Perhaps you've heard about Anders Breivick?  He is the person who, a few years ago, systematically gunned down sixty-nine people, most of them children, at a summer camp on an island in Norway.  A few months ago, I read an extensive biography of Breivick and learned that, one, he was abandoned and abused as a child, and two, he seemed incorrigible from almost the very beginning of his life.  Sociologically, he is a highly interesting study.  As we learn more and more about the effects of chemical imbalances on behavior, and as increasingly numbers of philosophers come to insist that we really have no free will, we wonder how to fit Breivick's life together.
      And just not Breivick.  We wonder about us.  How have our lives come out in the way they have?  Why are we not all Anders Breivicks?  We can argue about the influences of our genes, the effects of our environment, and the fact of human choice, but we will have difficulty in coalescing these in a factual way.  In the end, we just do not know.  We live with a tension, a tension between the sociological and psychological and, from a more fundamental standpoint, the spiritual that, despite the best research, we may never fully resolve.
     Yet if we ignore that moral semblance must be grounded in moral structure, if we claim that we really are no more than chemicals, then what tells us that we are anything more than, as biologist William Provine once said, "plops" on a meaningless canvas?
     Well, nothing.  Oddly, we can only make sense of Breivick if there is a moral God.

     Are you familiar with Pierre Proudhon?  One of history's most famous anarchists, in his short life (1809-1865), Proudhon established an enduring reputation as one of Europe's most controversial and insightful thinkers.  One of his most famous observations is, "Property is theft," which, if one thinks about it for a while, in many ways rings true.  He also wrote an influential book called God is Evil, Man is Free.
     It was this book that made me think the other day, once again, about the meaning of history.  For Proudhon, history has nothing to do with transcendent purpose or meaning. In fact, he suggested, history is simply humanity's effort to cast off what he called the "strictures" of God.  God, he argued, only tries to hold people down; humankind is better off without him.
     So said many others, of course, as the nineteenth century moaned and groaned with the birth pangs of modernity.  But Proudhon had a good point.  Let me explain.
     Viewed incorrectly, God can indeed be a hindrance to human development and achievement.  If we picture God as an unyielding tyrant who always insists on his way, regardless of what we may want or think, we miss who he really is.  God did not create us as parrots or robots.  He created us as rational and choice making beings.  He wants us to make choices; indeed, he expects us to make choices.  Yes, God has instituted a moral structure in the universe, and yes, God has wishes for all of us, but God's expectation is that we will choose him with intelligence and freedom.  He's not trying to force himself down anyone's throat.
     Hence, if we, as Proudhon suggested, discard God, well, that is certainly our choice.  God wouldn't have it any other way.  Yet we should understand, as God has all along, that we are captives of our finitude.  If we throw out the infinite, who will we be?
     Ironically, we will be chained more firmly than ever:  to ourselves.

     Pope Francis!  Now that Francis has come and gone from the U.S., many upon many pundits and commentators are remarking on how he did.  Most agree that Francis certainly captured the hearts of most Americans, even those who may not believe in Catholicism or God.
     Oddly, however, many people did not appreciate Francis's focus on climate change and the poor.  Better, they felt, that he highlight what they consider to be more pressing moral issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage than, as they saw it, drag the conversation into politically contentious issues that distract the Church, again, as they see it, from advocating the core principles of the gospel.
     We can certainly disagree on the relative importance of moral values.  However, to focus exclusively on some issues and exclude consideration of others is to miss the point. If morality is to mean anything, it must encompass everything about the world and the human experience in it.  Morality is about achieving a balance, in a pluralistic world, between competing human loyalties, spiritual or otherwise, about what is most proper and true.  Francis understands that morality is far more than two issues.
     In addition, Francis grasps that unless morality is couched in a transcendent starting point and framework, it is not viable.  He knows that without transcendence, meaning cannot exist, and the world has no real point.  We have no basis for morality.
     Hence, as Francis frequently points out, morality, centered in a transcendent and loving God, is about love.  We love God, we love our neighbor.  We set our moral conclusions in the compass of love.  Doctrine only has validity if it is expressed in love.
     Francis reminds us that love only has force if we live in a moral universe.

