I guess this is a big month for musician birthdays.  The 27th was Mozart's, and the 31st is Schubert's.  Not as well known as Mozart and writing in a different era of European idea and thought, Franz Schubert was nonetheless one of the most remarkable musicians in Western history.  Immensely productive and profoundly creative despite passing away, perhaps from typhoid fever, though no one is totally certain, at the age of 31, Schubert is known for writing some of the most ethereal and moving melodies of all time.  Listening to his music, one feels carried away, transported to another realm, lifted above what is earthly and material.  It's an intimation of transcendence.

     But that's what music does.  If music only told us what we already know, we probably wouldn't get as much out of it as we do.  We do not need to be reminded of what is normal.  We want to think about what is beyond normal, what breaks the normal down, what splits the obvious apart.  We want to know what we, at the moment, cannot.
     Music offers windows, music opens doors.  Happily, we often do not see these windows and doors until we have stepped out of what we know.  But isn't this how we ought to live?  Descending into the darkest recesses of his soul, Schubert talks to us about the deepest mysteries of existence, how we walk in a wisp, a gossamer veil stretched out between us and the other side of time.  He romanced eternity.
     As do we all.  Every day is a balance, an edge perched on the borders of presence and absence, a thin line of reality and ultimate destiny.
     Thanks, Franz Schubert, even if you didn't intend to do so, for showing us that life is more than life itself.

     Have you heard of the baby and the 5,000?  It is an old ethical dilemma.  You're in a concentration camp.  One morning the commandant of the camp comes to you and says, "Here in my hands I'm holding a new born baby.  To your right is a crowd of 5,000 adults. If you tell me to let the baby live, I'll slaughter every one of those 5,000 adults.  But if you tell me to kill the baby, I'll spare the lives of every one of those 5,000 adults."
     This dilemma is asking us to consider the basis of our ethics.  Do we make ethical choices, not on the basis of an unchanging moral foundation, but simply on the basis of their effects? Or do we make our ethical choices on the basis of an unchanging moral foundation, regardless of effect?
     I'll leave you to decide what you would do.  I mention this as I look at the hostage situation with which the nation of Jordan is currently having to deal.  If the country frees a known suicide bomber, ISIS will let its hostage, a solider in Jordan's army, go free.  If not, this soldier will be executed, likely by decapitation.  If the suicide bomber is set free, however, Jordan could be opening the door for additional violence to its citizens. Yet if it does not set this person free, a wife will lose her beloved husband forever--and ISIS may continue to terrorize Jordan anyway.
     What do do?  I pray for the leadership of Jordan, that it will have wisdom in making its choice.  Whose life/lives are more important?  Yes, every life matters to God, and yes, every wife deserves to have her husband, and yes, no nation should be subject to more violence.  But is the greater good the only consideration?  Or are there other facets of the issue?  It's very complicated.
     As is life.  God exists, yes.  Nonetheless, given this fact, how are we to discern how we are to exist?
     In truth, if God did not exist, we would not need to.  The human being would be no challenge at all:  dust to dust, and nothing more.
     

     If we believe that God is there, how do we convince people who do not believe that he is?
     It's an age old question, one which has occupied many, many individuals through human history, and spawned thousands upon thousands of books.  Year after year, century after century, people write about various keys they believe they have found to unlock the door of unbelief.
     Most of these keys ring true.  But there's more to the picture than that.  The other night, I sat in on an apologetics seminar that had been designed specifically for unbelievers.  I heard mention of humanity's universal and perennial quest for meaning, the enduring need for a transcendent point in this life to make full sense of its complexities, and the deeply felt emotional--and spiritual--need to connect with something larger in one's life.
     Though I couldn't argue with most of the points being made, I thought also of two friends of mine, both of whom attend my atheist discussion group, who had decided to come to this seminar.  They wanted, they told me, to ask difficult questions and get reasonable and solid answers to them.  They wanted to engage believers.
     And they did.  As I observed some of the exchanges, however, I realized, and not for the first time, that such things will be decided ultimately not intellectually but rather by emotion and will.  Massive amounts of information and argumentation mean little unless those listening reach a point where they are willing to listen to them not just as a mental exercise but as a work of their heart.  God's not a being of mind alone, nor does he speak into our intellect only.  Ultimately, he speaks to our heart.  Case in point, Jesus didn't appeal to his audience's mind as much as he did their heart.  We are profoundly emotional beings. Although we believe in our reason, we almost always, as many have pointed out, employ it on a foundation of sentiment and emotion.  Our reason doesn't stand alone.
     In other words, what about belief speaks not to your mind, intellect, or even conviction and dogma, but to you?  After all, you are the only you.
     And God is the only God.
  

