In the final chapter of his prophecy, Habakkuk, seeing that the Chaldean's onslaught is imminent, issues a final note of encouragement to his listeners.  It is a paean to faith, in the most difficult way.  "Though the fig tree should not blossom and there be no fruit on the vines, though the yield of the olive should fall, and the fields produce no food, though the flock should be cut off from the fold and there be no cattle in the stalls," yet, he adds," I will exult in the Lord, I will rejoice in the God of my salvation."

     Unless we have watched an army invade our native land, we may not be able to relate readily to the prophet's assertions.  It's difficult to step into the shoes of one with an entirely different experience that we have known.  Nonetheless, we all face circumstances of inordinate difficulty and stress, times when we are not sure what is going on or what to do about it, times when we feel utterly helpless in the face of immense privation and despair.

     How many of us can do what Habakkuk does?  How many of us can look at the depths of our situation and still claim that we "exult" in God?  How many of us can elevate our mind above the immediate and focus on what may be beyond it?

     Why did I use the word "may"?  I used the word "may" because unless we really believe there is indeed something beyond the immediate, we will not turn to it, and even if we turn to it, we still do have not absolute physical evidence that it is there.  We simply trust its presence.

     Faith, faith in a personal God regardless of the circumstance, is a road of looking beyond "mays," to believe in certainty.  It's not easy, and it sometimes does not seem to make any sense.

     It is to trust.

     In the second chapter of his prophecy, Habukkuk complicates matters further.  He talks about a vision that is "yet for the appointed time," and that is "hastening" towards its goal and "will not fail."  Wait for this vision, he counsels, wait, for "it will certainly come."
     Yet to wait, he says in the next verses, one must have faith.  The righteous, that is, those who have chosen to believe in God, he insists, must "live by faith."  They must live without seeing outcome, without witnessing visible goodness.  They must live, and perhaps die, without ever coming into the vision of, in this case, God's victory over the Chaldeans.
     If we can set aside the theological conundrums (and there are many!) that calling this "God's victory" raises for the thoughtful person of faith, we can learn a larger point. Although we use faith in many aspects of our lives, that is, we daily assume things will happen even if we do not now see firm evidence that they will, using faith in the context of God forces us into much bigger questions:  how can anyone spend her entire life waiting, like perhaps the protagonists of Beckett's Waiting for Godot, for something that never, in this life, comes?  The Chaldeans ruled Mesopotamia for over one hundred years, way longer than anyone, in those times, usually lived.  Thousands of people would live and die, still waiting for a vision that never arrived.
     So why continue to believe?  Why continue to wait?
     Why, indeed?  We wait, by faith, because we believe, not so much in the vision, but in the ultimate certainty of God.  In the end, surety, transcendence and synoptic surety, prevails.
     What else could?

     When I was doing my devotions and meditations the other morning, I decided to read the writings of the prophet Habakkuk.  I had not read Habakkuk in some time, although certain parts of the three chapters of his prophecy have stuck with me for decades.
     Habakkuk opens his prophecy with words about the Chaldeans (another name, in the time Habakkuk wrote, for the Babylonians).  He tells his readers that soon, very soon, the Chaldeans will rise up and sweep through the deserts of Mesopotamia, coming for, as he puts it, "violence," mocking kings, "swooping down" like eagles to "devour" their enemies, their horses "swifter than leopards" to capture and destroy all those who dare oppose them.
     After laying out the extent of Chaldean power, Habakkuk goes on to ask God why he isn't doing anything to stop this tribe from effecting its predations.  "Why are you silent when the wicked swallow up those more righteous than they?"  "Why do you look with favor on those who deal treacherously?  Why, God?  As so many of us have done since history began, the prophet wonders how a God who proclaims himself to be good seems to stand by while a fiercely antagonistic group of people decimates the land.
     At one point, Habakkuk asks God, "Why have you made men like the fish of the sea, like creeping things without a ruler over them?"  At this point, Habakkuk could be an existentialist:  if this life is nonsensical, why are we here, anyway?  What's the point? Absent some sort of positive divine intervention, people indeed seem like fish and all creeping things, soulless creatures who roam to live and die, for no apparent reason.
     What many of us may find particularly troubling, however, is this:  if God's presence ensures that we are meaningful and more than fish in the sea, then why do we not always see evidence of his presence in the upheavals of the planet?
     Therein lies the crux of the faith:  believing in goodness even when we do not visibly see it.

