Are you familiar with artist Marc Chagall's White Crucifixion?  I thought about it anew a few weeks ago as I was reading a book about modern Jewish art.  It is indeed a sharp contrast to Chagall's massive stained glass work of the Chicago skyline and a far cry from the nondescript tomb in which his body now lies in southern France.  It is a work that explodes with poignancy and longing.

     Considering that Chagall was Jewish, White Crucifixion remains one of his most intriguing works.  It seems to capture Jesus' patent Jewishness.  Weaving in themes like Jacob's Ladder, the patriarch's vision of heaven and its possibilities; the menorah and its historically conditioned promise of hope; the Ark and its reflections of loss and renewal; the refugee-driven character of much of Jewish history, biblical and beyond; Moses' burning bush; and, perhaps most significantly, Jesus' loincloth not being a conventional loincloth but a ceremonial Jewish garment.  It is as if Chagall is superimposing upon Jesus the weight of Jewish history and theology while seeming to, in the shaft of light that illuminates the painting's center, point beyond it, as if whatever else we might imagine Jesus to be, in him is a path, a means, a way to heaven, the hesed and hod of Kabbalah, the splendor of the name (Shem).
     And maybe, as we look ever closer to Easter and the divine pain that preceded it, we may find this a good way to look at Jesus.  He presented himself as God, but not all of us want to see him as divine.  He also presented himself as Messiah, the one who would enable humanity to reconnect with God.  Not all of us would wish to believe this, either. One aspect of Jesus on which I think we all can agree is that his was a person and life unlike any other, a person whose existence has spawned countless historical interludes and spiritual vignettes, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and more, for one simple reason.  He made all of us think more carefully and thoughtfully about that most difficult and complex yet exceedingly straightforward of words:  God.  Speaking not just of a God of power and omnipotence but one of everlasting and nourishing love as well, Jesus presented to us a picture of and direction for how life could best be:  forgiveness and eternal peace with God.
     As I will be traveling for a week or so, I will not be posting for a few days.  I hope to reconnect with readers on Good Friday, one week from today.  Enjoy Holy Week!

     "Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit," the apostle Paul writes in the second chapter of his letter to the Christian church at Philippi, "but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves."  Whether we are religious or spiritual or not, we can take these words as emblematic of a considered and worthy life.  When Mother Theresa came to Stockholm to receive her Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, she wore the same garb that she had been wearing for decades, the simple vestments of her Catholic order.  While those who gave her the prize wore their evening's finest for the ceremony held in an opulent hall once used by Europe's highest royalty, all of these, it seemed, did not matter to Mother Theresa.  She had spent her life living out Paul's encouragement to his flock so many centuries ago, to give up personal ambitions for the good of others.  She had given her life for her fellow human beings.
     As we approach Lent's end, we should think often of humility.  It rarely comes naturally to anyone.
     Perhaps that's the point.  Sure, there are perverse and unnatural behaviors in which we ought not to engage, but humility is one of those "unnatural behaviors" in which we should engage.  It breaks boundaries, it undermines norms.  Looking out for others lets us know that in the biggest of all pictures, what we do for others is far more important than what we do for ourselves.
     Just ask Jesus.

     Why do things begin?  The obvious answer is, of course, that if things never begin, things that are here, us included, would not be here.  Things had to begin in order that things could be.  Conversely, however, if things did not begin, things would not end.
     Yet why must things end?  Why can not things begin and never end?  Maybe the seeming impossibility of this possibility accounts for in part why we finite beings have so much trouble grasping the notion of eternity.  We expect beginnings, we expect endings.  But we do not expect beginnings without endings.  Nor do we expect endings without beginnings.  Comprehending a condition with neither beginning nor end leaves us gasping for breath:  how can such a thing be?
     Some may find this frightening, others ludicrous.  As we draw ever closer to the final denouement of Lent, however, it makes perfect sense.  Why else would an eternal God have spoken, in the person of Jesus, to finite beings if eternity did not exist, good as well as bad, waiting, upon our earthly passing, for us to step into it?
     In the hourglass of eternity, things not eternal must begin.  They also must end.  Yet eternity must always remain, moral structure and all, boggling our senses and imaginations, ever underscoring for us that without it, nothing else can really begin.  How else would we be here?

