As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I spent the last part of July and early August traveling and hiking in the American West.  One mountain range in which I hiked was the Sawtooth Mountains in southern Idaho.  The Sawtooths are a small range, tucked away in a part of the U.S. to which most people do not go, but offer many opportunities for wildness.
     What's wildness?  Opinions vary, but observers agree that, at the least, wildness is a sense of the wild, rugged, and unknown, of being in the presence of forces we cannot fully comprehend, of walking through a region of space and time whose essence we as finite humans cannot totally grasp.  Wildness, most say, is essential to being human.  As technology becomes ever more pervasive in our lives, we need moments in which we relinquish control of our surroundings and instead let our surroundings control us, times of utter surrender to the mystery of existence.
      Indeed.  Whether we make our starting point faith, religion, expectation, virtual particles, nothingness, or anything else, we all do well to accept and embrace life's inherent mystery.  Though we can certainly learn much about how life arose and how it works, we will not ever know, really, "why" life is.  We have it, we experience, but we do not really know why we do so.  We're just here.  Wildness reminds us of our inadequacy and contingency.
     Wildness also reminds us of our place.  It's no accident that the natural world has generated massive spiritual speculation through the ages: its power should make all of us gasp at the magnitude of the forces that shape existence.  Whether we attribute this to a creator or to impersonal powers is not so much the point as that we should recognize that we, all of us, have an inherent bent to seek our cause and meaning and that, if we are honest, we will admit that, given the fact and power of wildness and its essential ubiquity in the human experience, we cannot do so without considering cause's metaphysical mystery.

     How much do you know about Siberia?  Although thanks ((obliquly) former Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the so-called "Man of Steel's" Gulag of labor camps, Siberia tends to generate uncomfortable feelings for many of us, the land itself remains magnificent.  Remote, largely pristine, and perched on the edge of forest and tundra, an enduring gateway to the deepest Arctic, Siberia is a spectacular place.
     As I have been reading George Kennan's (yes, he is related to the twentieth century American diplomat) account of his journey through the region in the late nineteenth century, I have thought much about the irony of how sometimes places of the most remarkable beauty become places of the most chilling horror.  For Kennan, traveling through Siberia was a journey of wonder, one in which he daily encountered new and interesting things, one in which he saw displays of wilderness which he could not find anywhere else.  It was life changing.
     On the other hand, Siberia has been life changing for others, too, in the most unfortunate of ways.  It's tragic.  It's tragic that humans who fail to grasp the deeper meaning of this world and its splendor pervert it to their dark satisfaction, overturn any metaphysical notions of worth, and reduce the planet to a personal whim.  What are they thinking?  How can creatures of contingency suppose that they can shape it to their wishes?
     Throughout his travels, Kennan returns to a fundamental point:  while he realizes those he meets will always be different from he, he also realizes that they, like he, are simply fellow travelers on a planet which will forever be God's gift to all of us.
     And a planet which, through God's work, in Jesus, on the cross, will always be good.

     What does religion have to do with politics?  Some would say absolutely nothing; others would say absolutely everything; still others would fall somewhere in between.
     I ask because the other day I thought about U.S. presidential candidate Jeb Bush's well publicized response to Pope Francis's recently issued encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si. Speaking on the campaign trail about what he perceived to be the encyclical's political overtones, Mr. Bush opined, "Religion ought to be about making us better as people and less about things that end up getting into the political realm."
     I have no quarrel about viewing religion as an experience which can teach us to be "better" people, who endeavor to view others with greater kindness, people who decide to live not just for themselves but for their fellow human beings, too  (better, by the way, is a horribly relative term:  we all have different ideas on what it means).  It seems, however, that part of becoming a "better" person includes cultivating a greater openness to the welfare of the world in which we live.  Did not God say it was good?  Moreover, is our religion, whatever it may be, really something we want to compartmentalize, to restrict to encompassing only part of our life?  Do we want to live as half-baked beings?
     We can argue for quite some time about religion's precise role in politics, of course, but we should not be arguing over whether our religion has anything to do with politics. Clearly, it does.  Religion should not be something we allow into only a few parts of our lives. It doesn't work that way.  Practiced rightly, religion is cultural, social, and political. It's everything.
     And if true religion, as the revelation of God, threatens any of our convictions in these realms--or any others--so be it.

