"The kingdom of God is at hand," Jesus announced at the beginning of his public ministry, "repent and believe in the gospel."  Though Jesus made many remarkable and controversial assertions, this one perhaps grounds them all.  Jesus is saying that something bigger than this world has irrupted into this world, that the pervasive materiality of this cosmos has been interrupted and transformed by an even more pervasive eternality in which it is comprised and from which it draws its meaning.
     Surely one of the biggest obstacles to religious faith is deciding to acknowledge that what is not of this world can (and has) enter(ed) it--and changed it.  Although Jesus' Jewish audience was acutely aware of the implications of what he was saying, that in him, Jesus, God's rule had broken into earthly space and time, we moderns, schooled as we are in the improbablity of a spiritual presence in our reality, are not.  We are not inherently convinced that the divine can irrupt into the temporal.
     And why should we be?  Perhaps the better question is, however, why should we not be?  If the divine has never come to earth, if the divine has never entered into our experience, if the divine has never shown its face to us, where does this leave us?  We're living and dying on a planet that is in turn living and dying in a galaxy and universe that are in turn living and dying:  life and death, life and death, yet in the end only death remains.
     But we all know that we, we who are transcendent and personal and moral beings, would wish it to be otherwise.  We resolve to be brave, we resolve to be rational, but ultimately we know that we must do the most rational--and bravest--thing:  believe.

   "The poet's activity in creating a poem is analogous to God's activity in creating man after his own image."  So said Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the leading British Romantics of the nineteenth century.  Like many of the Romantics, Coleridge understood that this world is more than nuts and bolts, and that the human being is more than the mind and the technology it creates.  In contrast to the material inventiveness of the Industrial Revolution, Coleridge and his fellow Romantics aimed for the creative activity of the heart.  It was the imagination, they averred, that is the most important thing, for it is the imagination that enables a person to soar above her present world and touch what is in the end far more important, the transcendent, maybe even God.
     So the Romantics wrote their poetry, striving to not merely make but create, to bring into being what had not been before, to give life to a presence for which life did not previously exist; in other words, to emulate the creator God.  Although none of the Romantics claimed to be God, most of them grasped his importance in making sense of this temporal world.  They realized that the world's wonder was as much the result of material cause and effect as the irruptive power of an omniscient creator God.  They recognized that even if we eventually identify the precise way in which the universe began, we have only begun to tap the full power of the divine imagination out of which all it has come.  To appear by random occurrence is one thing; to be created is another thing altogether.
     It's a mighty imagination.

     As many of us in the West return to work after the long weekend that comprises Memorial Day, we realize that for many of us, the weekend was a time of gratitude; for others, one of immense grief.  For others, perhaps it was a bittersweet blend of both.
     I had a great aunt who, I was told (she died before I was born), had four sons, all of whom were draft eligible during World War II.  Three of her sons were indeed drafted, shipped to the Pacific Theater and, unfortunately, perished.  She never saw them again. When her fourth son was drafted, however, this aunt, though she believed in the U. S. war effort, spoke up and asked, through her congressman, that her son be spared overseas combat.  In an action reminiscent of the movie Saving Private Ryan, the military granted her request.
     Memory can be supernally wonderful, enormously painful, or both.  As those of us in the West remember people we knew (and those we never knew) who have fallen in combat, we can also remember that even if it does not bring anyone back, remembering nurtures hope.  It enables us to look beyond ourselves, to realize anew that life is something bigger than we can ever make it to be.  Life has a life of its own, a purpose, a future.  It is this way not simply because it is here, but because it is a metaphysical drama, a metaphysical drama of space and time which, happily and remarkably, is infused with transcendent meaning.  Memory and remembering are not in vain.  They are eternal.  

     When will we grow up?  As many people know, U.S. President Barack Obama has opened a Twitter account.  Although he's received millions of affirmations, he has also received a small percentage of extremely racist responses.  Regrettably, from what I can read, all of them originate in the U.S.
     Granted, everyone is shaped by her environment and upbringing, and granted, everyone lives according to different life experiences, but one wonders how and why, in the twenty-first century, in the supposedly "civilized" West, people persist in invoking such despicable language to describe their fellow human beings.  It's tragic, it's obscene, it's deplorable.
     Indeed, the world is fractured and broken, and indeed, we humans are terribly bent beings.  Yet racism seems almost metaphysical.  It's not advantageous from an evolutionary standpoint, but it remains, year after year after year.  Surely, this makes God weep, makes him weep to see his human creation treating each other with such disdain.
     Although humanity broke itself, only God can repair and redeem his creation. Physicality cannot undo a metaphysical break.  I pray that God's love, in Jesus, continues to break forth.
     Pray for your fellow human beings.