     Have you seen the Disney movie Beauty and the Beast?  Many parents might say yes; even more children would say likewise.  Hollywood animation techniques aside, the movie presents profound truths about redemption and restoration.  It tells us that we ought to look past the obvious and apparent to what, in a meaningful universe, the purpose that must always exist, to peer beneath the surface to see what, in a world of thought and intention, things really mean.
     Put another way, if we frame it rightly, Beauty and the Beast tells us that only as we agree to believe in each other and the fundamental worth of transcendent morality, we are make sense of who we are.  In its own way, Beauty and the Beast is suggesting that we all have value, and we all have purpose.  Furthermore, it argues that for this reason, we all can be redeemed, we all can be brought and restored to whom we can most be.
     This is what Belle believed then and, wonderfully enough, it is what God believes today.  Whoever we are and whatever we do, we remain remarkable, remarkable beings. Yet we would not be so unless we lived in a meaningful universe.  And it is only in a meaningful universe that we can even consider, much less find redemption.
     Jesus would not have died for meaningless beings.

     After an unplanned hiatus, I return to offering my thoughts for kind (I hope!) consideration.  Driving home from the swimming pool the other day, I heard an old rock song, this one by a long since gone band called Bad Company.  It's called "Shooting Star." In it, we hear the singer tell us a story about a man called Johnny who, despite everything, is a shooting star, a special human being, and who, through all the ups and downs of his life, lived, and died, in grace and peace.
     If I can expand the purview of the song a bit, I note that there is much truth to it. Genesis tells us that we are all created in the image of God, carefully and lovingly wrought as uniquely sentient entities, singularly equipped to live in a way all our own upon this planet.  As Sly and the Family Stone sang decades ago, "Everybody is a star."
     And so we are.  As the song points out, however, we are "shooting" stars.  Do shooting stars last indefinitely?  No:  anyone who has had the good fortune to see a shooting star (which are actually meteorites, sometimes comets) blazing its way across a dark night sky knows that their glory is short.  They're gone almost as soon as we see them.
     So are we.  We are glorious, yes, we are wonderful, indeed, but we are very, very short.  Even if we live to be a hundred or more, in the immense canvas of history and time, we are but a blip, and an infinitesimal blip at that.  Yet if we are in fact created in the image of an infinite God, we can know and believe that even if we are shooting stars, we are shooting stars in the umbra of eternal meaning.
     We are more than this life.

     Cancer or hunger?  Neither is good (unless the latter is the result of deliberate meditation, fasting, or contemplation).  How do we decide which is the more necessary fight?  Each year, in many parts of the West, various anti-cancer and anti-hunger organizations plan fundraising events for their causes.  Repeatedly, the anti-cancer events raise much more money than do those directed at ending hunger around the world.
     No one wants to see people die of cancer.  Yet no one enjoys knowing that people die of hunger, either.  On the whole, it seems that those who succumb to cancer live primarily in the affluent West, while those who die of hunger live primarily in the poorer regions of the world.  In addition, while those who perish from cancer usually do so in the company, or at least under the notice of one or many loved ones, those who die of starvation often do so in the bleakest and loneliest of circumstances.  In general, we do not see obituaries for them, nor do we see them remembered with memoriams at Relay for Life rallies.  By and large, they die forgotten.
     I certainly do not intend to discount the immense suffering that a death from cancer brings to both victim and family.  It is wonderful to see, however, when the people of the West emulate Jesus more fully in allocating their resources, that is, when they devote as many resources and communal resolve to ending hunger as they do to ending cancer. Jesus healed disease, yes, but he also fed hungry people.  We who can are to do likewise.
     After all, does not God love everyone?

     Yesterday I visited a Hindu temple with some friends.  It was an extraordinarily beautiful facility.  The people were extraordinary, too:  friendly, inclusive, welcoming. Many of those with whom I visited the temple, all of whom share my faith commitments, remarked on the adherents' openness to guests and strangers, adding that, unfortunately, many Christians could learn from this.
     It's tricky.  For the Hindu, the lines between truth and untruth are rather blurry, even nonexistent:  as the Hindu sees it, proper religion requires a delicate balancing of both, for in the big picture, both are necessary and, in a way, true.  Yet for the major monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (though not as much in modern Judaism), truth is very much black and white:  there is truth, and there is untruth, and never shall the two meet. While from a logical standpoint this makes sense, implementing it in personal relations is decidedly more complicated, and at times rather messy.  How do we believe in one thing, and one thing only, in the face of the religious pluralism that being created in God's image and endowed with choice making capacities inevitably spawns?
     Clearly, two things cannot be truth simultaneously.  If truth is truth, it must be unique and set apart.  If therefore God, the only God, made the world and all that is in it (Psalm 24), and if this God expressed himself in one person and one person only (Jesus:  John 1:14), then there can only be one way to see it.
     Ah, but how do we see?  More importantly, how does God see our feeble efforts to see him?  In the end, although God is God is God, and Jesus is Jesus is Jesus, we should all wonder and always ponder and be open to how God reminds us of this.
     Gloriously, we all are not the same.