     "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  Possibly the most depressing words ever spoken, they come from Psalm 22 in the Hebrew Bible.  We tend to think about them most intently during Lent, when many of us recall that as he hung on the cross in agonizing pain, Jesus yelled them out to God.  Betrayed by one of his disciples, condemned by a farcical trial, scourged until flesh hung like ribbons from his back, nailed to a wooden cross, and abandoned by his friends, Jesus had nowhere to turn but God.
     Yet in Jesus' hour of deepest need, God, his father, the father who had loved him, as Jesus put it, "before the foundations of the world," abandoned Jesus, his only son.  He turned his face away from him, unwilling and unable to look upon him as he endured God's penalty of hell for sin.  It's an unbearable picture:  total isolation and unremitting darkness and despair.  Jesus was separated from life itself.
     If we read the rest of Psalm 22, however, we see that after those words of horrific angst, the writer says to God, "But you are holy and enthroned on the praises of Israel."  The writer is voicing his conviction that even if God appears to have abandoned him, he remains a good, worthy, and loving God.  Because Jesus died, he rose, and because he rose, every human being can experience, if she wants, union with God.  Although we often suffer terribly in this earthly existence, God remains good.  His love pervades all things. Recognizing this is indeed the supreme challenge of faith:  we do not always know what will happen next.  And we do not always know why.  But we know God.
     If God's love is not present, pain and despair have no real conqueror.  And the universe, as the atheist Jean Paul Sartre pointed out, is darker and lonelier than we can possibly imagine.
     As we continue through Lent, contemplations and meditations of pain, joy, and all, I encourage us to remember the ubiquity of God.

     With the coming of spring, we, at least those of us who are familiar with some of the nuances of classical music, also remember the birthday of the great German musician Johannes Sebastian Bach.  For many centuries (Bach died in 1750), Bach's melodies have reverberated across the world, stirring the hearts of millions, perhaps billions of people, many of whom probably have not been aware that it was Bach's music they were hearing.  As long as humanity moves upon the earth, it's unlikely that Bach's melodies will be forgotten.
     

     In this, we can rejoice.  We humans are remarkable creatures, really, beings who can create, beings who can reason, beings who can change the world.  In Bach's many glorious melodies, we see, in magnificent musical form, a bit of our seemingly unlimited potential to take what is within and before us and transform it into something that, to a music lover, or almost anything else, is a thing beyond ready imagination.  It's quite astounding.
     Moreover, regardless of how one sees the universe's origins (though the frequent reader no doubt knows my loyalties in this regard), we can all, I think, put ourselves into the cosmos that we see as actors.  We are actors in a tale of incredible marvel and wonder, birthed and gifted to explore and understand and transform the worlds that lay before us, thespians who are acting out a drama at which we can, if we stop to think, be ever amazed.
    We can thank Bach today for what he has shown us about our capacities.  We can also thank Bach for giving to us a glimpse of the unfolding mystery of who we are in this vast, vast--and loved--universe.

     Today is the Vernal Equinox, otherwise known as the first day of spring.  For those of us who live in the colder climes of the planet, the Equinox is a day for which we wait, some of us patiently, others not, enduring or, for some, enjoying, a few or many months of snow, cold, and generally harsher meteorological conditions until, one day, spring comes.
     In chapter thirteen of the third book of his Anna Karenin, Leo Tolstoy writes eloquently about spring, thinking, no doubt, about the often difficult Russian winters, 

"Invisible larks broke into song above the velvety green fields and the ice-covered stubble-land; peewits began to cry over the low lands and marshes, still bubbly with water not yet swept away; cranes and wild geese flew high across the sky, uttering their spring calls. The cattle, bald in patches where they had shed their winter coats, began to low in the pastures; lambs with crooked legs frisked round their bleating mothers who were losing their fleece; swift-footed children ran about the paths drying with imprints of bare feet; there was a merry chatter of peasant women over their linen at the pond and the ring of axes in the yard, where the peasants were repairing their ploughs and harrows.
"Spring had really come."

