Ah, Black Friday.  For many, it's a time of excitement and glee; for others, particularly retailers, a time to dramatically increase revenues; for still others, a moment to express disappointment or, in some cases, disgust at American materialism.  For most of us, however, regardless of how we feel about it emotionally or philosophically, Black Friday signals the beginning of the Christmas shopping season.  It tells us that it's time to shop!
     Maybe so.  I'd like, however, to offer another perspective.  In the middle of his second letter to the church at Corinth, Paul writes about giving.  Thinking about the congregations in Macedonia (many miles north of Corinth), Paul observes that, "according to their ability, and beyond their ability, they gave of their own accord, begging us with much urging for the favor of participating in the support of their brethren" (2 Corinthians 8:3-4).  Consider:  these people didn't wait to be asked to give; they instead begged for the opportunity to give. Moreover, they gave beyond what anyone thought they could give (in other words, considerably more than the "standard" biblical tithe of 10%).  Trusting in the God who had given them everything they needed, they stepped up to do even more. They understood that, as Paul adds in chapter nine, "God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed" (9:8).  Because God is continually gracious to us, we can never give enough.  We can always give more.
     Let the retailers worry about what we should get.  Let us concern ourselves with what we can give.  As you go forth to "conquer" the stores before you, realize that it's no challenge to "get."  We can always do that.  The far greater challenge is to give.
     God has given us life itself; surely, he can give us more than enough to give.

     As most of us know, tomorrow is Thanksgiving.  Though we all have much for which to give thanks, perhaps the most important thing for which to give thanks is that we can give thanks.  That we can consciously rejoice in who we are and what we have been given, that we can be aware of the gracious bounty of the universe, that we can know, really know, that we are beings who can create moral lives.  We give thanks because we can give thanks.
     In addition, if, as many theologians have observed, all truth is God's truth, then we can give thanks for the incredible range of ways that those of us on the planet have found this truth, God's truth, that has defined and shaped their lives.  So give thanks most of all to God.  Give thanks to God that, despite the fractured state of modern spirituality, he is nonetheless able to communicate and present himself, the eternal fount of truth, to us, that in Jesus Christ, God has made himself known--everywhere.
     Whatever else you do this Thanksgiving, be grateful for the ubiquity of God.

     Perhaps you know the story of the Tower of Babel.  Recounted in the eleventh chapter of Genesis, it tells of how at one point in its early history humanity decided, as the text puts it, to build a tower to "heaven," and to make for itself a "name," lest "we be scattered over the face of the earth."  Subsequently, according to the account, when God looked down on his human creations, he said, "Behold they are one people, and they all have the same language.  And this is what they began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them"
     So God went "down" to the earth and "confused" the peoples' language (literally, "lip"), and "scattered" them across the "face of the earth."
     Although we can look at this story in a variety of ways (for instance, the beginning of linguistic diversity) and likely wonder and debate precisely what it means, I will say this much.  As I noted yesterday, to address God as the "Name" is to recognize his role as the ultimate originator and promulgator of the universe and, by extension, to assert our value as "names" of our own.  In the Tower of Babel account, we see that the people wanted to make a "name" for themselves, lest they be "scattered" over the face of the earth.  Put another way, the people sought to establish their identity as individuals who have no real connection to God.  They wanted to abandon the "Name" and "name" themselves.
     Not that we should fail to affirm our individuality.  Unshackled from belief in the primacy of God, however, any name is only a signifier of form and passion.  When people began to speak in different languages ("lips"), they were set free, free to think, act, and discern.  They were set free to roam the planet.
     Ultimately, people were set free to learn that despite the plethora of tongues running across the globe, tongues that speak of multiple generations of thought, ambition, and angst, only in God are they truly "one."