     A little while back, I blogged about nineteenth century French anarchist Pierre Proudhon's view of history.  Today, I discuss his famous monograph, "God is Evil, Man is Free."  In it, Proudhon writes, "Atheism is the negation of Providence, as it results from the agreement between the inflexible laws of nature and the incessant aspirations of liberty, and as I have attempted to define it . . . God is not conceivable without man; but man is not conceivable without God; God, whom faith represents as a tender father and a prudent master, abandons us to the fatality of our incomplete conceptions; he digs the ditch under our feet; he causes us to move blindly, and then, at every fall, he punishes us as rascals."
     In many ways, Proudhon is correct.  Atheism is one response to the frustration of being a human with the capacity for choice yet who is living in world she cannot fully control. It is one way people use to make sense of a world that allows them to be free but in fact does not:  in this type of world, how can Providence (divine benevolence) therefore be possible?  God is no more than a way to escape the facts of reality.
     Moreover, as Proudhon points out, unless God, as well as man, exists, neither can conceive of the other existing in turn.  Though this seems obvious, it underscores an important point, one which perhaps Proudhon did not realize he was making:  humans can not be fully human unless they affirm the existence of God.  They are incomplete without God.  Yes, as Proudhon continues, God does indeed seem to abandon people to the "fatality" of their incomplete conceptions, yet what Proudhon may not see is that our conceptions are incomplete not because God "abandons" us, but because of our essential finitude.
     Ironically, we can only really "see" if we "see" (and affirm) God. 

     Yesterday, America, and perhaps other parts of the world as well, remembers--or at least makes a pretense of doing so--Columbus Day.  Why?  Extensive research has found Columbus to be decidedly less wonderful than he was considered to be fifty years ago.  Our best evidence indicates that he engaged in questionable financial transactions; participated in excessive political pandering; mistreated the American natives he met; and used his religion (or at least the idea of God) to justify his frequently debasing actions. Moreover, as many a Native American historian has remarked, 1492, the year Columbus "discovered" the Americas, is one that sparked many centuries of tremendous suffering for the thousands of people who had at that time called the Americas their home.  Although the natives' descendants today benefit, in part, from the material improvements that Westernizing of the Americas has brought them, far too many of them continue to languish on the margins of society.  They remain ostracized and forgotten in their native land.
     History teaches us many things.  In this instance, it teaches us that when we search for individual riches and glory at all costs, particularly in the name of religion, we too often demean and deny the goodness and glory of the very religion we seek to uphold.  God doesn't need brutality to let people know about his love for them, and he certainly doesn't need those who proclaim his virtue and holiness to inflict suffering and pain on those to whom they are "trying" to make him known.

     Though those of us who live in white America are likely grateful to be doing so, we should be quick to realize that the instant we suppose our experience is the result of the work of God, we just as quickly elevate our joy, our earthly joy, over that of everyone who lost theirs when we got ours.

     In a recent profile, The New Yorker declared Dana Schutz, formerly of Michigan but now a painter based in New York, the "most exciting painter" in the city.  Looking at her work, it's not difficult to see why.  Consider the painting, "Fight in an Elevator," below. Although at first it appears to be no more than a mish mash of shape and color, when we look at it closely, we see that amidst its seeming chaos it is presenting more than visual image; it is grounding a story.  It is offering a starting point.  Schutz says that her work represents metanarratives, stories containing many stories, stories that explain smaller stories, stories that hold disparate narratives together.  Because metanarratives explain and frame multiple stories, they help us make sense of the bigger picture of reality and truth.  They also help us develop our own stories more fully.
     Hence, when we look at this painting, we are looking at our possibilities.  We are looking at what can be.  We are touching our human potential.  Yet what I find most exciting about this painting, as chaotic as it seems to be, is that it reminds me that, as most creation stories attest, before there was order, there was chaos.  But as the Genesis (as well as the Theogony) account make clear, although "the earth was formless and void" (or "chaos reigned"), the "spirit of God hovered over the waters" ("and chaos gave way'").  "Fight in an Elevator" tells us that however uncontrollable life seems to be, because the universe has been formed with intelligence and system, sensibility will eventually prevail.
     And we enjoy its fruits ever day, the fruits of an intelligible divine.

