Are you married?  Over the weekend, my wife and I celebrated our 34th wedding anniversary.  When we reflect on the years behind us, we are amazed:  who would have thought that out of an event held on an otherwise ordinary Saturday in Dallas, Texas, so many years ago, we have traveled, metaphorically speaking, so widely, trekking together through mile after mile of adventures as one.
     In a world that has reduced much of communication to digital expression and, as I see it, in so doing has undermined some of the humanness of the global community, marriage still stands as one way that people can connect with each other on a deeply personal basis.  It affords people a way to express their humanness in actual physical exchange. While barriers and hesitations of course exist in every marriage, the intimately personal shape of marriage allows those who participate in it to explore and deal with these things in a way that respects who we, human beings, most fully are.  It recognizes and affirms our inherently human capacities.  Marriage lets us see that whatever else we may say about the human species, we see that the human's deepest point of meaning is his or her ability to love.  We are made to love.  Be it love in marriage, friendship, or any other relationship, we mark ourselves by our capacity to love.
    And why not?  As the Italian writer Dante noted, in his Divine Comedy, when he reached the end of his journey through Paradise, it is love--God's love--in which all things form and come together.
     So it is:  we do not love unless we are loved first.
     

     Now that the solstice has come and the full "summer" moon not far behind it, those of us in the Northern Hemisphere can once more rejoice in the warmth and bounty that accompanies, indeed, seems to burst out of this timeless pattern of rotation, orbit, and diachronic splendor.  Of course, for those of us who live in the tropical areas of the world, or even those who live in the sunnier climes of Europe or North America, summer barely comes:  the air is temperate, if not warm all year around.  Nonetheless, as our ancient ancestors always did, we still tend to mark our lives by the movements of the sun, noting and engaging each passing phase of the seasons with various and different activities and remembrances.
     Curiously enough, however, if we look at the word solstice carefully, we see that it literally means, "the sun stands still" or "the sun doesn't move."  People who live in the Arctic know this firsthand:  for a couple of months during the summer, the sun never slips below the horizon.  For people who live further south, although the sun rises and sets every day and night, on some days, time does seem to stand still.  Everything seems to shine, grass, trees, flowers, lakes, streams; the sky seems endless, not a cloud in it; and the air seems as though it could not get any better, any better at all.  The world almost seems, at this moment, and no other, perfect.  It is as if heaven, in the broadest sense, has come upon earth, as if a spell, a wondrous and glorious spell has been cast:  peace and harmony and bliss flood the land.
     However we experience summer, we can be sure of this:  somehow, some way, it always comes.  Despite its troubles, our planet remains remarkably predictable and resilient, expressing the work of a God of love and grace whose fact of presence is beyond our imagination.  In this God is order, and in this order is us:  moral and free beings, free to move, free to seek, free to love.  Summer has come.

     Pope Francis!  If you've read any of the Pope's recent encyclical on the environment and you have any inclination, any inclination at all to support human attempts to reduce environmental degradation, you likely cheered (I did).  In particular, I cheered that Francis made clear that one's religion should affect everything we do.  It does not do, he argued, to let our religious belief into only certain areas of our life, or to pursue our religious beliefs for our good and no one else's.  We do not do them justice (nor, I might add, do we do justice to the God who inspired them).  The metaphysical encompasses everything.
     Speaking to a crowd of people a couple of days before Francis released his encyclical, U.S. presidential candidate Jeb Bush remarked that, "I hope I'm not going to get castigated for saying this by my priest back home, but I don't get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinals or my pope."  "Religion," he added, "ought to be about making us better as people, less about things that end up getting into the political realm."
     We need to wonder, really, what Bush thinks religion is.  We can't turn the metaphysical on and off.  It's either everywhere or nowhere.  Besides, do not "better" people make for a "better" political realm?
     Thanks, Pope Francis, for demonstrating that our religion should shape everything we think, say, and do, including how we treat our earth.
     As the opening lines of Psalm 24 say, "The earth is the Lord's, and all that is therein."