     Enjoy what God, guiding and undergirding and, through its natural laws, sustaining the planet yet leaving it for us to experience, has bequeathed us!

     Also, if you have time, listen to a bit of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, performed by world famous violinist Itzhak Perlman and his chamber orchestra:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKthRw4KjEg

     Last week, I heard part of a debate between an atheist and a professor at a Christian school of divinity on this question:  can we be good without God?  Although this is an ancient question, it nonetheless takes us to the heart of what is means to be alive and human:  how do we know what is right and wrong?
     The issue is not what is good and bad.  The real issue is, why do we think in moral terms?  Why do we instinctively imagine a world in which right and wrong exist?  How have we flesh and blood beings developed a immaterial moral sense?  Why would we suppose to do so?  Saying that we deemed it necessary to do so begs the question:  why, in the absence, of a moral sense, would we ever have considered it appropriate?  That's putting the cart before the horse; it does not answer the question.
     Theism of course says that our moral sense, being immaterial, could only have come from God.  But why were Adam and Eve, the first humans, to have it?  What was it about them that such a thing became possible?  Weren't they as flesh and blood as you and me?
     A non-theistic argument would say in reply that it was that very flesh and blood nature that enabled the rise of a moral sense.  It was inevitable and necessary for human survival, essential for the development of the species.  But who decided that?
     It's difficult to dismiss the importance of a moral sense.  Yet as I said earlier, it's also difficult to see how beings who did not have one thought it necessary to possess one.  Can genetic mutation and variation really produce morality?
     Although we should not use God to fill in the blanks, we can surely acknowledge that what is personal, that is, the moral sense, could never arise from what is, personally speaking, dead.  Perhaps how is not nearly important as why.
     It's hard to be moral without determining why we are. 

     Ah, home.  As we all know, home often changes, but wherever it is, it is home.  When one's parents move out of a childhood home, as happens to many of us, home becomes, in a very real way, gone.  Its presence is there no longer.
     Yet it remains.  Home is important.  Home settles and soothes us; home grounds us.  We need home.  We need a place.  Not space, but place.
     But even place is not permanent.  In the closing verses of fourth chapter of his second letter to the church at Corinth, Paul says that, clearly, our earthly bodies are decaying. Hence, he argues, we should consider the experience which lies beyond this present reality, that which lies outside the confines of our frail bodies.  It is that reality, he says, on which we should focus, for it is that reality which, far more than this evanescent existence, comprises the foundation of our moments.  Love our earthly home and homes, yes, but love that in which these homes find meaning, too.  Love the reason home is possible and plain.  Look at the bigger picture.

     In chapter five, Paul talks about being “naked” in our “earthly” dwelling (the current home of our body).  Now, we are in effect "naked."  We are not yet clothed with the experience of the next realm.  Indeed, we will not be fully “dressed” until we reach the other side.  That's our real home.
     As a person who while incarcerated on death row in a Texas prison found his salvation and meaning in Jesus remarked the night before his scheduled execution, "I've always wanted a home.  Now I'm going to get one."
     This person knew the real meaning of home.  Though the homes of this life are vastly important, they fade before the foretaste of the home to come, the home that necessarily grants other homes point and meaning.  Take away this home, and we're left with a very cold universe.

      If you live in one of the major metropolitan areas of the eastern U.S. or, in the British Isles, near Ireland, you have no doubt noticed that today is St. Patrick's Day.  Celebrated by Irish (and many others) the world over, it commemorates the life and death of the most famous Christian missionary in Ireland.  Historians agree that regardless of the various rumors swirling about Patrick's life, education, or origins, he definitively broke the back of the region's paganism and laid the groundwork for the emergence of the Catholic Church, which continues to dominate Ireland to this day.
     According to Patrick's writings, his conversion was a sense of God opening to him "the sense of my unbelief that I might remember my sins and that I might return with my whole heart to the Lord my God."  One thinks of William James's (in his Varieties of Religious Experience) characterizations of conversion as a sense of transformation and entrance into a newness that its holder had not previously imagined.  As James sees it, this sense of conversion subsequently motivates its holder to proclaim what she has found, to let others know what remarkable thing has happened to her.
     So it did for Patrick.  Like the apostle Paul, who was completely transformed on the road to Damascus (see Acts 9), Patrick was similarly compelled to go to Ireland and preach as long as he had strength.  Religious conversion tends to do this to people.  Although it can touch on extremes, for instance, the violent actions of religious fundamentalists--of all faiths--the world over, on the whole, it leaves people wanting to do little but share what they have found.  They usually cannot help it, so great is the insight they have been given.
     How ironic it is, then, that the conversion of someone so long ago has produced a day of drink-filled partying and mirth around the West!  On the other hand, religion happens to all of us in context.  God never changes, but we all find him in different ways.  Though Jesus remains the key, we come into knowing him in a nearly infinite number of circumstances, the patterns of our culture, our lives, and our individual hearts.  God's designs are inevitably far bigger than our own.  However, wherever we live, if we look hard enough, we will eventually find him.  Enjoy the party.