     Religion and state?  It's an old controversy, yet one that is constantly being inflamed afresh by any number of incidents or decisions deemed worthy of notice by politician and pundit alike.  Much ink and verbiage has been spilled arguing over the division, or lack thereof, between the two.
     Nowhere does this dispute become trickier when we consider the degree to which a person in public office should allow her religious convictions to shape her decisions.  On the one hand, clearly, if a person has any level of religious foundation, she cannot but help render decisions out of this worldview.  If she is wise, however, she will realize that she is doing so in a highly pluralistic society, one in which not everyone will necessarily agree with her convictions.
     This notwithstanding, it is patently silly to insist that anyone holding public office should be expected to set aside all of her religious convictions each time she makes a decision.  She would be ignoring who she is.
     I mention this topic because at last month's meeting of my atheist discussion group we watched an interview conducted with a confirmed atheist who ran for a seat in Congress in the state of Arizona.  Even in the pluralistic society that we call America today, many people recoil at the thought of a person who professes a total absence of belief in anything having to do with the supernatural to hold public office and render decisions which affect thousands, even millions of people.  Religious conviction, many people say, is a prerequisite for holding office.
     (Unless one is presidential candidate Ben Carson, who insists that a Muslim should not be allowed to hold public office.  Quick memo to Mr. Carson:  Christians are not the only people who can credibly perform the duties of a public office.)
     Although I have religious convictions, convictions which have their basis in Christianity, I see no reason to make commitment, or lack of it, to belief in the supernatural a requirement for public office.  Why should religious people consider themselves to be the only ones capable of such a task?  If a nonbeliever can do the job and be sensitive to the needs of all of her constituents as well as the greater good (very broadly defined) of the country, why not?
     After all, unfortunately, many people of religion living in pre-World War II Germany voted to allow Adolf Hitler to hold public office, and many people of religion even today prefer strong and dictatorial rule over almost anything else.
     If God is in fact there, and all the evidence indicates that he surely he is, our decisions about who holds public office, whatever they be will, in the long run, always carry meaning and purpose.  The world remains in God's hands.

     Retaliation?  Too often, people, particularly those who follow religious convictions, mistake retaliation for justice.  They suppose that if a person is justly convicted of a crime, justice demands that society, in some way, retaliate so as to "compensate" this person, as well as society, for his or her crime.
     However, as French author Albert Camus, perhaps most famous for his novels The Stranger and The Plague, wrote in his 1957 essay "Reflections on the Guillotine," retaliation is "pure impulse," an inclination or tendency that, as he sees it, has been ingrained in humanity from its very beginnings.  It's primal, a natural and therefore, as he sees it, unconsidered and instinctual urge, to strike back at one's fellow human being.  It has nothing to do with the rule of law.
     That's Camus's point.  Law, he goes on to say, "cannot obey" the same rules as nature. Law must elevate the character of human response to crime beyond mere primordial impulse.  It must set out a new path for how people view societal wrongdoing.  Law must change the tenor of the conversation.
     As many commentators have remarked, the ideal government is one of laws, not "men" (or women!).  If we are to construct our respective societies on the basis of law, we should understand that law is designed to improve us, not allow us to fall prey to our basest predilections.  Justice is the art of seeking betterment as well as redress.  We cannot separate the two if we hope to structure a just society.
     It all comes down to the heart.  What is in our heart when we are responding to those who have been justly (and this is a problematic word) convicted of crime?  Are we thinking of God's love and belief in human good, made as he or she is in God's image, or are we giving into everything which drags us further into our long since vanished primordial chaos (Genesis 1:2) and slime?

     In a recent article titled "Fear" in the New York Review of Books, Marilynne Robinson, author, most recently, of Lila, writes about an ennui which she believes strangles too many Americans, leaving them ready to embrace almost any idea so long as this idea helps alleviate one thing:  their fear.  Be it ideology, political posture, or cultural choice, too many people, in Robinson's view, sacrifice most of their common sense to distance themselves from fear, of all kinds.
     Few of us appreciate living in the shadow of omen or threat.  Yet we cannot protect ourselves from everything, nor, in a way, should we.  The adage is ancient, but the truth is still true:  in overcoming fear, we conquer ourselves.  Moreover, when we make decisions based on fear, we often make choices driven not by wisdom and reason but myopic self-interest.  We forget those we love, we forget the communities of which we are a part.
     Worst of all, however, we forget ourselves.  We forget that neither guns nor ideology will, in the big picture, really protect us.  We forget that we best protect ourselves when we stop thinking that we can, when we realize that the more we do to insulate ourselves from a fallen world, the more we reduce our humanness to mere passion and whim.
     And are we not more that these?
     Only if there is a personal God.  Otherwise, our fear, from the fear of heights to the fear of death, and more, becomes us.