     Forgiveness?  As Americans the world over continue to weep over the recent shootings in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, we might also ponder what about various subcultures of American society produced a person like Dylann Roof.  How did he come to nurture such a deep hatred for African-Americans?  What was it in his life, what was it about his life's patterns, what was it about the cultures in which he moved or to which he was exposed that led him to draw such perverse and horrific conclusions?  We rightly weep for the survivors, and are in profound awe over their ability to forgive Roof for his deed, yet we also wonder about Roof.  Though we cannot in any way excuse his action and the enormous pain it has sent rippling through too many families, we must also realize that he, too, is a person wrestling with enormous pain, pain so biting that it led him to kill nine people in cold blood.  His darkness is almost beyond fathoming.
     And roughly a week ago it came upon us, cutting through our lives like a knife, once more wrenching us out of whatever assumptions we may have made about the state of humanity and the societies they create, tearing apart mercilessly our picture of our fellow human beings.  It makes us close our eyes even as it makes us open them.
     What can we do?  It seems facile to say, trust God, although that is what the survivors are trying to do.  On the other hand, this is really the only response we can make when the cold underside of the metaphysical pushes into our lives.  It's also facile to simply chalk Roof's actions off to sin, although sin has been done.  When we look at ourselves, we see magnificent creatures who have been created by a magnificent God.  Yet we also see creatures who too often wander from this magnificent God, trying, over and over, to make the metaphysical do what we want it to be rather than letting it make us who we should be. 

     As many of us know, yesterday was Father's Day.  It is a day worth thinking about and celebrating.  It's a time to think about and, we hope, celebrate our fathers and, if we are fathers ourselves, to think about what that means and, we hope, to celebrate being one.  All of us are aware, of course, that not everyone has had a positive experience with his or her father, and for this I am very, very sorry.  Moreover, all of us fathers out there have regrets, some a few, some many, about the manner in which we raised (or are still raising) our children.  None of us is perfect.
     I lost my father, very unexpectedly, many decades ago, to a heart attack.  It was shocking then, and it still is today.  Why did Dad have to go so soon?  Happily, however, I have many, many wonderful memories of my father.  I owe so much to him, not just for taking care of me materially, which he did in abundance, but even more for being such a splendid picture of what life could be.  Dad embodied for me life's astonishing potential, always encouraging me to consider the nearly endless possibilities of existence.  With Dad behind me, I felt as if I could do anything.  His simple words, "Do your best," still resonate with me today.  He was a father, yes, but he was also a friend, a friend whom I miss every single day.
     I am so thankful to God for Dad, so grateful for the workings of God's loving vision through which he came into the world.  Having Dad in my life testifies amply to the enduring goodness of God.  Confused sinners that we are, God still looks after us.  His love, expressed so clearly in Jesus Christ, seeks everyone.
     Thanks, God, for Dad, and thanks, Dad, for being my Dad.

     A few weeks ago I talked about the passing of acclaimed rock climber Dean Potter.  If you recall, he died while attempting a BASE (building, antenna, span, earth) jump from Taft Point in Yosemite National Park in California.  In every way, it's tragic.  He had done the jump before, but for reasons we may never know, this time it didn't work for him. One of his friends who was doing the same jump died, too.  They both left girlfriends and many other friends and admirers.
      The other day I read a detailed article about the events leading to the jump and its immediate aftermath.  Toward the end of the piece, Potter's girlfriend shared a time in which she returned to Taft Point to remember him.  As she sat on the rock, she saw a raven who, as many ravens who frequent national parks will do, approached her and ate food out of her hand.  And she thought, "Yeah, it was Dean."
     Roughly four years ago in October of 2011, a time I wrote about a couple of times in this blog, my three siblings and I scattered our mother's ashes on a mountain in the San Gabriel Mountains of Southern California.  As I tossed my last handful into what seemed to be a very empty and lonely space, I saw a crow soaring up to the edge of the cliff, looking intently at me.  Though I'm not fully convinced that animals speak to us from the other side of death, I do believe that God speaks through everything that is.  He's always calling us, always reaching out to us, in life as well as death.
     God wants to love us.