     What a phrase:  the great beyond!  We hear it invoked in tales of exploration, in countless discussions and ruminations about existential meaning, or as a catch all for anything that we consider to be outside our everyday purview.  I was newly reminded of the phrase as I listened recently to REM's song, "The Great Beyond."  Although I know little about the songwriter's spiritual convictions, I came away from the song marveling anew at how all of us, at least once in our lives, ponder what we think or believe is metaphysically beyond us.  Moreover, even if we subsequently reject the metaphysical, we cannot dismiss that we all at one point in our life consider that it may be an avenue for determining life's meaning.
     It's easy to say that if this is true, we can therefore conclude that we, we human beings, are hard wired to look beyond us for answers to our point and purpose.  Perhaps this is a facile conclusion.  Perhaps.  Yet it speaks to something deeper:  we all seek purpose, we all seek point.  We cannot help but do so.  And it is a purpose greater than mere survival. We all strive to do more than simply exist.
     So it is not so much a question of the great beyond than a question about who we are--and why we are this way.  Why do we seek meaning?  Although I do not deny that evolutionary processes, guided by a divine intelligence, may well have brought the world to its present state, I do wonder why, if the goal of evolution is to ensure survival and nothing more, people seek meaning.  Every other animal does not require meaning to survive.  But we do.
     Even if we deny it, the metaphysical still speaks.  

     "A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song."  So observes the late poet Maya Angelou in a quote which has been floating around rather a lot lately, including on a newly issued American postage stamp.
     If we project this sentiment onto ourselves, the human being, we see that if we insist on speaking solely to promote or highlight our point of view, we miss the point of speaking and being.  Although some of us, be it as a result of political convictions, religious beliefs, or tribal and communal loyalties, may well believe that our position is always unalterably and absolutely correct, we err when we suppose that it should be the only thing about which we speak.  Life is vastly more than advocating one's position.
     Yes, in this life we deal with difficult metaphysical questions, and yes, in this life we face countless points of inner spiritual and social and political decision.  Yet if we forget that before we grapple with any of these things we are living and wonderfully creative human beings, we overlook a fundamental existential task.
     In the midst of our metaphysical and social uncertainties, we do well to remember that life is ultimately about singing our song--in all of its essential and necessary realities and permutations.
     Whatever we sing, it's in God's hands.

     As most of us know, the conflict between Israel and Palestine over the issue of Palestinian statehood seems nearly intractable.  Will peace ever happen?
     Genuine peace, that is, genuinely heartfelt peace, of any kind, is complicated.  It's complicated because genuine peace demands not only that all involved parties agree with the other, but that they agree in the inherent worth of the other.
     It's not easy of course to acknowledge that one's enemies have worth.  It's not easy to say that the one who hates you has value.  Moreover, most of us tend to view another's worth through our own lens.  We all want security, we all desire safety.  Yet we often want it in the compass of our own perceptions.
     And that has been a problem in many peace agreements.  I pray that the people of Israel and Palestine will indeed find common perception, and further agree that people are only as valuable as the idea of "value" is possible.
     And because God is there, it is.

     The blues.  If you know anything about the blues, you are likely aware that American musician B.B. King, an acknowledged master of the blues, died last week at the age of 89. Accolades poured in from all over the world.  King's influence was vast, and stretched over many, many decades, shaping the music of countless musicians and composers along the way.
     Anyone, King often said, can do the blues.  If we can think about life in colors, we see the truth of his observation.  Although we can identify many colors, all of them usually bright, to describe a life going well, we often use blue to portray a life suffering downturn.  The blues know that life, as the Buddha observed millennia ago, contains misery and suffering, and that despite its many and awesome glories and wonders, life can often be a difficult experience.  We may praise our existence, but at times we lament what it brings us.
     Yet the blues also know that lament is not permanent, that even at its darkest (bluest) life teems with hope.  For some bluesmen, it is a hope grounded in God.  For others, it is the hope that existence is inherently good.  For still others, it is both.  Either way, the blues understand the complexity of life, that life is far more than black and white, far more than belief or unbelief, far more than agnosticism or dogma.  The blues know that life is subject, and life is verb, being as well as becoming.
     The blues grasp that whatever else we do, we live, live humbly and circumspectly in a broken yet thoroughly beautiful world.