     Today, for those of us who follow such things, is the birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  To this day, people the world over continue to be astonished by the immense creativity and wonder of this Austrian's music.  Fluent in all genres of classical music, Mozart, though he, sadly, died at the tender age of 34, produced an array of musical expressions that most musicologists agree is unmatched.  As a contemporary said of him, "He was like an angel sent to us for a season, only to return to heaven again."  Most of us can only stand mute and marvel at Mozart's immense ability.  How could one person write works of such extraordinary beauty?

     Let's consider a verse from the first chapter of Genesis.  "And God created man [man and woman] in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created him" (Genesis 1:26).  The God who created the universe with all its immense complexity and wonder is the same God who created, with equal wonder, every human being.  For this reason, every person who has ever been born and walked through the history of this planet has the potential to duplicate and express, albeit in finite (yet often, in the case of Mozart, remarkable) form, the creativity that birthed the cosmos.
     Rightly do we crater and weep at the beauty of Mozart's compositions; they are works of unsurpassed wonder.  Yet rightly do we marvel equally at God, the personal infinite God who made and fashioned this artist--with all his prodigious talents--and enabled him to be and become who and what he is.
      As he does for all of us, we who are gifted beyond measure, we who are made to create in unabashed wonder.
     Enjoy and appreciate the people--all people--whom God has made.
     Thank you, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

     Can we know too much?  Looking at our cat the other day, sleeping peacefully, tucked into a blanket on the sofa, seemingly without a care in the world, I thought how simple her life is.  She knows little, yes, but she doesn't need to.  She is a cat.  And she doesn't even know that!
     In this present age, often dubbed the information age, an age in which so many of us have become so dependent upon and often worshipful of knowledge--of all kinds--we rarely stop to think whether we really need all the information we are receiving.  Maybe we do, maybe we don't.  But how do we know?  As the biblical writer opined many centuries ago, "In increasing knowledge is increasing pain."  How many of us have heard the phrase, "Ignorance is bliss?"  
     In many cases, this is true.  In many instances, we're better off not knowing.  In others, we of course are well served to know.  Yet however much we know, we must be prepared to deal with it in a responsible way.  Knowledge is often life changing, and life ending as well.  We want to know, yes, but we should know that the more we know, the more we do not and, significantly, the less mystery we have in our lives.
     Before Adam and Eve ate the "fruit," they did not know sin.  They had not tasted of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Now they, and all of us with them, do.  Are we better off?
     As finite beings in a finite world, yet a world created and pervaded by an infinite God, we should expect, even welcome mystery.  It's a inevitable part of our experience and being.  Sometimes we should welcome not knowing.  Sometimes we should welcome the not seeing all.
     In truth, if there were no mystery in the cosmos, we would likely not be.  Not only is the impersonal incomprehensible, but it is impossibly suited to birth mystery.  It is thoroughly opaque.
     Only divinity opens a door.

     From grizzlies last week to wolves this week . . . have you seen a wolf in the wild?  I have, many times, and am grateful for it.  Many of us know about the controversy that wolves are stirring in some parts of the West.  Some people love them, others hate them. Recently, however, scientists detected a most extraordinary thing:  a wolf sighting in California.  From Wyoming to Idaho to Washington to Oregon to California, this enterprising canine traveled in search of a mate.  Happily, he found one, and is now the leader of a new wolf pack.
     Life really does go on.  Despite everything that some of us might do to suppress it, life, of all kinds, goes on.  We love our lives, we love our world.  I hope we love our God. I also hope that we humans find comity between us and the other animals, predators in particular.  We are not the only beings on this planet.  When God commanded Adam and Eve to "rule" the earth, he was not talking about the rule of harsh and absolute monarchy. He wasn't promoting dictatorial human hegemony.  He was talking about the rule, also enshrined  in many a Native American saying, that people are to care for the planet for the "seventh" generation [and more] to come.
     Historically, many people have turned away from Christianity because they perceived, correctly, that too many Christians have promoted the destruction of the planet in the name of a misinterpreted call to human dominion.  In truth, God called Adam and Eve to cultivate and tend the earth, to contribute to its continuance and sustenance, to leave it in reasonable shape and form for those who would follow them.  After all, interplanetary exploration notwithstanding, it's the only planet we will ever have--and the only one that God will, in this life, give us.
     Why should we destroy what God has made?