     Have you ever gone to a medium?  A clairvoyant?  At a dinner party I attended the other night, a couple of people indicated they had.  I do not doubt that mediums and clairvoyants possess a special ability to, for the medium, look into the past, and for the clairvoyant, look into the future.  I've seen too many like phenomena to think otherwise. What always intrigues me about Westerners who invest in these experiences is that if I were to ask them whether they believe in God or the existence of a cognitive supernatural being, most of them would say no.  OK.  But if one believes in a medium or clairvoyant's ability to summon news from the past or disclose intimations of the future, does not this mean that one must also believe in the existence of fate and cognitive spirits?  Does not this also mean that the world is but a captive of a much larger "spirit" one?
     We can't have it both ways.  We must either believe in a cognitive supernatural realm and accept or reject what it has to offer, or we must categorically deny everything metaphysical and content ourselves with not knowing a thing about our past or future.
     Many of us enjoy imagining there is a spirit world.  Yet just as many of us like to think that we can make this world whatever we want it to be.  Again, to borrow a phrase from Renaissance England, we can't have our cake and eat it, too.  Can physical beings create spirit?

     Most of us are familiar with the Greek philosopher Plato.  Not as many of us, I suspect know the details of the way he saw truth.  Plato said that truth, that is, truth as Truth, though it can be found in this world, is not grounded in this world.  If we wish to find Truth in this life, we must look beyond the world, look to a world of eternal "Forms" from which we ultimately derive all knowledge about this world.  Though we can experience Truth in this world, we can only do so if we look for it through the lens of its world, the world of eternal Forms.
     What's Plato's proof of this eternal and invisible world?  When we distill it down to its particulars, we see that it is very similar to the proofs that many of us use to affirm the existence of God today.  In sum, Plato argued (and this was many centuries before Jesus appeared on earth) that so long as we live in this world, we cannot really understand all of it.  Why?  Because we are part of it.  We need to be able to step outside of this world to really know what it is and what it means.  Hence, the world of Forms.  It's like being in a box (Plato used the analogy of a cave).  If we are in a box, all we can see is the inside of it.  We do not know what the box looks like and we do not know where the box is.  All we know are its four walls.  The walls of our finite world.
     Of course, we do not need to believe in a world of eternal Forms.  Nor do we necessarily need to believe in God.  Either way, we may well have a satisfactory life.  However, we may be missing a much bigger point:  do we really want to live and die without ever knowing, honestly, why we were ever here?

     A few days ago, I talked about the idea of home and what it might say about our ultimate underpinnings.  A story that has been filling the Western news lately made me think about it again.  You may know that a couple of weeks ago two prisoners serving life sentences broke out of a maximum security prison in update New York.  From everything I can read, these are dark men, people who are ready and willing to inflict a great deal of pain on their fellow human beings.  Nonetheless, they apparently befriended a prison employee who, it turns out, provided them material aid for their escape.
     Though we do not yet know all the details, news reports indicate that at one point in her police interrogation this employee remarked that one of the prisoners made her "feel special."  If I may connect this statement--and what it might suggest about this person's state of mind--I venture to say that it is yet another demonstration of how much every person longs to be recognized and cared for, how much every human being looks for some sort of connection, some sort of, broadly speaking, home.  To be human is to want home.
     Many years ago, the night before he was scheduled to die on Texas's Death Row, a now forgotten prisoner remarked that, "I always wanted a home; now I'm going to get one." This man found Jesus on Death Row.  Under sentence of death, he came to believe that Jesus was his savior, God, and eternal friend.  His outlook on his mortality had completely changed.  As human as you and I, this man had always wanted home.  Now, he believed, he would get one, a permanent home, a place in heaven with God.  Forever, he believed, he will be regarded as special.
     The homes and attention of this life, as wonderful as they are, end when life ends. The homes and attentions of an eternal God will endure forever.  If, as Pliny the Elder once said, "home is where the heart is," ask yourself:  where do you want your heart to be?

