.
     What else could?

     When I was doing my devotions and meditations the other morning, I decided to read the writings of the prophet Habakkuk.  I had not read Habakkuk in some time, although certain parts of the three chapters of his prophecy have stuck with me for decades.
     Habakkuk opens his prophecy with words about the Chaldeans (another name, in the time Habakkuk wrote, for the Babylonians).  He tells his readers that soon, very soon, the Chaldeans will rise up and sweep through the deserts of Mesopotamia, coming for, as he puts it, "violence," mocking kings, "swooping down" like eagles to "devour" their enemies, their horses "swifter than leopards" to capture and destroy all those who dare oppose them.
     After laying out the extent of Chaldean power, Habakkuk goes on to ask God why he isn't doing anything to stop this tribe from effecting its predations.  "Why are you silent when the wicked swallow up those more righteous than they?"  "Why do you look with favor on those who deal treacherously?  Why, God?  As so many of us have done since history began, the prophet wonders how a God who proclaims himself to be good seems to stand by while a fiercely antagonistic group of people decimates the land.
     At one point, Habakkuk asks God, "Why have you made men like the fish of the sea, like creeping things without a ruler over them?"  At this point, Habakkuk could be an existentialist:  if this life is nonsensical, why are we here, anyway?  What's the point? Absent some sort of positive divine intervention, people indeed seem like fish and all creeping things, soulless creatures who roam to live and die, for no apparent reason.
     What many of us may find particularly troubling, however, is this:  if God's presence ensures that we are meaningful and more than fish in the sea, then why do we not always see evidence of his presence in the upheavals of the planet?
     Therein lies the crux of the faith:  believing in goodness even when we do not visibly see it.

     Have you seen the Disney movie Beauty and the Beast?  Many parents might say yes; even more children would say likewise.  Hollywood animation techniques aside, the movie presents profound truths about redemption and restoration.  It tells us that we ought to look past the obvious and apparent to what, in a meaningful universe, the purpose that must always exist, to peer beneath the surface to see what, in a world of thought and intention, things really mean.
     Put another way, if we frame it rightly, Beauty and the Beast tells us that only as we agree to believe in each other and the fundamental worth of transcendent morality, we are make sense of who we are.  In its own way, Beauty and the Beast is suggesting that we all have value, and we all have purpose.  Furthermore, it argues that for this reason, we all can be redeemed, we all can be brought and restored to whom we can most be.
     This is what Belle believed then and, wonderfully enough, it is what God believes today.  Whoever we are and whatever we do, we remain remarkable, remarkable beings. Yet we would not be so unless we lived in a meaningful universe.  And it is only in a meaningful universe that we can even consider, much less find redemption.
     Jesus would not have died for meaningless beings.

     After an unplanned hiatus, I return to offering my thoughts for kind (I hope!) consideration.  Driving home from the swimming pool the other day, I heard an old rock song, this one by a long since gone band called Bad Company.  It's called "Shooting Star." In it, we hear the singer tell us a story about a man called Johnny who, despite everything, is a shooting star, a special human being, and who, through all the ups and downs of his life, lived, and died, in grace and peace.
     If I can expand the purview of the song a bit, I note that there is much truth to it. Genesis tells us that we are all created in the image of God, carefully and lovingly wrought as uniquely sentient entities, singularly equipped to live in a way all our own upon this planet.  As Sly and the Family Stone sang decades ago, "Everybody is a star."
     And so we are.  As the song points out, however, we are "shooting" stars.  Do shooting stars last indefinitely?  No:  anyone who has had the good fortune to see a shooting star (which are actually meteorites, sometimes comets) blazing its way across a dark night sky knows that their glory is short.  They're gone almost as soon as we see them.
     So are we.  We are glorious, yes, we are wonderful, indeed, but we are very, very short.  Even if we live to be a hundred or more, in the immense canvas of history and time, we are but a blip, and an infinitesimal blip at that.  Yet if we are in fact created in the image of an infinite God, we can know and believe that even if we are shooting stars, we are shooting stars in the umbra of eternal meaning.
     We are more than this life.