     Wanting a break from writing the other day, I  walked into the den and turned on the television to one of the National Football League playoff games.  I rarely watch these things, but I watched this game, a contest between the Patriots of New England and the Baltimore Ravens, for fifteen or twenty minutes.  Over and over again, massively strong men were throwing themselves against each other, seeking some level of advantage, some opening in defenses, some way to make a gain.
     Countless commentators have opined about the similarities between these games and the gladiator games of ancient Rome.  Maybe they're right.  From another standpoint, however, these incredibly conditioned men are a picture of greatness as well as vagary. We may not agree with much of what the NFL does, we may not agree that football is worth watching, we may not agree that these men are proper representations of the human species.  Yet we can agree that those who play the sport and those who watch it are merely one more portrait of the timelessness of human futility:  here today, gone tomorrow.  Magnificent, yet fleeting.
     Ecclesiastes observes that, "Every skill which a person develops is the result of rivalry between him and his neighbors."  Though we are called to develop ourselves to the most we can be, we also remember that in a broken world, unless we commit our skills to a higher purpose, we're simply responding to the tenor of the times:  it's all about me. We're only contributing to the endlessly grinding wheels of human finitude and folly.
     Enjoy the games.

     What if we could do away with emotions?  Equilibrium, a movie I saw recently, presents a world in which people try to do just that.  Each day, people take a pill which suppresses and deadens emotion.  People who skip their pill or people who engage in sensory activities like art or music are arrested and incinerated.  People are not happy yet people are not sad.  They just are.
     Emotions are hard, of course; everyone knows that.  We wrestle with them every day. We may not always appreciate them, we may not always like them.  But we live with them.  Indeed, we can't live without them.  Emotions express who we are, what we do, what we think.  They enrich, they enlarge, they enable and allow us to find the fullness of existence.  We find them worth the  challenges they may bring.
     A universe devoid of emotion is a universe devoid of not just feeling but any capacity to have feeling.  The fact of our emotions tells us not just that the world is real but that it is real in a way that we can understand.  We relate, we connect.  No emotion, no human being.  And no feeling, nothing at all.
     How can our origins possibly be impersonal?

     "Freedom," the Who sang many years ago, "tastes of reality."  As many of you may know, today the U.S. remembers the birthday of civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr.  Central to the day is the belief that freedom, the ability to do what one chooses, when one chooses to do it is surely one of humanity's greatest blessings.  Those who have it treasure it immensely; those who do not, long for it deeply.
     Is freedom reality?  If being free is the ability to find oneself as oneself is in this world, then freedom is indeed reality.  It offers people opportunity to find what is most real and true about them, their lives, and the world in which they live them.  It is a path to ultimate discovery.
     Maybe that's why, as John records it in chapter eight of his gospel, Jesus told his audience that, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."  Freedom is only meaningful if it is grounded in something bigger than itself.  It's only real if it is responding to structure, if it is responding to a structure of form and truth.  Freedom recognizes that unless there is abiding truth, unless there is something within which to be free, being free is no more than the ability to engage in the authenticating acts of existentialism:  here today, gone tomorrow, never a point to be made.
     As we remember King's birthday, we also remember that the freedom he preached is ultimately, as Gandhi observed in his notion of satyagraha, self-discovery of truth.  We do not discover in an accidental universe without definition; we discover truth in a universe made real by truth itself.

     Have you seen a grizzly bear?  If so, you are fortunate.  They are not easy to find.  In the course of my mountain explorations, I've seen many, some at a comfortably safe distance, others way too close.  Regardless, grizzly bears are rather amazing.  Powerful and hulking, they lumber and roam through their world, master of all they survey, providing ecological balance for friend and foe.
     It's therefore odd to see,as I did recently, grizzlies in a zoo, exploring the trees and rocks set out for them, being bears before watching human beings, animals like us, animals still.  One wonders what grizzlies did before the Fall, before the world was broken, before the balance was toppled:  what were their lives like?
     We can only speculate.  But we can say this:  God cares about the grizzly bears now as as much as he did before.  He cares about everything else, too.  So does the psalmist say, "You, Lord, open your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing."
     Of course, grizzlies remain highly fearsome and not to be taken lightly.  They are patently unpredictable.  When next you see a grizzly bear, however, be it in a zoo, book, or in the wild, be happy that they live, that they exist.  Be happy that you share in such a remarkable world.  Be happy that you walk in the expressions of a infinitely creative God.
     Be thankful that life is God's gift to you.

     Anyone who has been a students knows about tests.  And almost everyone who has been a student knows about standardized tests.  Everyone knows that sometimes much depends on these tests.  Indeed, sometimes these tests determine the course of one's life.
     This makes, rightly, many of us cringe.  The world is more than a calculation.
     Moreover, as any teacher will tell us, tests rarely give the full picture of who a student is. Like anyone else, students are more than intellectual machines.  Like anyone else, students are incredibly complicated and interesting human beings.  They deserve more than tests to demonstrate who they are.
     As do the rest of us.  Like God does for us, we can look at our fellow humans in a vastly rich way.  There's always more than what we see, always more than what we hear, and we do ourselves, and our fellow beings, a disservice when we forget this.  Let's open the windows of our humanity.
     Let's walk through the door of the fullness of human possibility and realize that, as God told the prophet Isaiah centuries ago, "Behold, I am making all things new."
     We are always more to find.