     Karl Marx.  For some people, like his long time friend and supporter Friedrich Engels, Marx was a man whose influence would reverberate nearly indefinitely across the prism of human experience.  For others, Marx was a person whom they would just as soon forget, a person whose ideas have spawned untold amounts of pain and destruction.
     Ironically, both sides are right.  Marx's ideas will probably never go away completely, and we do not need to read much history to realize that his ideas, however wrongly they may have been interpreted, have indeed brought significant misery upon the human race.
     This brings me to Marx's daughter Eleanor, the daughter who Marx said, "Is just like me."  And so she was.  Growing up in a household frequented by the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century, set loose to read voraciously in the Marx family library, eyewitness to the birth of some of the most powerful ideas in Western history, Eleanor was, in every way, a Marx for all seasons.  While her father lived, she worked tirelessly to promote equal rights, equity for workers, democratic government, and freedom of speech and, after her father died, continued to work unceasingly for such things.  Her commitment was unwavering, her energy unabated.  Eleanor took the best of her father's thinking, that is, fairness between employer and employee, equal treatment for men and women under the law, freedom of speech and association, and more, and devoted her life to promoting them.
     And for this, we can thank her.  However, when she was in her forties, Eleanor learned that her long time companion and lover had married another woman.  So distraught was she that she took her own life, poisoning herself with prussic acid.  It was a tragic end.  So much verve, so much passion, so much life, now irretrievably gone.
     Although we can disagree on the worth of what we believe Marx and/or his daughter advocated, we all can weep over Eleanor's premature demise.  As the existentialists pointed out, life is passion, full of experience and growth.  How much more, I might add, when life is set in the compass of God, the fount of eternal passion and discovery.
     The psalmist said, "The human being is a mere shadow, a phantom."  With God, however, the human, and her passion, is forever.

     As I write these words, this second day of autumn, I look at the land changing around me.  I see leaves turning, flowers shriveling, and innumerable squirrels stashing away food for the winter.  Sights of autumn.  One squirrel in particular caught my eye today.  As I typed, he boldly scampered up to a chair near me, clambered up it and, taking another step, leaped onto a bush.  He had a massive hickory seed in his mouth.  Moving slowly across the surface of the bush (a yew) for a few seconds, he then stopped and thrust the nut into the bush.  Come cold weather, he will no doubt return for it, and enjoy a scrumptious feast, sort of like some of us enjoying a bowl of warm chili on a frigid winter night.
     Though many of us who live in the northern climes may lament the appearance of winter, the animals take it in stride.  Somehow, some way, they know exactly what to do--and when to do it.  Their timing is always perfect.  Ours is not nearly so much.  We must use artificial means to determine when to prepare; animals know without thinking about it.
     In his first letter to the church at Corinth, Paul ruminates on the wisdom of God. God's wisdom, he says, may well seem to many of us counterintuitive, as if someone as intelligent as God could or should have done things differently.  On the other hand, we can look at what seems odd as instead a picture of irony.  How funny is it that we homo sapiens, beings who possess the finest tools of meteorological prediction, tools which get better and better every year, still cannot surpass the ability of our animal friends to know, intimately, the precise rhythms of the seasons.
     Our world, God's enduring surprise to us, and you and me, never wiser than wisdom itself.
     Indeed.  Maybe that's why so many of us stumble over God's ultimate picture of wisdom:  Jesus Christ.