     Some of you may know that, out of respect, many Jews choose to address God by, simply, "Shem," which means "the name."  Christians and Muslims may find this odd, most of them choosing to address God by, alternately, "God" or "Allah" (the Arabic name for God), supposing it to be a more personal form of address.  On the other hand, our Jewish brethren may have it more right than we think.  When we consider the theological enormity of God, that in God is the ultimate source of life as well as the beginning of communication and speech, we see the wisdom of addressing him as, simply, the "Name." As does the "Name" identify God, so do our names identify us and set us apart.  Our names are our face to the world, the starting point of our entry into interpersonal exchange.
     Yet we were to suppose that there is no God, and that the cosmos therefore has no overriding purpose and meaning, then our names would mean little.  Though we would still name each other, we would really have no reason to do so:  in a world devoid of purpose, how can we?  But if God, the ultimate "Name," is there, and if God the "Name" is communicating and grounding the universe with purpose and point, we have every reason to identify ourselves.  We have meaning.
     To address God as the "Name" is to therefore affirm that we have genuine distinctiveness and presence, and not that we are, as Paul Sartre put it, "useless passions" running around with nowhere to go.

     Singularly striking, the plastic sculptures of Mihich Vasa belie what some might consider to be the inherent opacity of a sheet of plastic.  Whereas in most contexts plastic is used to connect and reinforce, with Vasa plastic takes on multiple dimensions, opening us to new windows into what color can be.  As the artist puts it, he is "interested in placing color in open space."  And so he does, hanging color on seemingly nothing, layering a multiplicity of hue and pattern in various polygons of plastic.  The finished product conjures thoughts of dark energy or matter, things we believe are there but which we cannot see, the inchoate and hidden dimensions of space and time.
     I stumbled on Vasa's work almost by accident as my siblings and I were sorting through the contents of my late aunt's residence.  Though we had always admired the cubes, cylinders, and other shapes and colors set on one of her etageres, we rarely had really examined them.  But now we did.  As I look at one of the pieces I kept as a memento of Jeanne, contemplating how the rising sunlight reshapes and realigns its colors, then, later in the day, as I set it in the glowing light of the setting sun, I think about the mystery of creation, human and divine.  I think about the human artist, meditating, creating, and I ponder the divine and its seminal energy of existence.  As Vasa's plastic polygons take us into new images and depths of life's possibilities, so does the artistic impulse, human and divine, unpack for us the greater agency that informs the cosmos with purpose and meaning.
     If color, of any kind, can be suspended in open space, there is always more to see.

     "How does it feel," goes the famous refrain of Bob Dylan's song, "to be without a home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?
     Most of us reading this blog have a home, a place to which they can go, a base from which they can plan and carry on with their life.  Most of us have a memory of a beginning.
     Too many others, however, do not.  Too many human beings, the flower of God's creation, wander across the planet, alone and forgotten, shorn of beginning, stripped of base, trekking through landscapes, mental and physical, which have no place for them. Too many of us have nowhere to go.
     It's easy to say that home is a state of mind, and it is easy to make home a set of experiences if we have a home already.  Many decades ago, as I tramped alone through incredibly remote stretches of the mountains of northern Alaska, I knew that when I came out, I have somewhere to go.  I knew I had a tangible destination.  I had no trouble picturing home as a concept.
     To be without home, to be bereft of base, lost and deprived of all linkage to the world, is to lose something vital to human flourishing.  It is to lose hold of what, in part, has made us who we are.  We may be here, we may be there, but we are unknown:  like a rolling stone.
     Yet even if we are known, to ourselves as well as others, we remain essentially alone. The transience of this existence guarantees it.  One day, even those whom we consider to be our closest friends will be gone, be it before or after we pass.  Nothing, as someone wrote as he watched lava swarm over the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, lasts forever. We walk in a world that, without any God or eternity to see it, is in truth like a rolling stone, great, amazing, and magnificent, yet fated to forever roam through a trackless cosmos.
     Is this really all there is?