     As the colder climes of the northern hemisphere drift deeper into winter, and many people dig further into their brumal hibernations, I like to look at the bigger picture: seasons come, and seasons go, and we are grateful.  Be it sun, snow, fog, wind, or rain, we rightly marvel at the remarkable expressions of the planet on which we live.  We find ourselves astonished at the diversity of meteorological event, the incredible breadth and nuances of the weather.  Though we may not always like them, we can be amazed by it. We can be amazed that we live in a world so full of form yet so full of surprise.
     Even in temperatures well below zero, the geese continue to fly, and the birds continue to feed.  Even, on occasion, the squirrels emerge.  The earth still breathes, the sky still sparkles.  And the lakes still jostles with their ice.  All is well.  Climate change or not, all is well.  It's a good world.
     Light continues to shine, a light of truth, a light of hope and way, illuminating, pervading, calling, enlightening.  So it was in the beginning, so it will always be.  God has not abandoned what he has made.
     Nor does he forget what he continues to create, and re-create, every day.  After all, many years ago, he himself lived it.

     On the other side of the Atlantic, thousands of miles from the pain rippling through Europe which I mentioned yesterday, many Americans are beginning to talk about the next presidential campaign.  A number of people have already expressed their interest in stepping into the office, and no small number of people are indicating they are leaning in that direction.
     Former president Richard Nixon once remarked that, "The presidency is a killer of a job."  How true.  Yet year after year after year, many people want it anyway.  I hope that whoever enters the office does so acutely aware that any power it may bequeath him or her is so terribly ephemeral.  It's futile, really, a wisp of hegemony that vanishes as soon as it is implemented in this extraordinarily complex world.  It will not last.  All that will remain are the convictions, moral, political, cultural, or otherwise (although these, in truth, are linked) that underlay and impel it.
     In a moral universe, a universe divinely imbued with a moral compass and authority, only ideas, in the end, will be real and true.  I hope the next president finds not so much accomplishment as he or she does meaning, for him or herself, for America, for the world. I hope that a greater good, one that we cannot always easily see but one that is always and supernally there, will triumph.
    In the face of material and eternal happenstance and contingency, we are so very, very small.  What does human "power" really mean in such a massive and incomprehensible universe?

     After some time away, hiking, recovering, reflecting, I write today to express my profound solidarity with the people of France, be they atheist, agnostic, Christian, Muslim, or Jew, as they collectively gather, mourn, and ponder the immensity, in every way, of the tragedy that befall that nation recently.  I don't need to describe what happened; everyone knows.  The pain is overwhelming.  It shows us how difficult living in a free country can be.  It's a constant balancing act between license and order to achieve a common good, a good that is "good" for all.
     It's not easy.  Nor will it ever be.  We are only human beings, marvelous but bent, visionary yet frighteningly myopic:  we cannot see everything we want to see.  If love, the love that flows through the cosmos, the love embedded in the very fabric of what is real, is to mean anything, however, it should not matter what we believe--or what we do not.  We're all called to love, no more, no less.  That's all God is asking of us.
     Love:  the most wonderful thing to know, yet the most challenging thing to achieve.  I pray today that we all will find it, and express who we most are:  beautiful creatures made in the image of God.

     It's a new day, a new month, a new year.  It's a time of resolution, aspiration, goal, vision, and intention, a time that our hearts, even if only for a moment, spur us to new heights of achievement, new pictures of who we think we ought to be.
     As they should.  We are creatures made to long to become something better than what we are at the moment, what we are today.  It is part of being human.  We all want improvement, we all want renewal.  Indeed, pity the person who supposes that she needs neither.
     Yet does not the writer of Ecclesiastes point out that, "There is nothing new under the sun"?  Absolutely.  But he also urges us to "do whatever our hand finds to do."  These are wise words.  Yes, life is a merry go round of routine and repetition (after all, 2015 is but one more year), but life is also a voyage of wonder.  It is a journey through the inexhaustibility of God.  We and our planet may be changing, aging, even, unfortunately, deteriorating, but God remains new, unspeakably new for us and our world.  Always.  His infinite presence guarantees it.
     Rejoice.   Rejoice that as the New Year dawns, it is in God that we will experience the fullness of life, that it is in God that we will see the ultimate picture of existence.  It is in God that we will see the highest vision of what we can be, and who we, morally, epistemologically, and culturally most are.  It's all part of the magnificent promise God embodied, in his son Jesus, for us and our world.
     By the way, I add that for the next week or so, I'll be hiking and traveling and probably will not be posting regular entries.  I look forward to renewing our conversations at that time.  Thanks for reading!
     Happy New Year.