     Atonement?  I blogged last week about Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar.  I noted how good it is to take time to reflect on our lives, what we have done well and what we have done poorly and, going forward, what we can do to improve.  We recognize that we are far from perfect or fully mature, and that we need time to consider this fact in the context of how we live our lives.
     Of course, unless we couch our repentance in the shadow of a larger fact in which we can find absolution, we are merely talking to ourselves.  Not that we shouldn't talk to ourselves, but that in matters of morality we spin our wheels if we think we can ponder or implement it apart from the fact of a meaningful universe.  As many a proponent of naturalism will admit, if this universe is all that is, it is not meaningful.  We need a transcendent point to do morality in a credible way.
     Today is also the first day of autumn, in the northern hemisphere, the autumnal equinox.  From this point, the earth, at least in those parts of the world in which seasons visibly occur, slowly sinks into its brumal slumber, letting go of its summer profusion and brilliance, moving into days of cold and darkness.  It is a time of transition and change, a time of passage, a liminal point in the planet's journey.
     Atonement matters.  Transition matters, too.  As we in the northern hemisphere continue to travel into the winter, we remind ourselves afresh of how moments of change encourage us to change as well, to open our eyes more fully to the totality of possibilities that life, and God bequeath us.
     Think.  Pray.  Seek.  If God is there, and he indisputably is, there is infinity to find.

     When will the world end?  Although no one really knows, that has not stopped countless numbers of people from trying to predict it, again and again and again.  It also has not stopped too many people from following any number of their fellow human beings who insist that they, among all the inhabitants of the planet, know, with precision, when the world will draw to a close (whatever, from a cosmological standpoint, this really means).
    Though I've thought of this phenomenon before, I had occasion to return to it during a conversation I had with a friend recently.  Many people, usually people who claim to be spiritual, particularly those who profess to be Christians, make a great deal of money by persuading people to purchase the "supplies" which they suggest such people will need when the world begins to collapse.
     This seems rife with contradictions.  If Christianity proclaims that the two greatest commandments are to love God and your fellow human being, then it seems the height of hypocrisy for Christians to encourage their friends to buy supplies that will enable them--and no one else--to survive.  Would not God want believers to help all people who are in need, particularly in a time like "the end"?
     The answer seems obvious.  When the world finally comes to an end (whenever this will be), the story is really over.  There will be no second chances, no new opportunities, no going back.  What had been will be gone forever.  It therefore seems that rather than seek to hasten this day, people of faith ought to want it to tarry, to use every moment they have to ensure that, while they live, they are loving their neighbor.
     If we do not love our neighbor, we certainly cannot claim to love God.  Ponder the end time, yes, but do not let it be your focus:  there's a world to be loved right now.

     Have you read T. S. Elliot's masterpiece, The Wasteland?  Written in the shadow of the destruction of World War One, The Wasteland brings Greco-Roman, Christian, and eastern imagery, thought, and mythology together into profound observations on the meaningfulness of existence.  It's worth reading again and again and again.
     As I read a recently published book on T.S. Elliot's early life, I thought of The Wasteland often.  Though I have read it many times, reading this book spurred me to do so again.  Coming on the heels of another book (on which I blogged recently) I read about the atomic bomb and Nagasaki, it caused me to ponder, once more, the ubiquitous revelry and yet hollow maw of existence.
     Western Europe fought its war, yes, successfully turning back the predations of an empowered Kaiser and his German armies and restoring most nations to their original status.  Some political entities, of course, never reappeared, including the Ottoman Empire.  Yet out of this empire's ruins emerged new nations.  Moreover, seizing the time, Vladimir Lenin led the Bolsheviks to victory in Russia, a feat whose effects are still with us today.
     Materially, I suppose, most (and I use this world guardedly) of the world is relatively better off today.  Politically, too:  most, but certainly not all nations enjoy a greater semblance of freedom than they did at the turn of the twentieth century.
     Spiritually, however, little has changed.  We remain beings on a journey in search of meaning.  As Elliot noted, meaning will be always elusive, hidden and buried as it is beneath lingering years of cultural neglect.  And despite what many think, war doesn't enable increased meaning; rather, it pushes it further away.  As Jesus once said, everyone is trying to force his/her way into the kingdom of God--but none will find it this way.
     Violence, be it cultural, economic, social, or political, will not produce real meaning. Sometimes meaning has to find us.  Not without irony did Jesus say to the Jewish rabbi Nicodemus, "Unless you are born again, you will not see the kingdom of God."
     Put another way, sometimes meaning is something that, outside of us acknowledging our human limits, in every way,  we cannot now imagine.  Sometimes meaning surprises us:  in the best of ways.
     Like God.