     Followers of Shakespeare's plays or students of Roman history know:  yesterday was March 15, traditionally recognized as the Ides of March.  On this day in 44 B.C., Julius Caesar, the general and would-be dictator of the Roman republic was assassinated, set upon by a group of nearly sixty people, including his supposedly best friend and associate Brutus, and stabbed to death on the floor of the Roman Senate.  It was an ugly demise.
     As the historian Plutarch tells it, some time prior to that day, Caesar was warned by a seer that he would die before the Ides of March ended.  In a movie made about Caesar a decade ago, he was pictured seeing a crow fly overhead as he traveled to the Senate that day.  In much ancient lore, including that of Rome, a crow was considered to be a bad omen.
     How much did Caesar know?  More importantly, how much did Caesar believe what he heard or saw?  We all have our Ides of March.  We all have moments in our lives, not moments in which we die, but moments that, for reasons entirely unique to us, are tremendously important in our lives.  We all have our crossroads.
     Perhaps best known for his composition "Crossroads," the African-American blues singer Robert Johnson paints a picture of a decision to be made, a barrier to be bridged and, to borrow from Caesar once again, a Rubicon to be crossed.  Though the story is that the song describes a pact that Johnson supposedly made with the Devil, we cannot be sure.
     The point is this:  how much do we believe about what we see?  How much do we believe in the possibility of a transforming moment?  Maybe Caesar saw, and ignored it. Maybe he didn't see at all.  The world is speaking to us all the time.
     But why?  The world speaks because it has been spoken.  The world speaks because it is personal.  The world speaks because morality is real.
     Even Faust understood that good and evil mean nothing unless they really exist.  And they only really exist if we are not the ones deciding what they are ultimately to be.

     What would it be like to live in darkness?  I guess this depends on how we define darkness.  Is it the inability to see physically?  Is it the inability to see spiritually?  Is it living in a place without light?  Is it living in the northern climes of the planet during the coldest stages of winter?
     Or is it, as Anna Lyndsey (a pen name), writes in her recently published memoir, Girl in the Dark, to live with a skin condition that precludes her from exposing herself to direct light?  Once as active as any of us, a number of years ago Lyndsey was diagnosed with a rare skin condition that, if she ventures into any type of light, she feels as if her skin is on fire.  The more and stronger the light, the more intense the burning.
     As a result, Lyndsey no longer works outside her home.  She spends her days in a darkened room, listening to books on tape, doing a little writing on a dimly lit computer screen, waiting for her male companion to come home.  Only at dusk, when the sun's light fades, does she dare go outside and explore.
     Besides pitying the conditions in which Lyndsey must live, I think as well of how, as I intimated earlier, her situation reflects, in many ways, our corporate experience.  We all live in darkness of some kind.  Sometimes we know we do; sometimes we do not.  It seems, however, that the latter is the most insidious.  Self-delusion topples everyone.
     As most religions know, darkness is often the path to light.  I hope that more and more with each passing day Lyndsey finds this to be true.  Indeed, I hope that all of us walk in our darknesses looking for the light.  I hope that all of us come to see that although the world is rife with darkness, the fact of its being created means that, ultimately, its light is what will define it.
     So does John say, "God is light and in him there is no darkness at all."

