What is the purpose of God?  So did someone put it to me earlier this week.  What, really, he said, could it be?
     I could have replied that the idea of God holds the meaning of the universe together; or that the presence of God supplies the cosmos with a purpose it would not otherwise have; or that encountering God brings a person lasting peace with her creator; or that God provides the only reasonable explanation for personality and order in the universe; or that the notion of God indicates an intelligent starting point for a thoroughly intelligible cosmos; and, either way, I would not have been too far off the mark.
     Yet I don't know that this answers the bigger question.  Given everything we know about ourselves and the world around us, what can the idea of God possibly add to our understanding of it all?
     Asking this question, however, forces the issue to a head.  We couldn't ask it, we wouldn't ask it unless we thought we should.  And we will only think we should if we think we have a reason to do so.
     And at one time or another, we all do.  And that says it all.

     In my most recent atheist discussion group meeting, one person suggested that we all inhabit different realities, and that what is real for one of us may not be real for anyone else.  She of course understands that, physically speaking, we occupy the same material grounding.  How we see and experience that grounding can be, however, vastly different.
     To this, another replied that, "Can't we agree that, for example, if we put our hand on a hot stove, we will burn?"  Though the first speaker did not deny this, I think that he (the other speaker) missed her point.  If we insist that our way of looking at the world is always and evermore the only way that we can look at the world, we miss something highly important about the human being:  God intended for us to see the world in different ways.  Indeed, he comes to and encounters each of us in a different way.  Even if we all believe in him, we will never see him in precisely the same way.  God's too big for that.
     What we believe may be the same, but how we see it is not.  Whether we are Kantians, averring that there are objects separate from us or postmodernists who insist that what we know is created by our perception alone, we should understand that, regardless of what we think, we all inhabit the same "here," a "here" ultimately mediated by God.
     After all, how can we who are "here"--and nowhere else--really know--or make--what it is?  Unless anything else is "here," we are in truth how the Smashing Pumpkins many years ago characterized us, that is, rats running around in a cage.
     The story never really begins.

     Art, the nineteenth century Impressionists said, is something close to pure sensation.  And, the twentieth artist and critic of abstraction, Wassily Kandinsky asserted, the way we do art is art in itself.
     What can we take away from these things?  Inherently creative and profoundly emotional beings that we are, we live ultimately according to our experience, an experience that is mediated by our senses.  To do art is to do life, to create experiences, to step into our beingness, and to move away from and beyond our mind.  To live is to be rational, yes, but it is more precisely to understand that, when all is said and done, we are an experience, a highly charged aesthetic experience that all the neurons on the planet will never, in another moment, ever be able to exactly duplicate.
     So did God arrange the construction of existence.  To live is to live as a work of art, a masterpiece of form, experience, and function, to be and pursue steady movement toward deeper existential fulfillment, a movement which finds its final and richest expression in our encounter with God's own, and highly charged as well, existential experience, his taste and inculcation and expression of human existence in the person of Jesus Christ.
     We really can step into the life of God.

     Given the heavy news coverage given to the Oscars, we may wonder what is the point.  For those who follow the Oscars, it was of course a visual feast:  the the parade of "celebrities" on the red carpet adorning the entrance to the auditorium prior to the ceremony; the interviews with numerous movie stars; the vignettes splashed on the auditorium screen, and more.  Magazines that cover "celebrities" left with much fodder for their next issue.
     For the rest of us, however, the Oscars come and go as if nothing has happened.  By next year, the movies and stars which excelled this year will be forgotten, and the new winners will be forgotten promptly in the following year as well.  We wonder:  what is the point?  The movies made money, the stars made money, people were entertained, the culture grew some more furrows, and then we move on to the next thing.  It's gone as quickly as it has come.
     So goes much of Western culture.  It passes over and through us almost seamlessly, as if it had never happened, as if we had never experienced it at all.  Thanks to the magic of soundbites, Andy Warhol's famous fifteen minutes of fame have shrunk to less than a minute, as evanescent as they can possibly be.  We barely know they were here.
     Yet we keep moving on, keep pursuing our life dreams, perhaps thinking about one of the leading characters in the novel Perks of Being a Wallflower's wish that he not lapse into "oblivion."  We strive for presence, for presence is all, in an epistemologically empty cosmos, we have.  It's almost enough to make one wish for a God, for then, and only then, will any of the Oscars ever have any lasting point.
     Indeed, for then, and only then, even after every movie has run, every star has passed on, and all has turned to dust, presence, more powerful and intense than we can presently imagine, will continue still.
     