     What about the atomic bomb?  From the day on which the atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima and, several days later, Nagasaki, people have debated whether it was the right thing to do.  Should America have dropped the bomb?  Should America have chosen this way to end the war?
     These are complicated questions, and I do not pretend to have answers to them.  I will say, however, that in reading a book published recently (Nagasaki, by Susan Southard) that explores the lives of five children who survived the bombing and how they grew into adulthood, I have seen the issues presented to me in fresh ways.  As I read the deeply horrific accounts of the effects of the bomb, of the way it literally burned people alive, maimed thousands of others for life, and left a residue of radioactive induced illnesses that plagued Japan for decades, I wondered again and again:  why?  Sure, I am familiar with both sides of the arguments, and I am well aware of the circumstances under which the U.S. government elected to drop the bomb, yet one thing remains:  unfortunately, no one really knew the full measure of the bomb's effects.  No one knew exactly what would happen to the people and buildings on which it dropped.  No one.
     Some might argue that it was God's will that America win the war, or that, in the long run, God brought good--as he defines it--out of the pain and misery.  To the latter point, we have little to say:  how can we know?  To the former, however, we might say that although we can say that we "know" God's will, we will never know it in its fullest ramifications.  And we err if we insist that we do.
     As Jesus said, "No one is good but God."  The rest of us are amateurs.
     Rest well, people of Japan.

P.S.     I am well aware of Euthyphro's argument to this point, but will not respond to it today!

     In addition to attending a college reunion of sorts over the summer, I attended a high school reunion.  Like most reunions that happen many decades after the life experience it remembers, this one was amazing.  One particularly remarkable part was a breakfast I attended with people I had known since elementary school (even more years in the past!). There we were, certainly older, hopefully wiser, looking about the same, yet not, enmeshed in life, but in thoroughly different ways, moving across the skeins of our respective existences.
     What does one say to people he has known all those years?  In a word, everything. After dealing with the perfunctories (children, jobs, location, etc.), we began sharing the deeper currents of where we had been.  As we did, I thought often of a novel by the Japanese writer Shikao Endo which I had read many years before.  It is called Silence.  At one point in the story, Endo compares the process of knowing things, particularly things of existential or spiritual importance, to peeling an onion.  We unwrap life, and each other, one layer at a time.  We cannot rush it, we cannot push it.  We must peel slowly, letting each layer move through and touch us deeply, then begin to explore the next in the same way.  Life is complex, and so is unpacking it.
     As we journeyed more deeply into each other's lives, we came eventually to what we really believe about this existence we currently enjoy.  Do we really know what it is?  Do we really know what it is for?  Do we really know why we're here?
     Even if, as I do, one believes in God and that he infuses the cosmos with purpose, we still wonder about "why."  Why me?  Why anyone?  It's love, yes, but a love that is thoroughly unfathomable.
     And maybe that's the point.  God's love is the greatest--and best--mystery of all