     What's home?  This was the question an artist friend and I discussed for a couple of hours today.  Now that we've collaborated on one project (he's the artist, I'm the writer) about journey, we're looking at one about home.  Like journey, however, home means nearly an infinite number of things.  We all have our own ideas of what home is, we all have our own experiences of home.
     That, we decided, is the point.  Home is not so much a place as it is an experience, an experience for which we all long.  But why?  Why do we long for home?  Evolutionary biology would say that we're developed a need for home because we have come to realize that it benefits us, that it enables our species to survive more effectively.  Maybe so.  But this doesn't answer the question:  what is it about us that we long for home?
     Existentialism, as Paul Sartre articulated it, insists that we are alone in the universe. In all the cosmos, there's no one but us.  There's certainly no God.  Echoing this, some cosmologists say that we are nothing but a plop, a plop with no reason to be here, but a plop just the same.  As biologist William Provine remarks, "The universe doesn't give a damn that we are here."
    If this is true, we see why we long for home.  In a lonely, forgotten, and pointless (as author Stephen Pinker once said, "The more I learn about the universe, the more pointless it seems to be") universe, it's all we have.  But if the universe is pointless and indifferent, should not home be likewise?  What could home possibly be?
     So maybe, I suggested, we're looking at something more metaphysical.  Maybe we're seeing that we long for home because there is a "home" to be found.  Maybe the universe is our home.
     It is.  But it only is because a personal God made it.  How could a pointless universe be home?

     Consciousness.  We all experience it, we all know we experience it.  But to this day we do not know, precisely, what it is or how it came to be.  Some would say it is a work of God, others would say that it is an emergent property driven by system complexity, others would say that it may be a blend of both, and still others would say that it just is.
     I thought anew about consciousness as I was reading in Ecclesiastes 11 and Psalm 139 a few days ago.  In Ecclesiastes 11, the writer opines that no one knows how bones are formed in the womb of a woman, nor does anyone know how humans come into life (the Hebrew actually says, "how the spirit [the spirit of life] comes into the bones")  In Psalm 139, the writer notes that God knew his unformed substance when he was still in the womb, that he skillfully knit him together, and that before he was ever born, God knew what the span of his life would be.
     These verses raise very difficult questions, not all of them having to do with consciousness.  If God "knew" a person's unformed substance and "skillfully" knit it together in a woman's womb, should we conclude that God makes people to be mentally retarded or congenitally deformed?  Should we conclude that despite all the chemical reactions that spur the growth of an egg in a woman's womb, ultimately it is God who enables the egg to have what we call life?  Where does "life" come from?  Is it really just a response to chemical interaction and exchange?  If so, how are we to view it?
     In this brief blog, we cannot address these questions in great detail.  We can say, however, that if we hold that God is absent from the world and the processes that brought it to be, though we then do not need to worry about whether he is actively "deforming" people, we remain bewildered by the puzzle of existence:  why?  Why existence?  And what really is life?  How can impersonal chemical interactions produce sentience?
     If on the other hand we hold that God is indeed present and working in the world and the processes that brought it to be, we face perhaps even bigger challenges:  if God is the author of life, why does he allow people to be born who are not fully equipped to deal with it?  How does he interact with human physiology?  What does he most want?
     In the end, we have a choice.  One, we can continue to muddle through the troublesome enigma of consciousness and existence, living and seeking to understand them, and then dying to be no more.  Two, we can continue to stumble along in our human darkness before God while we strive to believe that if he is the omnipotent and unknowable creator, he at least knows what life means.  And if this is the case, one day, we will know, too.

     Did the Roman emperor Constantine, who converted to Christianity after he had a vision of a cross before going into a battle, orchestrate and compile the New Testament canon?  So said someone at my atheist discussion group last night.  It's a common claim, one that has been tossed around for centuries but which has become more prominent recently with the work of the so-called Jesus Seminar.  Unfortunately, it flies in the face of much historical evidence.
     We have numerous almost complete canons, the Muratorian, Syriac, and Latin, among others, dated, in some cases, nearly two hundred years before Constantine took the throne.  In addition, we have many portions of the New Testament that date to almost the beginning of the second century A.D.  Moreover, the council at which Constantine supposedly "finalized" the canon, the Council of Nicaea in 323 A.D., was not convened to develop a New Testament canon.  It was convened to settle, once and for all, the question of the divinity of Jesus (by the way, it decided that, given all the biblical and historical evidence, he was--and still is).
     Hence, when I hear such arguments, which were also made famous by Dan Brown in his best selling Da Vinci Code, I feel compelled to ask those making them this:  what's your evidence?  Although we can discuss almost ad infinitum whether we ought to construct our lives around the claims of the New Testament, we should at least do so with a proper view of the New Testament's origins and setting in history.  It's only fair.
     Besides, if the New Testament is indeed historically accurate and true, the answer to the question of how we should respond to it becomes patently obvious.  Now the history we know becomes the basis for the God we can, through Jesus Christ (see John 14:6), know as well.