     For those of us who follow such things, yesterday marked the first Sunday of Lent.  Repentance and circumspection now dominate the religious imagination, as those so inclined spend ever more time pondering the exigencies within their lives, the fleeting puffs of materiality in which we have life and breath.  Life looks more remarkable than ever:  an authentic path to meaning.
     And it is.  Lent, however, demands that we look for ultimate meaning not in life itself, but in that from which life came.  Given the wonder of the world, it's easy to rejoice in life without also wondering why life is, why we have it, why this existence has been given to us.  To what end do we live?
     In its call to slow down, to meditate and consider, to let go of the immediate, at least for a while, Lent carves multiple inroads into this question, dissembling the perfunctory and expected and normal.  It calls us to not blast life apart without knowing what we are blasting it into, to cease striving for what will not last, and to relax, as the Psalmist says, in the reality of God (Psalm 46:10).  Lent invites us to look at what matters most.  Who will we really be when we leave this world?
     Need we really acknowledge larger realities in our earthly existence?  Only you can decide that.  One truth, however, will remain.  We will never escape the fact of our mortality.  Lent reminds us of our contingency.  It also reminds us that if the world is contingency only, the universe would never have had a reason to be.  And neither would we.
     Enjoy the journey.

     Ultimately, are we individuals or people in community?  The easy answer is of course both.  But it's complicated.  A recently published, highly moving memoir, There was and There was Not, by Meline Toumani, seeks to come to grips with just how complicated it is.  Toumani has lived her most of her life in the United States, where, as an Armenian, she grew up constantly hearing talk of the Turkish massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915.  The Armenians call it genocide, the Turkish government, to this day, seems to deny it ever happened.  As Toumani explored how this issue played itself out in the lives of her people, she came to conclude that they would not really realize life's fullness until they moved past it.  Although she did not wish for anyone to forget about it, she also wanted for people to fit it into a larger historical and cultural context.
     In the course of writing her book, Toumani lived in Turkey as well as Armenia.  While living in the former, she learned to speak Turkish fluently, traveled around the country and talked with many people, Turks and those of other ethnic groups, and did what she could to understand various standpoints on the issue of the Armenian genocide.  She did the same when she lived in Armenia (she already knew how to speak Armenian).
     In the closing pages of the book, Toumani asks a few probing questions.  "What does it mean to be Armenian, or Turkish, or anything else?  What does it give you, and what does it keep you from getting?"  And, "If we [Armenians] move on from genocide recognition, with or without Turkey's olive branch, what holds us together?"
     Her answer is that, "If there is no better answer to this question, maybe the answer is simply, nothing.  Nothing holds us together; we are no longer together at all.  Now all possibilities are available to us, and that is terrifying.  We become individuals."
     She makes a very good point.  Although we have been created uniquely, every one of us different from the other, if all we are is uniquely individual, then, yes, she is correct: we've created the most disconnected planet we possibly can.  No one is anything, really, for we are all of us alone.
     Yet we are made to live in community.  We are made to live together and not apart.  We therefore individuate with joy but with caution as well.
     Many years ago, a friend of mine sent me a poem.  It read, "I am a self who lives in a world of selves who live as self."  Indeed:  even God is not alone.