     As I finish out my recent travels, I think about a holiday that Jews the world over celebrated recently:  Rosh Hashanna, the New Year.  And I also consider that in a few short days, Jews will remember another special and most significant day, indeed, the holiest day of their liturgical year, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
     One of the things about which I spoke on the retreat this week had to do with newness and rebirth.  We all of course celebrate New Year the first of January.  And we all take time to reflect on our lives, what we consider we did incorrectly and wrong, and what we should do to avoid doing such things going forward.  Some of us do this thinking about God, and some of us do not.  Either way, we all recognize the fact of newness and the necessity for repentance and reflection in our lives.
     What our Jewish friends are telling us, however, goes a bit deeper.  Apart from divine agency or purpose, nothing, as the Hebrew writer of Ecclesiastes observed, is new under the sun.  New years come and go, on and on and on.  Moreover, apart from divine umbra, we engage in repentance and reflection solely within ourselves, and for ourselves only. There is no higher point.  We pursue these things for our benefit and, we hope, that of our fellow human beings.
     And as far as we are concerned, God may have nothing to do with it.  What Rosh Hashanna and Yom Kippur are saying is that, rather than set newness and repentance in a purely material perspective, we should instead set God at the center of how we think about them.  Otherwise, our newnesses will merely reflect what has already been, the mercurial and repetitive expressions of finite existence, and our repentance will no more than express what we think about ourselves in our own world or, in other words, demonstrate our loyalty to the root meaning of the English word "idiot," a person who sees everything through her own eyes and does not wish to entertain the insights of anyone else's.  We are only looking at the inside of our personal box.
     So, yes, celebrate every point of newness, and yes, rejoice in every new year.  And yes, take time to meditate on mistakes and shortcomings.  Yet remember that such practices really only become viable to us when we recognize our utter inability to do either effectively and fully without the fact of a personal and omniscient God.
     After all, God is the ultimate point.

As I travel this week, speaking at a retreat, I spent some time in California with one of my aunts who, is, sadly, dying.  Happily, she is doing so with a greater hope.  She, and I, believe, unwaveringly, that we will see each other again.  As I prayed for her, I reminded both of us that as she journeys,  the light will only get brighter.  As the psalmist reminds us, "With you, oh Lord, the darkness is light."

     As people around America and perhaps the world contemplate today's anniversary of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, all of us likely wonder, where was God the morning of September 11?  Why didn't he stop the hijackers from flying those airplanes into the towers?  Why did he allow all those people to die?
     No one can tell us why, really and ultimately, these things happen.  And no one can tell us why God seems to stand by when they do, watching, maybe even laughing, unwilling to care, unwilling to intervene.  No one.  Our finitude simply will not allow it.
     What can we do?  Whenever we remember a tragedy, be it that of September 11 or one that has directly ripped our own life completely asunder, we need to believe that regardless of what we may think, and irrespective of what we may see, God is--and always will be--light.  We need to believe that, somehow, some way, God, the God who sent his son to die for us, will always be our light, our beacon, our measure and fountain of greatest hope, the light in which, as the psalmist puts it (Psalm 36), even in the blackest of nights, "we see light."
     As evangelist Billy Graham, speaking in New York City about the events of September 11, 2001, said, "How do we understand something like this?  Why does God allow evil like this to take place?"  Like all of us, Graham had no answers.  And like all of us, he probably never will, at least in this life.
     "But," Graham continued, "But God can be trusted, even when life seems at its darkest."
     As Graham would readily acknowledge, this is so easy to say yet so very hard to do.  In the face of such tragedy, however, it's really all we can--and should--do.  Difficult as it is, we can trust God.  Somehow, some way, he knows.  Somehow, some way, he is there.
     Again:  God is light.

     At several points in my recent travels West, I had opportunity to hike alone in the mountains.  It was a delight.  Although decades ago I hiked alone extensively, tromping frequently and often through numerous and nameless stretches of wilderness across the continent (and no doubt stirring no small amount of concern for my parents!), looking for time, meaning, and destiny, given the other responsibilities that life has brought me, I do not do so as much.  So it was good to be out again.
     One day, as I was trekking through the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho, on my way to a lake deep in the range, I realized that although I had encountered other people on the trail earlier, now I was quite alone.  What a marvel:  in an age when wilderness is more accessible than ever, in a time when increasing numbers of people are taking to the hills (a movement which I applaud greatly), I had found a time and place in which I was alone.
     Breathing deeply, I gazed over the water and the mountains set around it, the mountains that seemed to pierce the sky, a sky whose blueness spoke of depths untold, all spread across a day that seemed, at that moment, endless.
     Was I endless?  Of course not.  Yet like countless others who have moved through mountain landscapes over the centuries, I touched the tendrils of eternity.  I touched the vastness in which we all are set, the inscrutable and lilting feeling of openendedness that moves through our finite experience.  Life, and God, spoke to me in fresh ways. Existence shone more profoundly.  For a  moment, the mystery cracked.
     Yet the mystery of course remains.  We're only passing through; we're only catching what time casts aside.  We're just wayfarers on an unfathomably large sea.  As the existentialists might say, we're alone in the universe.
     So I have a question:  are we really alone?
     On your answer hinges the entirety of your perception of existence.