     "School's out," the famous Alice Cooper song goes, and for countless students across the world, it indeed is (or soon will be).  Finals are being taken, graduations observed, degrees awarded, commencement speeches prepared.  We see smiling graduates and parents, people still facing finals, filled with angst, teachers ready for a break, school bus drivers winding down, and more.  Another pedagogical season is drawing to a close.
     For those of us who don't like school, blame the ancient Sumerians.  It was they, archaeologists tell us, who developed the first schools, lining up students in rows on benches in mud brick buildings, their writing implement a triangular stylus, their writing paper, clay.
     We've come a long way, perhaps, although education remains, for many, an nearly impossible goal to attain.  Far too many people around the world do not have access to formal learning, and far too many people around the planet wallow in illiteracy. Ironically, for some in the affluent West, education can seem a burden; however, for many in other parts of the world, it is a tremendous privilege.
     As students of affluence celebrate their "freedom," they do well to remember that freedom, although it has certainly been identified as liberation from various forms of physical oppression, is even more passage into a new way of seeing.  When we are set free, we see the world in a different way.  So says psychology, and so says religion. Freedom begats, often in seminal ways, newness of perspective.
     We can set ourselves free from every form of physical bondage, but we usually can only set ourselves from mental or spiritual chains by invoking the help of another being.
Maybe that's why the apostle Paul, in writing about spiritual newness, said, "If any person is in Christ, she is a new creation.  The old has passed away; all things have become new" (2 Corinthians 5:17).  A highly educated individual, Paul nevertheless grasped that genuine learning, that is, learning about what really matters, begins with realizing that we only see clearly when we know, physically as well as intellectually, what is most true.

     What are we to do about our ethnicity?  Nothing.  It's no secret that disputes over ethnicity comprise a good portion of the conflicts that are tearing the human community apart. This is tragic, really, as none of us can help having and being the ethnicity into which we are born.  Our ethnicity is the way we are.  And the way we always will be.
     When Jesus walked the earth, he was walking in a world dominated by the mighty Roman Empire, a vast cacophony of racial and religious diversity.  Although the land in which he lived (Israel) was less diverse than other parts of the empire, it nonetheless reflected its own share of ethnic variation--and rancor.  Yet Jesus made clear that all people were welcome in his family, that everyone, regardless of who or what he or she may be or where he or she is from, can step into and experience the grace of God.
     Though we live in a very different world than that in which Jesus lived, we remain ethnic beings.  We will always be different from each other, we will always be distinctive from each other, and we will never have a choice in the ethnicity into which we are born. And this is good.  Better that we learn to live with ourselves and each other, as we are, where we are, than what we wish we were or what we wish, in adverse fashion, about the fate or destiny of other people.
     Jesus embraces us as we are.  Surely, we can do the same.

     Towards the end of Ecclesiastes, the writer urges, "Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come and the years draw near when you will say, 'I have no delight in them.'"  It's good for us to enjoy life, to delight in existence, to seek out the experiences that work best for us.  However, and this is a BIG however, anything we do, we do not do in a vacuum.  We are not random beings on a random planet. We are creations of a purposeful and loving God.  Yes, we may eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we could die, but we do so in the compass of a world that has been created with intentionality and purpose by a meaningful and intentional God.  Life is bigger than us.  It is eternal.  Not only does what we do in this life matter now, it matters for eternity.  It is much bigger, much bigger than simply the "moment" before us.
     So, as the writer encourages us, enjoy life.  Enjoy its fruits, enjoy its wonders.  Enjoy friends, enjoy good times.  But remember this, and be hopeful:  there is a God infusing everything we do with meaning and marvel far beyond anything we can conceive or imagine.  We and our actions are vastly real, more real than we may think.  They're not scattered, they're not disconnected.  They're the work of God.
     Though we may die tomorrow, squarely (and perhaps unexpectedly) in the midst of our various pursuits, we will not go without meaning.  Our actions will not be done and effected without point.  Not only are they meaningful in the world, and not only are they meaningful because they have meaning, but they are meaningful because the world is meaningful.  And the world is only meaningful because there is a God.
     Remember this life, yes, but remember its point even more.  It's not an accident.

     Sure, it's a Hallmark holiday, and sure, it's an opportunity for the retailers of the world to lure people, particularly men, into their stores and showrooms, and sure, it's exploited by clergy and politician alike, but Mother's Day remains a good day.  Whether we have good or bad memories of our mothers (or perhaps a mix), we must admit that without our mothers, we would not be here, would not have found life, would not have tasted the marvels of existence.  If our mother genuinely loved us, so much the better, for we learned early on that the world is indeed a good place, and that life is indeed an adventure worth pursuing.  For those for whom the opposite was true, I'm sorry, deeply sorry.  Life was likely not as pretty.  In fact, it may have been inordinately cruel.  And I hope and trust that as you have spun out your life, you have found healing and remedy, that you have found that even if your mother did not seem to love you, other people do. And I hope that you have learned that God loves you, too.
     The sacrifices a mother makes for her children mirror the sacrifices that God makes for us every day, the endless effort he makes to ensure that despite the brokenness of the world, we, humanity, endures.  The love of a mother for her children reflects the heart of God working through every corner of the cosmos.  In a mother's unconditional love, we see the selfless love of God.  Good or evil, sinner or saint, he loves us all, blessing us with everything we need to flourish on this remarkable planet.  Like a mother, God never forgets those whom he made.
     Nor like good children, should we forget him.  We may disagree with God, we may hate God, or we may love everything about him.  But never should we forget about him. On this Mother's Day, we do well to remember that, as forgetfulness is not the nature of the universe, for everything that is has been built upon everything that has been, to therefore forget our mothers or, worse, to forget God, is to forget ourselves.
     Enjoy existence!