     How inured we are in the West to the fears that dominate the rest of the world.  In reading Infidel, Somali and Dutch activist and speaker Ayaan Hirsi Ali's autobiography, published in 1997, recently, I found myself marveling, again, at how insulated we are. When Ali left her native land, eventually making her way to the Netherlands, where she subsequently applied for refugee status, she saw police frequently.  In contrast to her previous experience with police in her native land, when a mere glimpse of a law enforcement official sent waves of fear rippling through her, she soon discovered that in the Netherlands, unless one has broken a law, one doesn't necessarily need to recoil at the sight of the police.  In fact, police proved to be very helpful to her as she wound her way through the various legal channels to attain refugee status and, after some years, citizenship.  Initially, however, Ali's worldview had no categories for such perceptions.
     On the other hand, not everyone in the West instinctively assumes that the police are on her side.  Just ask a person of color.  Although Paul's epistle to the church at Rome advises readers to obey the authorities, this dictum becomes difficult to swallow when one lives in an authoritarian society.  Why does God allow such regimes to persist?
     Although I cannot answer this question easily, if at all, I like it because it forces we who are ethnically comfortable in the West to realize that more people than not face very different and complex questions about the sovereignty of God.
     Accepting divine sovereignty comes more easily when one possesses political or economic hegemony.  When one is on the other side, however, it poses obstacles which those who have hegemony cannot always readily understand.  But understand we must. We must endeavor to see the world through the lens of every living being:  none would be here if not for the love of God.

     Several weeks ago, I mentioned that one of my aunts had died.  Over the weekend, I was in Los Angeles, attending a memorial service my siblings and I had organized to remember her.  A number of people came, many of whom spoke wonderful words about Jeanne and the impact she had had on their lives.  We were grateful.
     The following morning, I had opportunity to walk to a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean (we stayed at the home of one of Jeanne's friends, who live not too far from the sea). As I sat on the rocks, gazing at the waves washing effortlessly across the beach far below, I thought about Jeanne again.  I thought about how important her faith was to her. For Jeanne, her faith in Jesus was absolute.  It was the bedrock of her life, the foundation of her experience.  Her faith in Christ informed everything she thought and did.  Every time we talked, she mentioned how crucial her trust in Jesus was to her life.
     Before I bid Jeanne farewell for the last time, I prayed with her.  I prayed for a safe journey, a safe journey to the other side, the other side where she will see, to use Dante's words in his Paradiso, "the universal form, the fusion of all things . . . the Love that moves the sun and stars."  Then I told her, "I'll see you again."  For I know I will.  Though Jeanne is gone from this earth, she lives.  She lives with the Jesus to whom she has devoted her life, the Jesus who held her life and hope together, the Jesus who gave her world form and meaning.  Her faith has become sight.

     Although I was traveling over the weekend, I could not help but hear about the tragedy that continues to unfold in France.  My heart sank at the news.  From our vantage point on this finite and confusing earth, though we can ascribe such actions to a combination of hatred and mistaken religious fervor, we still quake before what they suggest about the capacities of the human being.  Are people really this evil?
     Unfortunately, history has made it abundantly clear that the short answer is yes. Given certain conditions, human beings are capable of inflicting the most horrific pain imaginable--and beyond.  Before this certainty, we cringe; yet we should cringe even more if we believe we live in an accidental and therefore meaningless universe.  Although it certainly complicates our efforts to make sense of our reality, religion, particularly one invested in a personal and loving God who made himself known in Jesus Christ, enables us to come to grips with pain in a way that a happenstance cosmos does not.  We may still not understand fully, but we know that in a divinely created and therefore meaningful universe, explanation, now or later, is eventually possible.
     Until this eventuality becomes reality, however (and this is the ultimate frustration of finitude in the grip of eternity), we will not know it completely.  As Paul put it so eloquently (and maddeningly), we live by faith.
     Pray for the people of France, pray for the planet.