     For the liturgically minded among us, you know that yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent.  For forty days, Christians around the world will take time to contemplate, in deeper fashion than they might otherwise, humility, sacrifice, and repentance.  They endeavor to let go of themselves and their everyday desires and embrace the other side, the side of life to which most people do not usually go, that of recognizing the reality of human folly and frailty before the vastness of the cosmos and, most of all, the overwhelming mystery and presence of God.  Lent is a time of journey, journeying to who we most are, remarkable and glorious, yes, but broken as well, broken people who are in need of the saving and healing grace of God.
     In less than thirty-nine days, this journey will end, culminating in the remembrance of the grandest event of all:  the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  It is a victory that remains with us to this day.  All things have become new.
     In closing, I offer this prayer by Jan Richardson:

     Will you meet us
     in the ashes
     will you meet us
     in the ache
     and show your face
     within our sorrow
     and offer us
     your word of grace.

     That you are life
     within the dying
     that you abide
     within the dust
     that you are what
     survives the burning
     that you arise
     to make us new.

     And in our aching
     you are breathing
     and in our weeping
     you are here
     within the hands
     that bear your blessing
     enfolding us
     within your love.

     In a recent interview, sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, perhaps the most respected entomologist in the world, suggested that humanity would be well served to eliminate, once and for all, religion.  Religion, Wilson said, is rooted in tribalism, and tribalism intrinsically leads, as he sees it, to intolerance.  Religion breeds conflict, nasty competition, and discord and anger.  We are, Wilson concludes, therefore better off without it.
     Wilson is surely correct in saying that "tribalism" has infected and used religion to singularly damaging ends.  We do not need to look far to see that, even today.  However, given that everyone ponders life's meaning, whether they do so in thoroughgoing materialist fashion or in pursuing transcendent quest, we may encounter difficulty, even contradiction in insisting that religion, in itself, should be eliminated altogether. Whether they involve themselves in religion or not, human beings tend to lapse into dogmatism over their individual or tribal viewpoints.  It's what, in part, gives them the strength and confidence of their convictions.  People like to be in control of what they own, be it possession or belief.  The impasse between America's Democratic and Republican parties is a prime example.
     It therefore seems as if the wiser path is to continue to give people opportunity to pursue their meaning, be it through religion or otherwise, while also encouraging greater societal focus on eschewing epistemological discrimination in favor of human unity, despite differences.  That is, allow each person the freedom to pursue his/her meaning, transcendent or not, while also insisting that people recognize that, in this life, no answer can possibly be final for absolutely everyone.  As humans are highly diverse, so will their perspectives be, and every perspective contributes to human richness, the marvel of the human penchant for creative purpose, however one defines it.  Whatever people believe, they must recognize that even if billions of people agree with them, there are many billions more who do not, and they are equally valuable and worthwhile in the human adventure on the planet.
     Furthermore, although personal quest certainly can lead to personal dogmatism--of all kinds--it need not if the questers admit that their quest is for them and for them alone.  If they find community in it, so much the better.  Yet community should be held loosely, as it is always subject to change. Though we remain human, we also remain alone:  some may find darkness without certainty, yet certainty, mismanaged, can bring a greater darkness still.  We should all walk somewhat "insecurely," convinced yet cognizant that we, this day, are not the end.

     Not to be too political, but what does Vladimir Putin want?  As most people know, Putin has for the past year or so been waging a battle, primarily through surrogate Ukrainians but with some of his own soldiers as well, to take over, the international community surmises, the one time Soviet satellite and now independent republic of Ukraine.  He is already well on his way to accomplishing his goal:  the Crimea region is gone.
     We can of course argue that, for example, the preponderance of native Russians in the Crimea indicates that if given a choice, they would prefer to be part of Russia, or that the natural ties between Russia and Ukraine run very deep and should not be ignored, and we can certainly identify bits of truth in these viewpoints.  But this does not mean that Putin is right to do what he is doing.  Very few nations, including, unfortunately, the United States, will enter another without invitation, and those that do are invariably more concerned about their own well being rather than that of the other.  Everyone, particularly nations, wants her space, her turf, what she considers to be rightfully hers.
     Yet being human, or being humans in a nation, means, it seems, to wish for more than one's "turf."  Whether in interpersonal relations or international exchange, it means to not look out for one's own interest only, but seek the best interests of the other as well.  If a conflict arises between these, then the best course of action is to look past one's own interest to that of the other.  In other words, to give rather than get.
     Boundaries provide essential definition.  We cannot live without them.  If we think ourselves, or our nation, to be more important than the boundaries that have defined us, we may be well to do so.  But we should be careful.  If we break a boundary, we break ourselves which, unless we know where we are going, may lead to further fracture still.