     As I watch an old (1998) PBS series about the life of Jesus which a friend invited me to view, and as I listen to the various scholars offer their considered opinions on the relative veracity of the various biblical accounts about Jesus, I wonder constantly about the fine line we scholars draw between faith and history.  If one is invested in what she considers to be a personal relationship with Jesus and also makes her livelihood studying his life, it seems that she must balance what she believes is true with what she finds to be true. That is, people do not need to know every detail about Jesus' life or world to place their trust in him as God.  They need only know, and believe, that he loves and died for them. Once they do this, they may spend the rest of their lives never questioning whether the accounts of Jesus' life are historically true.
     For those of a more scholarly frame of mind, including the scholars interviewed for the program, however, this is not enough.  They must have historical proof.  They must balance and reconcile their belief system with what they find.  Though their faith is solid. they acknowledge that there is more to Jesus' life than meets the eye, and that as scholars they are obligated to explore such things.
     If what these scholars find appears to threaten the integrity or veracity of their (or anyone else's) faith in Jesus, they, nor anyone else, need not worry.  As the scientific method corrects scientific reasoning without undermining the worth of the method itself, so do biblical scholars correct their conclusions as they uncover new information without undermining the worth of the God around whom their investigations center.  If God is really active and there, he will not be negated by scholarly discussion.
     The larger, and vastly more challenging question therefore becomes this:  how willing, within solid and verifiable reason, are we to believe?

    How much can we learn from experience?  Quite a bit, actually.  To exist is to experience, and to experience is to exist.
    The larger question, however, is this:  how much should we believe our experience? Specifically, I think of the religious experience.  Go around the world and talk to people of every faith; they all will tell you that they "feel" or "experience" the spirituality of their religious experience.  And, they add, they "know" they do.
     I have no doubt that these people feel something.  I do not dispute that they experience religious sensation.  If experience is all they use to justify their religious convictions, however, we are obliged to look at their claims with a measure of skepticism. Though they "know" they are experiencing, how can we know that they are, other than their assertion to this effect?
     Unless the religious experience is grounded in and connected to a measure, big or small, of materiality, though it may be thoroughly wonderful to those who taste it, we have no reason to suppose that we will, too.  Anyone can have an experience, and anyone can have feelings.  Anyone.
     If the person of religion is to justify her experience as being universally true, she must demonstrate that it reflects and corresponds to earthly reality.  She must prove that her experience, while it may well have a supernatural basis, has a natural basis, too.
     And she can.  A solely ethereal God is of no use to anyone.  A God who is both metaphysical and physical, however, will speak to all of us, for he will speak to what we are:  physical creatures living in a metaphysically present world.
     It's difficult to see any other way for God to explain himself to us.

     "Si comprehendi non est deus" (if you understand him, he is not God), once observed the great medieval theologian Augustine.  In an age in which more and more people of religion become ever more dogmatic in what they believe, increasingly caustic in their advocacy of their positions, and frighteningly reticent to engage in any effort to understand other viewpoints, we can learn much from Augustine's insight.  If we think we understand God completely, we certainly do not.  Yes, we can learn much about God, and yes, we can enjoy a relationship with God, but no, we will never understand him totally. Our feeble attempts to develop doctrines (that of election comes readily to mind) or pictures of God (various depictions of heaven and hell through the ages) are just that, feeble efforts by physical beings to understand a metaphysical presence.  Pity those who assert that they have dotted all their "i's" and crossed all their "t's" in regard to God, and that they have wrapped everything there is to know about him into a nice, neat package which anyone can open and use:  God is anything but a box.
     We live in shadows, really, wondering, searching, and finding, but never finding it all. God remains mystery.  Yes, many centuries ago he revealed himself in Jesus Christ, but even this did not answer all the questions people had about God.
     Jesus did, however, answer one question, perhaps the most important one of all:  does God love us?
     Yes.  And in the long run, if God is to be God, this is really all we need to know.