     Cancer or hunger?  Neither is good (unless the latter is the result of deliberate meditation, fasting, or contemplation).  How do we decide which is the more necessary fight?  Each year, in many parts of the West, various anti-cancer and anti-hunger organizations plan fundraising events for their causes.  Repeatedly, the anti-cancer events raise much more money than do those directed at ending hunger around the world.
     No one wants to see people die of cancer.  Yet no one enjoys knowing that people die of hunger, either.  On the whole, it seems that those who succumb to cancer live primarily in the affluent West, while those who die of hunger live primarily in the poorer regions of the world.  In addition, while those who perish from cancer usually do so in the company, or at least under the notice of one or many loved ones, those who die of starvation often do so in the bleakest and loneliest of circumstances.  In general, we do not see obituaries for them, nor do we see them remembered with memoriams at Relay for Life rallies.  By and large, they die forgotten.
     I certainly do not intend to discount the immense suffering that a death from cancer brings to both victim and family.  It is wonderful to see, however, when the people of the West emulate Jesus more fully in allocating their resources, that is, when they devote as many resources and communal resolve to ending hunger as they do to ending cancer. Jesus healed disease, yes, but he also fed hungry people.  We who can are to do likewise.
     After all, does not God love everyone?

     Yesterday I visited a Hindu temple with some friends.  It was an extraordinarily beautiful facility.  The people were extraordinary, too:  friendly, inclusive, welcoming. Many of those with whom I visited the temple, all of whom share my faith commitments, remarked on the adherents' openness to guests and strangers, adding that, unfortunately, many Christians could learn from this.
     It's tricky.  For the Hindu, the lines between truth and untruth are rather blurry, even nonexistent:  as the Hindu sees it, proper religion requires a delicate balancing of both, for in the big picture, both are necessary and, in a way, true.  Yet for the major monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (though not as much in modern Judaism), truth is very much black and white:  there is truth, and there is untruth, and never shall the two meet. While from a logical standpoint this makes sense, implementing it in personal relations is decidedly more complicated, and at times rather messy.  How do we believe in one thing, and one thing only, in the face of the religious pluralism that being created in God's image and endowed with choice making capacities inevitably spawns?
     Clearly, two things cannot be truth simultaneously.  If truth is truth, it must be unique and set apart.  If therefore God, the only God, made the world and all that is in it (Psalm 24), and if this God expressed himself in one person and one person only (Jesus:  John 1:14), then there can only be one way to see it.
     Ah, but how do we see?  More importantly, how does God see our feeble efforts to see him?  In the end, although God is God is God, and Jesus is Jesus is Jesus, we should all wonder and always ponder and be open to how God reminds us of this.
     Gloriously, we all are not the same.

     A little while back, I blogged about nineteenth century French anarchist Pierre Proudhon's view of history.  Today, I discuss his famous monograph, "God is Evil, Man is Free."  In it, Proudhon writes, "Atheism is the negation of Providence, as it results from the agreement between the inflexible laws of nature and the incessant aspirations of liberty, and as I have attempted to define it . . . God is not conceivable without man; but man is not conceivable without God; God, whom faith represents as a tender father and a prudent master, abandons us to the fatality of our incomplete conceptions; he digs the ditch under our feet; he causes us to move blindly, and then, at every fall, he punishes us as rascals."
     In many ways, Proudhon is correct.  Atheism is one response to the frustration of being a human with the capacity for choice yet who is living in world she cannot fully control. It is one way people use to make sense of a world that allows them to be free but in fact does not:  in this type of world, how can Providence (divine benevolence) therefore be possible?  God is no more than a way to escape the facts of reality.
     Moreover, as Proudhon points out, unless God, as well as man, exists, neither can conceive of the other existing in turn.  Though this seems obvious, it underscores an important point, one which perhaps Proudhon did not realize he was making:  humans can not be fully human unless they affirm the existence of God.  They are incomplete without God.  Yes, as Proudhon continues, God does indeed seem to abandon people to the "fatality" of their incomplete conceptions, yet what Proudhon may not see is that our conceptions are incomplete not because God "abandons" us, but because of our essential finitude.
     Ironically, we can only really "see" if we "see" (and affirm) God. 

     Yesterday, America, and perhaps other parts of the world as well, remembers--or at least makes a pretense of doing so--Columbus Day.  Why?  Extensive research has found Columbus to be decidedly less wonderful than he was 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.
     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 the very religion we seek to uphold.  God 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.

     Though those of us who live in white America are likely grateful to be doing so, we should be quick to realize that the instant we suppose our experience is the result of the work of God, we just as quickly elevate our joy, our earthly joy, over that of everyone who lost theirs when we got ours.