     What's in a president?  I think of that as I am reminded that today, in the United States, people remember President's Day.  Set aside as a day for the nation to recall and remember its presidents, particularly George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, President's Day invokes many things across the broad span of American opinion.  Some think of these individuals with immense admiration, others with undisguised disdain, still others with a mixture of skepticism, thankfulness, maybe awe.  For Washington, debates continue to rage over his ownership of slaves and whether or not he was a more than a Deist, that he was in fact a Christian.  For Lincoln, we appreciate how he emancipated the slaves and held the country together during one of the darkest periods in its history or, for others, how he violated the laws of habeas corpus during the Civil War and violated states' rights by not allowing the South to go its own way. Some even accuse him of ending an economic model (slavery) that, they claim, was actually good for the country.
     However we remember these men (and to this point they've all been men) as well as their forty-two counterparts, we do so because, like it or not, they have impacted the planet as few other people have. Although in some way every one of us has impacted the planet, American presidents have surely impacted it in ways that far exceed our own.
      In other ways, however, their impact is quite small.  Many centuries ago, when asked by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar to interpret a dream, the prophet Daniel, after offering his take on it, added, "It is God who establishes rulers."  In other words, over and beyond every ruler and his or her actions and machinations, whimsical, deliberate, thoughtful, or otherwise, lies a fulcrum of purpose more profound than they, and we, can imagine. Big or small, we humans stride a planet whose ultimate design, purpose, and destiny we really cannot fully describe.  We may predict, we may cogitate, be it on the basis of geopolitical and scientific assessments or sacred writings, about its end, but we quickly forget that even the most hegemonic ruler is, in the last battle, merely--and only--mortal. Ultimately, he or she, like all of us, doesn't really know the full extent of his place.
     God or not, we walk in a singularly unfathomable universe.

     If you're in love with someone, or if you've ever loved someone, you probably know that tomorrow is Valentine's Day.  Although in many ways it has become (or, I might say, degenerated into) a Hallmark holiday, it actually has a measure of legitimate historical origin.  Its name comes from St. Valentine, one of many martyrs in the early years of the Church and, as Rome faded into history and the Middle Ages began, it morphed into a day associated with love and romance.  Despite the way that various retailers use Valentine's Day to increase sales, doing their best to entice lovers, particularly men, to spend more disposable income than they would otherwise to please their loved one, it's still a good day.  What harm can come from thinking about love?
     Setting aside thoughts about the infamous Valentine's Day Massacre of American gangster lore, we can say that Valentine's Day should cause all of us to think, again, about how and why we love--and how and why God loves us.  So many of us struggle to be loved, so many of us look for love, as the saying goes, in all the wrong places, and so many wonder, as perhaps singer Linda Ronstadt did decades ago, when we will be loved.  Not one of us does not appreciate, in some way, the love of another human being.
     Tom Vincent was a hermit who lived on the side of California’s San Gabriel Mountains’ 9,000 foot Mt. Baden-Powell for over 50 years.  A recluse, he made every effort to keep people away, sometimes firing his rifle at anyone who dared approach his habitation.  One day, however, Tom became very sick, so much so that he could no longer live on his own.  As it turned out, he was dying.
     Fortunately for Tom, the local postmaster, the only person with whom he ever talked, learned of his illness and took him down the mountain to a hospital.  After a few weeks, Tom died, the postmaster still at his side.  He didn’t die alone.  Tom did not die forgotten.  He was thought of, he was cared for.  Tom saw a window into the world that he had not opened before.  He saw that that the world was not a completely cold place.  He saw that life had not been a travesty.  There was love, there was memory.
     As you remember Valentine's Day, think about Tom.  Think about love.  And think about from where, in a world of impersonal chemical and material origin, love could possibly otherwise come.  Think about the transcending love of God.