     Ah, as Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov once wrote, "Speak, Memory."  As we draw and live out our lives, we indeed hope that our memory speaks to us, that we can see and hear those things which have shaped us, that which has brought us to points of significance in our lives and which have created the individuated worlds we inhabit every day.
     We also hope, I think, that what we remember becomes the basis for what some researchers are calling "post memory."  What's post memory?  According to those working in the field, post memory is the memory that we construct from the ashes of traumatic and painful memory, the recollections that we, in a real sense, resurrect, not on the basis of what was there but on the basis of our ability to create a new world in our lives.  It's like a new memory.  Every memory is of course new, but a post memory is a memory that has very little, if at all, physical connection to the old.
     Recently, however, I heard the testimony of someone who had been enslaved to a cult since childhood and who, although she has escaped it, knows that she will forever live with her scars from it.  We cannot fully elude our past.
     So do we seek newness in vain?  Not completely.  Newness is everywhere; we only need look for it.  Total newness, however, will not happen in this existence.  A pure post memory will never be.
     If there is a metaphysical, however, the possibility remains.  When the metaphysical irrupts into earthly existence, the transcendent in the immanent, everything, even memory, changes.  God's love will prevail.   

     Many people decry the notion of a "God of the gaps."  What is a God of the gaps?  It is a God whom believers allegedly use to fill in the blank spaces of scientific knowledge, a God who, when all the available information does not answer a question fully, seems to do so.
     At first glance, yes, a God of the gaps seems like a crutch, a haven to which a believer might go if she cannot address a particular scientific or metaphysical issue.  Viewed in this light, well, it certainly is.  We all know that many questions about earthly processes and cosmological origins linger.  We all know that we may not ever be able to answer all of them.  We therefore err if we try to impose God as a solution to the former or too quickly use him as an antidote to the latter.  We do not wish to think that if we have pushed ourselves to our epistemological limits and still wonder about them then we should simply insert God as our response.
     We do well rather to hold out God as a framework, a set of possibilities and outcomes, a fact and presence encompassing and grounding our queries.  God is there, yes, but we are, too, and have every responsibility to continue our explorations.  Indeed, if God is working in the world and in our lives, and if he is indeed present in all things, we can proceed being confident in the meaningfulness and worth of our investigations.  We do not need a God of the gaps.  Rather, we need a God who is meaningful.  If God is indeed meaningful, so is everything else, regardless of whether we perceive to be so.
     Question, examine, and question and examine again.  At the end of the day, God will still be there.

     Being in California was wonderful.  In addition to appreciating its almost always splendid weather, I valued so much watching (and, metaphorically, walking with) my son stride across the graduation stage and, metaphorically again, into his destiny.
     Destiny is a slippery term, really.  For people of faith, it is often enshrined in what they perceive to be the will or design of God.  God, they believe, is, somehow, working in and through their lives to carry out his vision for them, to bring them to the point at which he desires them to be, that is, unequivocally committed to living for a higher purpose, the purposeful love out of which the world has come.
     For the unbeliever, or perhaps those of a less dedicated or focused faith, destiny is the flow of their lives, the goals they pursue, the ideals they nourish, the life that they would like to have, possess, and live.  Destiny is not embodied in any transcendent purpose, but simply the inevitable, given individual input, energy, and shaping, outcome of how one implements one's personal vision.
     In truth, however, both sides are after the same thing:  existential fulfillment and life meaning.  And why not?  We are all human; we are all interested in making the most of this present, and fleeting, existence.  So who's right?
     In a way, both; in another way, only one.  Either there is a God active in reality, or there is not.  It's quite black and white.  We frame destiny in the lens of our cultural baggage and spiritual conceptions.  Bigger picture, however, if destiny is entirely driven by what is before us, yes, it will be ever present and real, but no, it will not, in a world devoid of a reason to be, be real as reality should be.  It's a construction of the perceptual moment.
     I know that my son is committed to deepening his understanding of God and his ways in his life.  I know that he is full of ambitions and dreams.  How he, and all of us as well, balances these things steps into the ongoing work of a personal God in the cosmos, well, that will be his--and our--greatest destiny of all.