     Did you watch the Belmont on Saturday?  I didn't, either.  Nor am I particularly an afficionado of horse racing.  However, I paid some attention to the Belmont this year as it seemed that, maybe, just maybe, it would produce the first Triple Crown winner (a horse who wins, in succession, the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes, and Belmont) since 1978.
     And it did.  American Pharaoh won by five and a half lengths.  When I watched parts of the various replays that were floating around the Internet, I found myself amazed at how fast this horse ran, and how strong it appeared to be from start to finish.  It was a remarkable picture of grace and beauty, a magnificent display of an animal with a lengthy history of relationship between itself and the human being.  I found it a beautiful expression of life's possibilities.
     This notwithstanding, clearly, horse racing is a sport of the wealthy.  People purchase horses for tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars and, if the horse is fast, go on to earn many, many millions on their investment.  After all, they can.  In addition, they might argue that even if their sport seems, in the big picture, rather trivial, it does generate jobs and entertainment for thousands, maybe millions of other people.  The horses who race love to run, the people who ride them love to ride them, and the watching public loves the show.  What could be missing?
     Maybe nothing.  Or maybe everything.  Either way, we must ask ourselves, as we must ask ourselves about every human activity:  absent a metaphysical underpinning, what's the point?  It was great, it was grand, but as Ecclesiastes 8 observes, one day, "its memory will be forgotten."
     Shouldn't life be more than this?

     I talked yesterday about character and how focusing on it should lead us to think more about who we are than what we do, because who we are should shape what we do. As I've been contemplating the Hebrew book of Proverbs lately, I've come to see how carefully it builds on this.  In proverb after proverb, it presents character as something born of two things:  listening and learning.  It invites us to listen, to listen to the voice of integrity and reason, the call of probity and prudence, the urgings of God.  It asks us to learn from observing how when we listen to these voices, we grow increasingly able to live according to what they tell us.  As we listen, we learn, and as we learn, we listen even more.
     We shape our character by how well we listen, how well we listen to voices, not ours, but the voices of the world and, ultimately, the voice of God.  We do not listen to our selfishness.  We learn from seeing how listening to these voices--not our own--allow us to hear them even more clearly.  We see how much we need our existence and its maker to teach us how to live it.  Our character is the fruit of walking with circumspection and humility, of walking with respect for what life, and God, have to teach us.  We begin our walk as strangers, strangers to life, strangers to God, and we end our walk as friends, friends with life, and friends with God.  We begin with a character given to grasping and overlooking, and we end with a character bent to listening and learning, listening to learn what we do not know, learning that listening to what we do not know is to learn that life is ultimately, simply, to listen.
     There's an eternity to hear.

     Perhaps you've heard of or read David Brooks's widely selling book on character.  In an age in which too many of us in the West (and, to an extent, other parts of the world as well) focus on what we can do or acquire, Brooks is suggesting that we pay more attention to whatever is in which impels us to live.  Think less about what we do, he offers, and more to how we do it.
     Brooks's observations are of course not terribly new.  Most psychologists would say the same thing.  Yes, existentialism's thesis that existence precedes essence (what we do makes who we are) proved wildly popular in the Seventies, Eighties, and beyond.  Today, however, more and more of us are coming to realize that it is, in fact, bankrupt.  If we think that what we do makes us who we are, we overlook the far more important thing: who are we?  How do we know who we are if we construct ourselves solely on what we do?  We're ignoring where "we" in fact begin:  within.  We are moral beings.
     Many a writer has noted that although we can spend our lives running from our innate to cultivate inner holiness (do not we, if we live rationally, all wish to do good?), in the end it will catch up with us.  We will die, maybe satisfied with what we have done, but thoroughly befuddled as to why, other than for the enjoyment of a self which we never stopped to consider or examine, we actually did it.
     As Jesus said, what does it matter if we gain the whole world but lose our soul?