     Some years ago, Rabbi Harold Kushner published a book, a very popular book, called Why do Bad Things Happen to Good People?  We all resonate with this.  We also resonate with its converse.  Why do those who seem so evil, like the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, live into their late nineties, and their victims do not see their thirtieth birthday?  Why, as countless religious texts observe, do those who do the most good die first and those who do the most evil last?  Or as songwriter Billy Joel opined, "Why do the good die young?"  It doesn't seem fair.
     And it's not.  We will never be able to understand why, either.  It is a question that will haunt us to the day we die.  The world is bent, the cosmos is broken, and equity constantly eludes us.  On the other hand, how do we measure what is fair?  How do we know, always know, what is right?
     The short answer is that we don't.  The longer answer is that we have one of two avenues to pursue.  We can suppose that there is a God who will one day set all things right.  Or we can suppose that we will do the best we can to effect what we perceive to be justice in this life and leave the rest to the forces of time and destiny.  Or we can do both.  Either way, justice matters.
     On the other hand, may be not:  if we cannot explain the reason for the world, we really have no basis to complain.  What's the point?
     Oddly, if God isn't there, we have no way to even ask the question.

     If you've ever read the Bible's book of Genesis, you may have come across the story of Joseph.  It is a classic account of how even when things seem to go as badly as they possibly can, God nevertheless works good--for everyone involved--from them.  There are no interminable endings with God.
     Briefly, Joseph, the favorite of his father Jacob yet hated by his brothers, was one day sold by his brothers into slavery in Egypt.  In Egypt, however, he quickly gained favor with his master Potiphar until in a fit of jealousy and rage, Potiphar's wife accused Joseph, falsely, of trying to seduce her.
     Thrown into prison without appeal, Joseph, remarkably, found favor with his jailers. Eventually, after he had established a reputation for interpreting the most difficult and arcane of dreams, he came to the attention of the nation's ruler, the pharaoh. Recognizing Joseph's gifts, the pharaoh elevated him to a place second only to him, charging him with ensuring that when, as Joseph had predicted on the basis of Pharaoh's most recent dreams, famine comes to Egypt, the nation would be ready.
     So successful was Joseph in his duties that when famine came, the entire Mediterranean world was soon knocking at Egypt's doorstep for food.  Among the suppliants were Joseph's brothers.  After some complex and almost recondite exchanges between them, Joseph made himself known to his siblings.  As the story draws to a close, he tells them that, "You intended to do evil to me, but God intended it for good."  Indeed: across the ancient world, thousands of lives were saved from starvation and loss of their nations.
     Throughout, God didn't try to stop anyone from making his choices.  He let matters unfold.  In the end, however, he prevailed.
     In God's world, nothing is ever left unsolved or undone.  There's always an ending, a thoroughly rational, in the broadest and deepest sense, ending.
     

     If you know anything about rock and roll, you are likely familiar with the Beatles' song Eleanor Rigby.  It is a paean to the forgotten people of the world, the people who live and die and no one notices, people whose death attracts virtually no notice other than those who do the funeral and burial.  And even they probably stop thinking about the death in a few days.  It's just another life, gone, a life like countless others, here today, gone tomorrow.  It's no more.
     Many years ago, I was traveling in Eastern Canada, exploring parts of Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia.  Although these parts of Canada attract fewer tourists than their western counterparts, they nonetheless enjoy a busy season every summer.  In some sectors of the region, however, very few people go.  It was in one of these places that I found myself one cloudy afternoon.  I was in a cemetery, a very old cemetery in the little town of Iona.  The history buffs among us may know that Iona is also the name of one of the most famous medieval British monasteries, whose monks, along with their neighbors at nearby Lindisfarne, did much to preserve the scholarship of the ancient world until the European continent emerged from its lengthy slumber of antiquity.
     I saw some very old grave markers, some hundreds of years old.  It was fascinating, really, to see how, though these markers now exist for only a very few people, they continue to preserve and remember human lives and, more broadly, existence.  Each one tells a story, a story which probably none of us will ever know.  All the lonely people, as the song goes, "Where do they all come from?"
     It's a very good question.  In a world whose origins seems more knowable yet increasingly unfathomable with each passing year, we wonder:  where do we all come from?
     Life's origins really do matter.  Do we really live in a random universe?