     Talking with a friend the other day, we reminensced on the movie “Love, Actually.” Amid its vignettes and points of humor, this movie paints a world of love sought, sometimes found, and sometimes, lost, yet a world in which life continues on just the same.  It’s a beautiful (in the purest ancient Greek sense of the word) picture of human intentionality trapped in human limitation, the aesthetics of a bottomless yet meaningful existence.
     Bottomless yet meaningful?  When I consider the rambling cacaphony of humanity, I ponder the exigency before which we all stand.  We see what is, we see indications of what we hope could be, yet we do not see full evidence of either, for we all are contingent, contingent in a porous reality whose possibility, if personal transcendence is absent, is itself contingent on itself, a decidedly paradoxical eventuality.  It seems a stab into a darkness we cannot conceive or describe, the darkness into which we may think we will one day go, the blackness that, as Peter put it in his second letter, of the world's end.
     When God came to Abraham and promised a covenant, Abraham had nothing on which to base his conviction that this covenant would actually come about except the fact of God.  Similarly, when God spoke to Moses in the burning bush, Moses had nothing on which to base God’s vision of the future except for the fact of God.  Sure, he saw the bush burning, and sure, he saw the staff turn into a serpent, yet these were all in the present moment.  Could God guarantee the future?  Could he provide evidence for things hoped for?
     Or do we?  It all hinges on the essence of the bottomless yet meaningful reality in which we all stand.  If it is "it," nothing, really, is guaranteed, not even who we are.  If it is "not," that is, if there is something in which it finds greater form and meaning, then human intentionality exceeds itself, and all things are possible--even God.

            

     I heard the other day the poet/songwriter Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”  It reminded me of Canadian (and now American) singer Neil Young’s song, “When God Made Me.”  In it, Young questions God, asking him why he made people a certain way, why he made people when he knew they wouldn’t believe, why he wanted people to have faith anyway, and more.  Both pieces ask a very good question:  how can I have faith in God if I do not understand everything I feel or believe him to do or be?  Why must I wander in the darkness when I’m standing in the light?
     These are difficult questions.  Faith is an exercise in tension, a tension between what we know and what we do not, between what we see and what we do not, between what we think and what we cannot conceive.  It’s a nearly insuperable challenge.  I ask God many “why” questions, too:  why must morality be framed in a particular way; why must people be born only to die a few days later; why do some people believe and others do not?  It makes one long for the simplicity of former Beatle John Lennon’s song, “God,” in which he says, "I just believe in me; Yoko and me.  That’s reality.”

     Though I get that Lennon, along with countless others, wishes to reduce what is real to what is immediately before him, and that on the face of it, this looks as the most viable way to look at the objects of our perception, I also wonder, given the possibility of the metaphysical and transcendent as well as the difficulty of reducing ourselves to a brain and attendant vat of chemicals, whether he is overlooking that reality is more than what he wants to perceive.  Otherwise, we are merely projections of ourselves—and who and where are we?!
       Granted, transcendence and religion do not lend themselves well to our perceptions.  And that’s the problem.  Ironically, it’s also the solution.  If we could explain everything with chemicals, if we never developed questions like Cohen and Young pose, if we subsumed all experience into a plastic (or computerized) box, then, yes, we would need nothing else.  But we can’t.  So we wonder.
     It's the ultimate human challenge.  And God is waiting for us, today, tomorrow, and beyond, to respond.
    

     Is faith simply an ethnic expression?  We have some good friends who are Muslims.  They came to the States from Pakistan in 1975 and never left.  They love America and would never return to Pakistan, except to visit.  And they love and revere Allah.  They pray to him at least five times a day.  Growing up as Muslims, they have never known anything else.  For them, being Muslim is being who they are.  If they had been born in the U.S., would they be Muslims?  While it is impossible to say with certainty, my point is that for them faith has been filtered through the lens of their cultural heritage, just as mine has been filtered through the lens of my American experience.  We express our faith amid our cultural baggage, for sure, and walk in it in the compass of our life experience.  We cannot do otherwise.