     Have you been to Montana's Glacier National Park?  During my recent sojourn in the West, I spent about a week in Glacier.  I had not been in twenty-nine years, so I loved being back.  The first time I was in Glacier, even longer than twenty-nine years ago, in the autumn of 1974, I trekked along its share of the Continental Divide, hiking over mountains, through valleys, camping at numerous alpine lakes, and into Canada.  It was a fabulous and life changing trip.
     Now, over forty years later, Glacier still looks like Glacier (although sadly, due to climate change, its glaciers are shrinking; some have disappeared altogether).  Its mountains have not changed, its forests are still strong, its waters pristine as ever.  Its passes remain formidable, its trails yet a challenge.
     All this is good.  It's good that, thanks to its being a national park, Glacier has been preserved for over one hundred years, and that its animals and scenery will remain inviolate for generations to come.
     On the other hand, we will certainly change over the years of our lives.  At least we should.  We should be responding to the challenges and joys of growth and age, should be allowing existence (and God) to shape and mold us into wiser and more whole people. That's why returning to places that do not, largely, change is good for us.  We place ourselves in permanence, set our mercurial beings in things that do not pass away quickly, things that hold to presence nearly indefinitely.  We give our change to the changeless.
     And we get perspective.  We understand a bigger picture.  We grasp larger facts about existence.  And maybe, just maybe, we get fresh glimpses of how, despite the material cacophonies of our lives, inexorably mortal we are, and how much we tread on the edge of a fundamental insecurity of place.
     Then perhaps we realize that though we enjoy this earthly home, we see that it would not be a home were it not the expression of a personal universe, a personal universe filled with a personal God.

     As many in the West are aware, yesterday America celebrated Labor Day.  Why?  Historically, the Congress designated Labor Day as a moment to honor those who work, those who, day after day after day, engage in some type of vocational occupation.
     Not all of us of course necessarily like what we do.  And not all of us enjoy getting up for work each day. As God originally envisioned it, however, we would.  From the very beginning, since the day that God set Adam in the garden and instructed him to work, to till and cultivate the land before him, people have worked.  To work is to be human, and to be human is to work.  Working enables us to discover our humanness most fully.  It challenges us, involves us, enables us, fills us.  Working gives us a more complete grasp of who we are in our world.
     More broadly speaking, work has a point.  Though we may not always see it, it does.  God has endowed work with meaning.  And when we work, however imperfectly or apathetically we do so, we echo the passion of our creator.  We are people who are eloquently and passionately doing and communicating what they have been given to further the greater good of us all and, of most significance, to find more deeply what enables it all.
      Thanks for working.