      Do you enjoy your smartphone?  Most of us who have them do.  We love them, yet we hate them, too.  We love what they do for us, and we recoil at what they are doing to us.  But we know we can't turn back the clock to the days of pay phones only.  We cannot be the Luddites of the Industrial Revolution, those who rejected the technologies that the Revolution introduced to the Western world.  Unless we live in the world of Jules Verne's Time Machine or Steven Spielberg's Back to the Future, we cannot go back in time.  As the writer of Ecclesiastes wisely observes, "What is crooked cannot be straightened" (3:15).
     And why should we?  Can we really, fully, assess the impact of what we do today?  Can the older generation, those who grew up with pay phones, really discern the fullness of what the absence of pay phones is doing to the younger generation?  So little could those who impelled the Industrial Revolution, those brilliant inventors and innovative entrepreneurs who developed and marketed the devices on which we still rely today, imagine the impact of what they were doing one hundred years hence.  Like all of us, they were creatures of their time, working for what they considered to the betterment of the generations of their days.  They thought, they made, they continued on.
     As do we.  We work in our time to build on what has come before us.  People may lament the way that the Industrial Revolution undermined human belief in a sovereign and personal God, yet they cannot dismiss the usefulness of what the Revolution brought us.  It has lengthened and saved countless lives.  None of us, religious or not, wants to return to the days that preceded it.  We wish to live with what we have.
     And who we have become.  So what do we do?  We admit the wonder and caprice of existence, and hold on, believing that if God indeed created the world, it still has meaning and everything that it generates and unfolds will, too.  We're just along for the ride.
     And we ride.

     "We can only obey our own polarity," stated American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, "'Tis fine for us to speculate and elect our course, if we must accept an irresistible dictation."  So Emerson observed in "Fate," an essay he published in 1860.  Like all of us, Emerson struggled with the often frustrating balance between what we want to do with what actually happens.  Though we all make plans, though we all develop life visions, big or small, we all know that, as many have said, "Stuff happens."  We never know.
     

     The ancient Greeks envisioned three spinster sisters who lived in a cave far away from all human habitation who rolled out a length of thread for every human being then, in seemingly arbitrary fashion, snipped it.  The point at which they snipped the thread marked the end of that person's life.  Sometimes the sisters rolled out the thread for some distance, say for the playwright Sophocles, who lived to be ninety.  Other times the sisters snipped the thread very soon after rolling it out, perhaps for the Spartan babies who were considered deformed at birth and promptly discarded.  Either way, neither gods nor humans could undo the sisters's decision.
     Although most of us today do not believe in these spinster sisters, we nonetheless wrestle with what appears to be the rather arbitrary and uncontrollable nature of existence.  We all know about people who appear to have done everything they can to ensure good health, then abruptly drop dead of a heart attack, as did a 64 old master's level runner in Michigan (I learned of this from my brother) a couple of years ago.  And we are all aware of people who seem as if they will die young, then live to a ripe old age, including any number of rock musicians who, despite having abused their bodies greatly, keep going.  Many people use Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards as one example of this.
     Regardless, we all must come to grips with the uncertainty of existence.  It's a delicate balance.  Even if we accord ultimate sovereignty to God rather than the simple randomness of reality, we nonetheless stand before the same issue:  we walk in profound mystery.