     Looking at my cat this afternoon, her twelve year old self splayed out on the concrete of our patio, I thought:  what a life!  Though Summer (her name) may not possess the degree of self-awareness or grasp of transcendence and the metaphysical that we humans do, she clearly does not know what she is missing.  In her case, we might say that, yes, ignorance is bliss!  Absent any connections with immortality, Summer will continue living, perhaps for many years to come and, one day, will cease to do so--and will have no idea that she had ever lived.
     Oddly, unless the possibility of immortality inhabits our human reality, we are, in truth, no different from Summer.  We will live happily and joyfully, yes, then one day we will not.  And we will at that point have no idea that we had ever experienced our existence.   The story is over.
     As I have reflected on the many experiences I had in my recent travels West (experiences and reflections about which I will go into more detail later), I thought often of the terminality of existence.  It's sobering, it's jarring, it's frightening.
     But God is not.  And this makes all the difference.

     Memory, sweet memory.  Many a poet has uttered these words, and many a writer has woven them into her narrative.  Throughout the ages, people have treasured memory, the remembrances of the joy and wonder that have spoken into their life experience.
     Memory was on my mind as I visited the site of my cousin Elizabeth's ashes last week. As some readers may know, Elizabeth passed away in December at the age of 61.  Several months before I left for the West, Liz's husband wrote me to share where he and his family had scattered her ashes.  It was, he said, in a meadow in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, and he gave me directions to find it.  After a time of hiking around the range, I made my way to the trail he had named, trekked the requisite distance, and came upon it.  Spreading out below a massive peak, its many flowers mixing with spruce and cedar trees, green grasses swaying gently in the alpine breeze, the meadow shimmered quietly in the fading sun.  Breathing in the silence, I thought:  what a lovely place to spend eternity.  Although Elizabeth's soul is elsewhere, permanently unified with her creator, the Lord God of the universe, her ashes will remain on the planet she loved, safely ensconced in the depths of the mountains in which she and her husband had spent countless wonderful times in their thirty-five years together.
     Thanks, Elizabeth, I said, thanks for the life we shared, thanks for the memories you left me, thanks for being in my days.  I'll miss you always.
     How beautiful that we, we frail human beings, can remember.  How marvelous that we can look back, how remarkable that we can reflect.  How amazing that we live in this astonishing and tragic world, a world of gain, a world of loss, a world in which past, present, and future are ever flowing together, a world that is constantly blessing us with the riches of this unbearably profound existence.  Such startling poignancy, such bright pain.
     Memory, sweet memory.  And God.

     As I continue my mountain travels and consequently not post a blog with any degree of regularity, I pause to send a short set of thoughts before I return to the West once more, this time to the mountains of California.  While roaming through the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, I came upon a book, Traplines, John Rember's memoir of growing up in the Sawtooth Valley before it became the relatively well visited region it is today.  It's a beautiful book, insightful, poignant, and deeply reflective, a wonderful package of remembrances about a life in a tiny mountain town.
     Towards the end of his memoir, as he ponders how to measure the meaning of his life, Rember makes this observation:

 "What we can hope for is to glow “What we can hope for is to glow brightly in the moment of our decay, to remember the brightness of others, and to feel the faint heart that remains in the things they touched.”

     These are beautiful words, beautiful indeed.  We will decay, yes, but we will glow and, unless we are afflicted with various diseases of memory, we will remember.  We will remember our glow, we will remember the glow of others, and we will remember the "faint heart" of what we, and they, have contributed to the human adventure.  We will rejoice in the fact of existence.
     I cannot argue with anything Rember has said.  I will, however, add this much, a thought which I draw from the twelfth chapter of Ecclesiastes, namely, "Remember your creator."  Remember and rejoice in this life, yes, remember and revel in what you have experienced, yet remember and rejoice in how you came to be, in how you have found your existence.  Remember your creator.
     Thanks, John.  All the best.