     What's history?  One of Christianity's greatest prelates, Augustine lived toward the very beginning of the medieval era.  Even today, his thought shapes countless theological inquiry around the globe.  One dimension of existence about which Augustine thought extensively was history.  History, he said, is the story of two cities, the city of man, and the city of God (for details, see Augustine's voluminous City of God).  History is a struggle between human striving and divine purpose, a purpose which, in the end, prevails.
     Yet it does so through the agency of human adventure and exploration.  God's ideas last, but human activity does, too.  None means anything without the other.
     On the other hand, Karl Marx saw history as the story of class struggle, the conflict between the workers and the owners.  It had nothing to do with God.  Spirituality is a myth.
     In many ways, both Augustine and Marx have much to offer.  We understand the necessity of God, and we understand the fact of human presence.  What we will never see, however, is what they mean when we fit them together.  In the end, who in history can ever know, fully, what this history means?  We may live history, but only God understands it.
     Otherwise, its meaning would be solely our own.  And apart from transcendent moral structure, what do we mean, anyway?  We're only here.
     

     Once again, we weep over a mass shooting, this one in the town of Roseburg, Oregon, an attack that left at least ten people dead.  And as we grieve, we wonder:  why?  Why here, why now, why must this happen?  What is it about this person's life experience, shaped as it was by the culture swirling around him, that led him to do this thing?
     Though we do not yet know the full extent of what drove the shooter to do his his deed, we do know that in one of his recent posts on the internet he remarked that, "The material world is a lie."  Without knowing precisely why he came to this conclusion, I can of course only speculate about the thought underlying it.  Yet in a nation in which material acquisition is so strongly stressed, in a country in which personal success is too often measured in terms of wealth and property, it's not difficult to see how those who do not possess such things might consider them to be a sham.
     If we consider this world to be the sum of all meaning, then, yes, it's easy to see why one might decide that it is a lie.  As we all know, this life, and the world in which it is lived, are frightfully fleeting; they are good and grand, but they do not last.  For beings who are naturally bent to look beyond materiality for ultimate meaning, this prospect can be enormously frustrating.
     Whatever else we might take away from this horrible event, we can at least consider that if we look only to this world for hope, that is, lasting hope, whether we are inclined to shoot people or not, we will never be satisfied.
     We want there to be more.  And there is.  As Paul remarks in the first chapter of Philippians, "To live is Christ, to die is gain."

     Can we have it all?  One verse from Ecclesiastes seems to say that we can.  "It is good that you grasp one thing, and not let go of the other," it says, "for the one who trusts God will come forth with them both."
     What does this mean?  The key is the description, "one who trusts God."  Clearly, there are things we ought to desire, and clearly, there are some things that will work better for us than others.  We are not to cling to everything blindly and to suppose that this is what God wants us to do.  We are not to justify ourselves on the basis of what it seems we are able to get or do.  Just because we can do it, and just because we can have it does not make either one God's will.
     At its heart, God's will presents the essence of trust.  If we grab before we trust, we will always miss the mark.  If we grab after we trust, we will often miss the mark, too. We must not think in terms of what we can "get" from God, be it guidance, help, or material aid.  God is not a slot machine, not even for guidance.
     Talking with his disciples, Jesus once said, "No one, having put his hand to the plow, and looks back, is fit for the kingdom of God" (Luke 9:62).  Worldly speaking, we will never have it all.  We will always be incomplete.  But we can't look back.  We are to look ahead.  We do not worry about what we get.  We worry about how we can trust.
     And everything else falls in place.  It's a paradox, isn't it?  We seek, but we do not; we knock, but we cannot open.  We look but we cannot see.  But we seek, knock, and look, anyway.  We can go after what we want, we can go after what we need, yet in the end, we can trust in what we receive.
     Time's a gift, life's a gift, we're a gift.  We trust the gift, we trust the gift giver.
     So does many a verse in the book of Proverbs say, "Trusting God is the beginning of wisdom."