     As I dug out from the winter storm that enveloped the upper Midwest recently, occasionally hearing the groaning of my neighbors about their task, I thought about numerous people on the other side of the world who everyday have to deal with far more dire threats to their well being, things like war, terrorism, and natural disasters for which they do not always have adequate municipal response.  In this light, I had little about which to complain.
     But many of us complain anyway.  Many of us lament the meteorological challenges that ripple through our lives, wondering why we live in a part of the world in which we are subject to such things, thinking that we would rather be in a different place, at least for a seasons.  We'd rather not have to deal with them.
     Not that I necessarily love shoveling snow (although I do not really mind), but I do love that, in some parts of the world, we see seasonal change.  We see nature's rhythms, we see its patterns, we see the structures that order and govern the planet.  We see the core of what makes the world go, see a window into the heart of those things that enable us to live.  We see the wisdom of God.
     Not to say that we would not see these things if we did not experience the seasons, just that facing the raw expressions of nature's might allows us to step back and realize anew how fortunate we are to know this universe.
     And, if we like, the God who made it.
     

     Wanting to learn a little more about the reasons for its popularity, I recently read the best selling novel Gone Girl.  While I will not spoil the plot for anyone who has not read the book or seen the movie, I will say that I quickly saw why the book has won so many admirers.  It's very compelling, almost effortlessly pulling the reader into a vortex of intrigue that, in the end, seems tangled--and unfathomable--beyond belief.  It's almost like a page from the Twilight Zone.  We read it, we see it, but we still can't grasp why it happens and why its protagonists do what they do.
     But that's us.  As most of us know, life is inherently unpredictable.  Many upon many people like to think, however, that they can make it thoroughly the opposite.  They believe they can control their destiny, that they can map and implement their life path and story without any dissent or opposition.
     Sometimes they can, at least for a while.  Usually, they cannot.  In a broken world, a bent but nonetheless functioning creation, we try in vain to direct everything.  It's impossible.  Though we can tap into the world's structures and patterns, though we can alter some parts of space and make inroads into time, we cannot eliminate them altogether.  We stumble over our reality.  We trip over ourselves.
     This is really good, actually.  If we mastered (whatever that means) our reality fully, we would have nothing else to be.  We would be in a state of permanent stasis, captives of the veil that falls constantly upon us all, the delicate veil that reminds us, if we listen, that we are more than controlling beings.
     We would miss the bigger truth:  life, and destiny, are much, much larger than what we think or see.  As Jesus told many a listener, "What does it profit a person if she gains the whole world, but loses her soul?"
     Regardless and no matter what, God won't go away.

     As you may know, yesterday was Groundhog Day.  For anyone who lives in colder climes or who has seen Bill Murray's movie by the same name, you know that Groundhog Day is a day that conjures up all kinds of images.  Its origins buried deep in ancient European belief and lore, Groundhog Day occurs roughly midway between the Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox.  It is, as those who live through cold and snowy winters, the point at which maybe, just maybe, things are on the upswing that, going forward, they are closer to spring than winter.  For people whose families come from Central Europe, they can imagine their ancestors, less equipped to deal with the hardships of the winter than we are today, rejoicing in the idea that "Old Man Winter" has, in part, and for another year, been conquered.
     Of course, our present capacities to predict weather far exceed those of our ancestors (but not always!), and of course, we have the capability to examine long term weather trends and draw assessments and prognostications which our forebearers likely could not do.  When particularly harsh weather, in whatever season it may be, is forecast, we can take steps to mitigate the effect it has on us.  We benefit from our modern technologies.
     On the other hand, with each new statistic and predictive instrument we devise and use, we put one more layer between us and our world.  We're safer, yes, but we are not necessarily richer, culturally and otherwise.  We forget what the world is like.  We fail to remember our deepest roots.  We overlook the beauty of the rhythms with which the world breathes.
     And maybe, maybe, maybe, we forget that we live and occupy a reality whose meaning does not consist in our ability to tame and conquer it, but rather in our willingness to subject ourselves to its mysteries--and to learn that, finite that we be, we will never fully outwit that which we did not make.