     Have you seen the "Big Chill?'  It describes how a group of former Sixties radicals come together for the funeral of a friend and, in the course of a subsequent weekend, discover that maybe they are not so radical anymore.  Many of them are quite wealthy; others have pursued occupations at which they might have laughed in their heyday.
     When I saw my friends from the "Movement" in 1991, I thought often of the "Big Chill." Not that any of us had "sold out," and not that any of us were extraordinarily well-off, but that, by and large, we have taken up rather conventional lifestyles--just like our next door neighbors!
     Yet when we got together this past August, twenty-four years later, although we all still hold conventional jobs, have had children and, in every outward respect, act like anyone else, I didn't think of the "Big Chill."  I thought of age and time.  I thought of how we stand on the verge of a different stage of life, I thought of how we remember our time those many decades ago as a dream whose full measure we may only now be able to see, and I thought about how many of us, now considerably farther along in life, are trying to grasp the full import of existence.
     And I thought, naturally, about the spirituality of it all.  What is the full weight of destiny?  If the afterlife is not an option, as many of us continue to believe, then when we leave this planet, the story ends.  And we will not be back.  If the opposite is true, as at least I believe, although I do not profess to fully grasp exactly what it comprises or means, and the story does not end at death, well, again:  the notion of destiny remains a bewildering one.
     To wit, even if it is not the absolute end, how do we picture the idea of destiny?  How do we picture the idea of end?
     Unless there's another end beyond it, sadly, we will never know fully.

     What do we do if someone tells us she has had a vision?  I thought of this question anew as I read through Princeton professor Elaine Pagel's recent study of the Book of Revelation.  For those who have not read it, the Book of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament (and the Bible) presents the apostle John's recounting of a vision he was given about the last days of the world.  Not surprisingly, Revelation is a book that has spawned countless speculation about how the world will end, along with generating numerous end-time sects whose members have at times sold all their property to prepare for what they were told is the world's imminent end.  Its tentacles creep into almost every corner of the Western religious (broadly speaking) imagination.
     For Pagels, John's vision, though she believes he certainly saw it, has little or no connection to the future of the world.  Instead, she embeds it deeply in the historical context of the time.  It's not necessarily new information about God and his activity in the universe, but rather an amalgamation of previous prophecies reshaped to communicate various messages to the churches of John's day.
     While I certainly endorse seeking to understand the visions described in the Bible in the context of their time, I'm willing to give more weight to their applicability to the present day than perhaps Pagels might.  Nonetheless, I tread slowly when determining such applicability, much less when trying to use John's visions to make specific declarations about how the world will come to an end.  As Jesus made very clear, only God knows the ultimate details.
     All this is to say is that when we encounter people who claim to have had a vision and, even more, have recorded it in a book that has been with the world for thousands of years, we have to first ask ourselves one fundamental question:  can the metaphysical speak to the physical?
     If our answer is affirmative, we can then weigh the contents of this vision against other known visions to decide its value to us at the present moment.  If our answer is negative, well, the question is moot at best.  So our question becomes that one that is even more challenging:  how much are we willing to trust, after carefully evaluating them, communications from the metaphysical?
     For if we are willing to trust, really trust such things, we will never be the same.

     Ever heard of the poet Robinson Jeffers?  If you grew up in California, you may have. Otherwise, probably not.  Jeffers spent the best years of his life living in a house set on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean near Big Sur, a singularly spectacular and culturally evocative piece of wilderness a couple of hours south of San Francisco.  As Jeffers contemplated the might and power and wonder of the ocean constantly crashing on the rocks below his home, he wrote poetry.  He wrote about love, he wrote about nature.  He wrote about solitude, and he wrote about what we ought to see.
     What, according to Jeffers, ought we to see most clearly?  That we should love the natural world, the beauty and allure of wild places and not, as he said in one of his most memorable phrases, "man apart."  We should not love our fellow human being only.  We should love the universe as well.
     Elsewhere in his poetry, Robinson seemed almost to reject the worth of humanity, to say that he would rather not live among human beings, but with the impersonal joy of the wilderness.  Although I love being alone in the wilderness, too, I don't know that I could love it only.  And I do not say this just because I like being with people.  I also say it because if wilderness is impersonal, I don't know what I, as a personal being, could really find in it, except that there exists an unbridgeable gap between me and the reality in which I move and live each day.  And then what would I do?
     The wilderness speaks to us because it is personal, made by a personal God for us, personal beings in a personal universe.
     The world is on our side.