     So whose is the greater confrontation with the limits of the present?  We both walk in an aura of a coming thing, we both tread about in this life in light of the life we believe it will one day be, however we conceive and define it, we both understand existence through the skein of another one from which it came.  We cannot see life as existing independently, as life being accidental, as life being no more than the coalescing of subjective chemical experiences, as life being what has been made from what has been there.  We both hold to the fact of another presence.  Faith knows no boundaries.
     Ethnicity may drive the experience of faith, but it doesn't define the fact of it.  People have faith in God because they are human beings.  People have faith in God because they realize that all the scientific knowledge on the planet, valuable though it be, will not answer a most basic question:  why are we here?
     People have faith in God because they understand that humility is essential to humanness.

     Although she has been gone for nearly five years, I cannot help but think of my mother on this day, year after year after year:  it's her birthday.  I found fresh poignancy in the day this year when a few days ago I heard John Lennon's "Mother."  For those who have not heard the song, Lennon sings of the mother and father whom he always wanted but, as he puts it in the song, were never there for him.  They didn't "have" him.
     Would we all wish for parents who are there for us, who "have" us, who love us as we wish them to love us.  In contrast to Lennon, I experienced this love in full, and more, in the love of my parents, my mother and father.  I really needed nothing more from them, for in their love they gave me everything I could possibly want and need.  I left home believing that the world was a good place, that people were decent beings, that love reigned in the universe.  Thanks indeed, Mom and Dad, thanks always and forevermore. I'll never be able to repay everything you did for me
     I hope that all of us find this kind of love, too.  Whether it's from our parents or others, I hope that we all come to see the fullness and presence of love in the cosmos, and enjoy and appreciate its every expression on our behalf.  I hope that we all know love as something that always wants us.
     Like the love of God.  Thank goodness for a loving God.

     The other day, I watched a video produced by a prominent atheist blogger named Matt Dillahunty.  He talks about what he considers to be the futility of faith.  Using the famous "faith" passage in Hebrews 11:1, which reads, "Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen," he proceeds to dismantle the entire edifice of Christian belief.  In the end, he observes that faith is just "pretending you know something when you really don't."  In point of truth, he says, the verse in Hebrews indicates that faith itself is the evidence for itself, a conclusion that, for him, is not a tenable intellectual position.
     He's right:  it's not.  Faith needs more than itself to be credible.  Faith needs reasons, and faith needs evidence to be cogent.  However, when believers raise this issue with Dillahunty, he replies that their evidence is "not good."  By whose standards?  Clearly, his own.  If the evidence for the Christian faith can be tested, that is, if it is falsifiable, why should it not be considered credible?
     Although we cannot readily test an experience, we can certainly test historical event. There is ample archaeological and linguistic evidence that many of the events presented in both testaments of the Bible really did happen, and there is ample historical evidence that the people of whom the Bible talks were born, lived, and died just like you and me. We can test this evidence, not in the court of public opinion, but through dispassionate research and study.
     If Christianity has no historical basis, then, yes, we have no good reason to believe it. If it does, however, we have every good reason to at least test and examine it, even if we later decide we cannot live with it.  We owe it to ourselves to follow the evidence where it leads.  We all possess minds, we all possess reason, and we all possess the capacity for rational thought.  And we ought to employ it.
     Who knows what we will find?!

     Like almost everyone in the West, I weep over the predations of ISIS.  I weep over the people being kidnapped, the people being executed, the people being terrorized, all in the name of establishing a utopia designed for only a very few.  The tragedies the group is spawning are almost beyond imagining.  
     Yet I also hope that the West learns from these difficulties.  I hope that the West learns that a great deal of ISIS's appeal stems from the West's quest, a quest that has now spanned over a hundred years, and counting, to control the world for its benefit.  I hope that the West realizes that its obsession with corralling access to oil and other natural resources has produced enormous resentment in many corners of the world, and I hope that one particular country in the West comes to see that setting itself forth as exceptional belies what the word means.  How does it really know?  It's no secret that part of the ongoing anger towards the West is due to the West's historical willingness to support numerous dictatorial regimes in various regions of the world.  In the end, everyone, the most exceptional nation included, wants its turf, usually regardless of how this desire may affect others.
     ISIS is a creature of its moment and time, a moment and time created yes, by the culture out of which it came.  It's a creature whose actions almost everyone agrees are horrific, but a creature in part sparked by other cultures seeking hegemony over all others. It's a delicate balance, really:  how do we look out for ourselves while looking out for others, too?
     Be it in interpersonal relations or international affairs, Paul's observations in 1 Corinthians 13 holds true:  "Love seeks not its own."