     We're all familiar with robots.  We've all heard that they are becoming ever more able to perform a wide range of tasks.  And we've all heard various commentators wondering aloud about the social and ethical implications of robots which are able to "think" like human beings.  (Case in point:  who has seen "I, Robot," starring Will Smith?!)
     If robots come to think as we do, particularly if robots come to develop moral capacities, it may change us more than it will change them.  Most of us pride ourselves on our ability to make moral decisions, to work within ourselves and with others to come to reasonable choices about how we live.  We would be hard pressed to live rightly without doing so. Should other beings develop these capacities, what will we do?
     I would hope that we would not immediately tell ourselves that it is the robot who should adapt to us rather than both of us adapting to each other.  I would hope that we will not feel too threatened, that we would not shy from engaging them in moral issues.  I would hope that all parties would resolve to learn from each other and, in so doing, enrich the lives of all concerned.
     Just as we are creations of God, so the robots will be creations of us.  God will not always tell us what to do; he's willing to let us make our own moral decisions in our corporate lives as human beings.  Similarly, I hope that we are willing to let our creations, the robots, make their own moral decisions, to work out their lives in community with the human world.  It's terribly complicated, really, but it's worth thinking about.  As Mary Shelley pointed out nearly two hundred years ago in her novel Frankenstein, it is the creator who is ultimately the picture of the created.

     Martyrs.  We've all heard the term.  We may have heard it while studying history in school, listening to a sermon in church, mosque, or synagogue or, and it is this situation on which I wish to focus, in the news media.  As religious extremism--of every ilk--be-comes ever more widely publicized around the world, we see person after person claiming that he or she wishes to die as a martyr for his or her god.  So dedicated is this person to his or her god that he or she will not simply wait to die a natural death for him, but to rather actively seek to die for him.
     In the original language out of which it came, the word martyr means "witness."  A person who is a martyr is testifying, in some way, to the reality of the god in whom he or she believes.  Martyrs believe they are proclaiming the worth and presence of their god.
     That martyrs proclaim the presence of their god is not in dispute.  Clearly, however much we may doubt the validity of a martyr's god, we cannot deny that in dying for this god, the martyr is making his name more widely (and loudly) known.  With every fresh martyrdom, the world hears a little more about the god for whom the martyr died.
     Whether a martyr is upholding the worth of his or her god, however, is another question.  Historically, martyrs, though they have been very willing, if need be, to die for their god, very few of them have actively sought to die for this god.  Although they may have well been aware that by speaking on behalf of their god they would incur social, religious, or political wrath, they did not in general set out to die.  After all, what kind of a god would actually want his people to die unnecessarily?
     Yet many of today's martyrs have set this framework on its head.  They have come to believe that they should seek not to live, but to die for their god.  Though I do not impugn them for their dedication, I wonder whether this is really what their god wants to them to do.  In general (many ancient pantheons of course included gods of the dead), gods are about life, wholeness, equanimity and peace.  And it seems that choosing life for a god gives one much more opportunity to find whatever wholeness and peace this god offers in this existence.  Any god can offer a wonderful afterlife.  But a god who can offer an abundant life in this life seems to be a god with the most power of all, the ability to shape both this life and the next.
     This is truly a God for all seasons.

     Sandwiched between Mother's Day and Father's Day and, oddly enough, strongly connected to it, is the 31st of May (yesterday).  Why?  In the Hebrew Bible is a book called the book of Proverbs.  It is a compendium of thirty-one chapters of adages, advice, observations, and suggestions about how to live a life marked by intelligence and wisdom. Whether one believes in the validity of the Bible or not, she will likely find at least one point in those thirty-one chapters that she will find useful for living a meaningful life.
     Chapter thirty-one describes what the writer considers to be the person and attributes of an "excellent" wife.  If we can set aside any thoughts or perceptions of chauvinism or misogyny that we might experience when we consider the nature of this characterization, I call our attention to verse 11, which reads, "The heart of her husband trusts in her."
     What does this have to do with Mother and Father's Day?  When a husband trusts his wife, his wife trusts him in return, and when children see their mother and father trusting each other in all the ups and downs of life, they learn that trusting in a trusting mother and father brings them--and all of us--some of the richest love and joy of existence.
     Moreover, trusting each other, parent and more, gives us a window into trusting that from which trust and love ultimately come:  the goodness of God.