     A new book has come out about the rock and roll scene in the Sixties.  It's about the groupies, the women who made themselves known, in every way, to the rock stars of that pivotal era in contemporary music.  While many of us may wonder why these women would ever have been willing to engage with musicians in such fashion, we should also recognize that what they did is nothing new.  Women swooned over Ludwig van Beethoven, and women fell hopelessly for Franz Liszt.  Throughout the many ages that men have been making music, any number of women have chosen to give themselves sexually to them, usually with very few boundaries or restrictions.  Indeed, judging from a backstage situation which I witnessed prior to a Rod Stewart concert in Berkeley many decades ago, it's not only people who have been born as women who contribute; it was a group of transgender men who led the rush when Rod emerged from his limousine and walked into the nightclub to perform.
     Although some women have criticized these women for their activities, the groupies insist that they are just doing "what I want to do."  In this, they express one of the most sacrosanct ideals of the West:  individualism.  Although individualism emerged, oddly enough, as a by-product of the Reformation's focus on the one-on-one relationship which every human can enjoy with God, it has taken on vastly different forms since then.  Using the groupies as an example, many of us like to point to the Sixties as being responsible for creating individualism's most perverted historical expressions.  Not so.  Again, rampant individualism is nothing new.  What is new, however, is that today we in the West subscribe to it in the shadows of postmodernity, the idea that truth is no longer absolute and is, at best, relative to the individual human being.  While this is in part true, it ignores its logical outcome:  how do we ever determine what is really true?  The short answer is that we can't.  Ironically, however, all of us earnestly want for some things to be always right.  None of us can live without placing our trust in the unchanging physical laws of the universe, and none of us can live without believing that the world is a good place.  We cannot do without absolutes of truth.
     Though we may wish to wonder about the groupies's motivations, we perhaps should look more carefully at ourselves.  Unless we step beyond unbridled individualism, we have no better response to postmodernity's assertion of the meaninglessness of the universe than they do.  
     As Yeats said long ago, "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; the best lack all conviction,while the worst are full of passionate intensity . . . "
     There will be nowhere for us to go.

     Have you read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning?  A classic study of human resilience, Search for Meaning explores how people responded to the vicissitudes of Auschwitz, that is, how, despite the horrific conditions of their lives, they nonetheless sought to find meaning.  Frankl's point is that regardless of one's condition, she will seek to understand and pursue a greater significance, purpose, or meaning.
     Frankl's thesis says much about who human beings are.  Even if God does not exist, or even if God seems absent, people will try to make sense of their existence.  Why?  We have two options.  One, we can say that humans developed a sense of meaning in order to make their lives, well, meaningful.  This assumes, however, that people were aware of the notion of meaning before hand.  How could they know it was important?  Two, we can suggest that humans have been designed with purpose, and to therefore seek purpose. This of course demands that we posit the idea of God.  Random beings defy explanation; created beings necessitate it.
     Although we recoil at the issues that Auschwitz raises about the goodness of God, we also must realize that we cannot have it both ways.  If transcendent moral structure exists, however difficult its presence makes finding an explanation for pain, it nonetheless is superior to trying to find meaning without one.  If there is no transcendent moral structure, we are left with only ourselves, our random and indecipherable selves, to explain what we cannot legitimately seek to understand, anyway.

     How do we test personal experience?  This was the question we discussed at the monthly meeting of my atheist discussion group last night.  The speaker with whose words we began stated that although we cannot deny that a person has had an experience which she considers to be religious, difficulties arise when a person outside the faith tries to determine one, the actual content of the experience, and two, whether it actually reflects material foundation.
     The speaker also pointed out that we all bring baggage to our interpretations of events.  No one, he noted, is a totally impartial observer of thought or behavior.  For this reason, he suggested that we should only interpret personal religious experience through the lens of the scientific method, the approach he considers to be the most free from personal bias.
     Unfortunately, though I readily applaud the usefulness of the scientific method, I also say that to elevate it above all other hermeneutical possibilities and insist that it is wholly impartial is to commit the same error of presuppositional baggage of which its user is accusing others of doing.  To be fully fair to all the evidence, the scientific method must understand that although examining subjective experience is problematic, it must nonetheless consider William James's (who did not invest in an orthodox approach to faith) long ago observation that at the heart of religious experience is "something more."
     Like every other hermeneutic, the scientific method must also think outside the box. If the supernatural indeed exists, surely we can find, eyes wide open, evidences for it. Billions of people around the world cannot all share the same illusion.

      "When I see a garden in flower, then I believe in God for a second, but not the rest of the time."  So remarked recent Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich.  A writer who has devoted her career to presenting people's life stories as seeming works of fiction, Alexievich understands well the difficulty of believing in God all the time.  In the face of what she has witnessed in her life behind the Iron Curtain, it's easy to see how God appears elusive:  where could he be in oppression?
     Yet Alexievich also understands how powerfully a single point of natural wonder tends to point us to God.  Theologians call this natural revelation, the idea that God speaks and expresses himself in what he has made, revelation that everyone can see.  Challenging this, however, is the idea that such revelation is in many ways an inference; that is, one must step up a level from the experience to consider that a God may be within it.
     This is the central imperative of faith in times of political darkness and oppression: we must step beyond what we can see.  For a Westerner, this may be easier, of course, but given the universality of the natural world, its possibility lies before us all.