     For those of us (a group which includes, I hate to say it, me) who read AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) Magazine, we know that this month's issue featured a lengthy interview with one of the elder statesmen of rock and roll, Bob Dylan.  At 73, Dylan finally decided to sit down with AARP and talk.
     We all have varying opinions about Bob Dylan, and I won't spend time talking about those (except to say that one member of my family is very passionate about his admiration of him!).  I do want to highlight one thing Dylan mentions in the interview, which is that, "Passion is a young man's game.  Young people can be passionate.  Older people gotta be more wise."
     Of course, Dylan doesn't mean eschewing any kind of passion.  He'd be denying who we all are.  He's referring to the wild passions (and perhaps debauchery) that seem to accompany rock bands that tour in their twenties, thirties, and forties.  Such things have become rock and roll legend, and have filled countless books.
     Dylan has a good point. Those of us who have lived past the midpoint of their life understand that as we grow older, things change.  We look at life and time differently. How can we not?  We all hope we are growing in wisdom; we all hope we are becoming more balanced people.
     As Ecclesiastes advises the young person (chapter eleven), follow the impulses of your heart and pursue the desires of your eyes.  Yet remember this:  when all all else is said and done, reverence God.  Remember your creator.
     Passion may assume different forms, yes, but it remains essentially the same: reminders and reflections of our journey before, I trust, God.  We all see existence differently, but we all exist the same.  We may not do everything we once did, but we do what we do now.  And that's enough.  Life is a cacophony of possibility.  It's always new.
     So did Jesus say, don't put new wine in old wine skins.  Put new wine in new wine skins and, whether you're young or old, see your life unfold in the eternality of God.

     Most of us have no doubt been thinking about Leonard Nimoy lately.  The famous and enduring "Mr. Spock," Nimoy captured the imaginations of millions of people all over the world.  His character's commitment to rationality and logic, his Vulcan hand sign, his mysterious ways of overpowering those opposed to him, and his endless quest for certainty have touched us all.  They've made all of us think anew about who we are.
     Out of costume, Nimoy was of course as human as the rest of us, emotive, passionate, and creative.  In character, however, it was a different story.  "Trekkies" reveled in his ability to cut through the superfluous and focus on the most important issues at hand.  For him, logic was king.
     Interestingly, this raises a larger point:  are we mind or heart?  Are we more mind than heart or more heart than mind?  Or does it depend on the situation?
     Some people will tell me that they make all their decisions on the basis of reason alone.  Really?  Then we may as well be a brain on a table, a Cartesian talking head. However we want to take the Genesis story of the creation of man and woman, we can at least say it indicates that, in the beginning and, judging by human history since that point, people are as much mind as they are heart.  And we make decisions based on both. We cannot help it.  It is who we are.
     So I say to Mr. Spock, thanks for reminding us of the necessity of rationality and logic. And yet, as one episode of Star Trek showed us, thanks as well for demonstrating that even those have their limits.  It's hard to suppress, much less overcome the heart.  And who would want to?
     God didn't make us robots.  He made us creatures of the heart.

     Here we are, the day after the second Sunday of Lent.  By now, the faithful are well into their Lenten pursuits, steadily and patiently striving to relinquish control over various areas of their lives and to set their days into a larger compass of understanding.  As they should:  giving up is the essence of being human.  If we try to control everything, we will inevitably end up creating a world of us and us alone, a world without any real point except poor little us.
     Granted, we ought to control some things.  When we strive to control everything, however, we will eventually realize that we have not succeeded in controlling anything. We reduce ourselves to a collection of atoms spinning in a nexus of space and time, avoiding everything but ourselves.  And who are we?  We will never be any more than our limits and possibilities.  Lent is God's way of telling us that though we are remarkable creatures, we err in supposing that we are so remarkable that we can decide what it means.  How could we?  We are only us.
     We're just visiting the planet that God made and, one day, we will see things as they are really meant to be.