     We all have a birthday, and today is mine.  But what's a birthday?  A birthday is a point on a narrative, another steppingstone on an adventure on which all of us are embarked, every moment of every day.  It's a reminder of joy, it's a recollection of sorrow; birthdays encapsulate the stuff of existence.
     When I think about my earliest years, years when I wondered why I was here, why I was doing what I was doing, why I was being told to believe the things I was told to believe, I often wonder:  how did I get to where I am today?  I have no idea.  Yes, I planned, and yes, I tried to execute intentions, yes, I went here and there, and yes, things happened, but in the end I have no clear idea of how I landed on today.  Who does?  We're all living in a universe we did not make, a universe over which we ultimately have very little control.
     All we know is that life is a promise and expectation, an inkling and anticipation, a river and ocean coming constantly together in a creation we do not really make:  it's the work of life itself.  Moreover, whether we know it or not, life in turn is the work of, if we wish to render the world meaningful, God.  We are poems with a point, poems with a destiny, poems with a conclusion.  We are poems of eternity. Otherwise, it's futility.  
     Here's to birthdays!
     By the way, I'll be traveling for the rest of the week to attend a conference.  See you next week!

     Over the weekend, many Americans, and probably many more people around the world, celebrated Halloween.  Most of us know the story of Halloween.  It's a night traditionally viewed as a time when ghouls, ghosts, and other macabre creatures escape their chthonic dungeons and roam freely across the earth, fomenting fright, horror, and panic.  Today, it is a day exceeded only by Christmas in the amount of money Western consumers spend on it.
     However much one may wonder about Halloween's flirtation with the forces of darkness, we can observe that it is a night that might lead us to think about how we really see the world.  Do we see it as ruled by light, by the Zoroastrians' Ahura Mazda, or do we see it as ruled by darkness, the specter of the Hindus' Kali?  The tragedies of life seem to point to the latter; the joys, the former.  
     I suspect we all would like to say that light dominates.  And why not?  No one wants to walk in darkness.  In a fractured world, however, we will always have both.  The world's brokenness and disorder tell us that misfortune will occur, yet its wonder and beauty remind us that, despite it all, sublimity, the matchless marvel of sentience and being, the world is a good place.  If the world just happened, however, we would have no reason to view it in either way:  why would we?  We would have no basis.  There is no morality in an empty universe.  On the other hand, If the world is created, however this happened, we have every reason, indeed, a right, to call it good, as well as frightful. There is a point.
     Light can only be called "good" if God created it.

     Perhaps you've heard of the Sixties rock group called the Monkees.  Many rock critics castigate the Monkees, primarily because they were a band that did not develop organically but rather through the agency of various record producers who wanted to "create" a band.  For many, the Monkees were an "artificial" band.
     Be this as it may, some of the Monkees' songs have proven rather memorable.  For example, the movie "Shrek" used their song "I'm a Believer" to wide effect.  I am thinking, however, of a different song, one called "Daydream Believer."  Sung by Davey Jones, whom the girls who followed the band widely regarded as the cutest of the foursome, it is a poignant dance of love and life and the thought that money does not enhance either one.
     A few years ago, Davey Jones, on tour, as he had been for decades, traveling the world, continuing to draw audiences to hear the songs he did for the Monkees, unexpectedly, very unexpectedly, died, felled by a heart attack.  He was 67.  As I thought about his death then, and as I reflect on it today (having heard "Daydream Believer" recently), I return to the profound mystery of existence.  How we love being alive, and yet how we wonder what it means, particularly when we encounter such abrupt ends.  We search for some sort of purpose to such fleetingness.  We may well find it in living, but this only lasts as long as we live, our bewilderment still unresolved.
     I'm  thankful that such marvel and wonder, the marvel and wonder which all of us are, is not without a point, is not without a reason, is not absent of a reason beyond itself (for a reason in itself only serves to set us into an endless circle of groundless point). Ironically, life is life, and all that it implies, precisely because it is more than itself.  It is the work of God.
     Rest well, Davey.