A few summers ago, I was backpacking through a glacial basin in the depths of California's Sierra Nevada mountain range. One evening toward the end of my trek, I stood, perched on a rock overlooking a 12,000 foot high lake, watching the sun set over the peaks to the west.  The air was cold, the sky clear.
     As the sun slipped below the horizon of jagged rock, I mourned but I treasured, too.  I mourned at the cold that would drive me into my tent, I treasured what I knew would come the next morning:  the rising sun.  I took in the order and rhythm, I gasped at the certainty of light.  I was deeply grateful that they all happened.
     Basking in our collective post Christmas presence, we can think, again, about light's certainty.  Whatever empires roamed through the lands of the ancient near east, whatever assertions of potency and power they promulgated, we can understand that, in the end, God came.  In the end, God spoke.  God came to earth, God bathed its light in his light.  Long absent in physical form yet continually pervading reality since its very beginnings, God's light made itself unmistakably known.
     As we go forth this week, we remember this light.  We remember the joy of Christmas togetherness, we recall the happiness of opening gifts.  We revel in memories of fun moments.  Though we return to "reality" and its swirl of work and attendant responsibilities, we can continue to walk in the glory, to marvel at the mystery, the profoundity of it all.  We can embrace the light, the light of purpose and meaning.  Even as we trek through the quotidian, we can touch that which enables it to happen and be.
     Inasmuch as I leave this week for a backpacking expedition in the American West, not to return until well after the New Year, I send my best wishes for a wonderful end--and beautiful beginning--to another year spent in God's light.
     Thanks for reading!

     In a few days, in all corners of the planet, literally billions of people, religious or not, will remember Christmas Eve.  Regardless of how they we view the birth of Jesus, for most of these people, Christmas Eve will be a time of remembrance, generosity, warm familial gatherings, and much more.  It's a night unique in all the year, a night in which countless families around the world make every effort to come together and, for at least a few hours, make peace and enjoy the fact of each other. It's a time in which life, for a moment, seems suspended, captured in a hourglass of human bliss.

     And why not?  The event that birthed Christmas Eve is an event on which all of history hinges, a pivot of time, space, and eternity that transformed the entire span of human challenge and endeavor.  Jesus' birth changed everything, absolutely everything.  In Jesus' coming, we sense and appreciate, definitively, that God can--and does--irrupt into our experience, that God, in ways we cannot always fathom, can, and will, make himself known in our lives.  God will manifest himself in our history.  Christmas Eve tells us that we tread on a very thin skein, a achingly slender layer of moment between time and eternity.  It is the richest possible investment of who we are, the most profoundly possible doorway into who we can be.

     Christmas Eve opens our eyes to the totality, the absolute and unimpeded totality, of God, the one who made all cosmos, space, and time, for us.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

     Most of us have heard the "Christmas story" countless times.  Across the world for thousands of years, people have read and pondered, over and over, Luke's account of Jesus' birth.  One might almost think that there is nothing new to find in it.
     But there always is.  As I was reading it this year, I found myself struck, and not for the first time, by the thought that the first people to hear about Messiah's birth were shepherds. In the twenty-first century, most of us do not think much about shepherds.  In Jesus' day, however, shepherds were an integral part of the economy of the ancient world.
     Yet shepherds were despised, viewed as the lowest of the low.  Few wished to associate with them.  They spent their days--and nights--largely apart from the rest of the people, living lonely lives in the fields and hillsides of the nations. 




  
     The shepherds can teach us much about Christmas.  Many of us devote the Christmas season to finding the most expensive gifts we can afford.  We strive to go one better than we did last year.  The last thing we aim for in our gift buying is humility.  But the first group of people to whom God revealed the birth of Jesus were people whose lives were steeped in humility:  lowly shepherds.
     Christmas doesn't encourage greatness; it calls for humility.  It calls us to look not at how we can spend our money on ourselves, our friends, or family, but rather what we can do for others, what we can do for the "shepherds" among us.  Christmas teaches us to reach out to those on the margins.
     Jesus came not to aggrandize, but to serve.  So did he say that, "The Son of Man [a name that he often used for himself and which reflected traditions deep in the Hebrew worldview] did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for the many" (Mark 10:45).  Jesus came to give, not receive.
     So ought we.  So ought we see Christmas as an occasion for humbly recognizing what we can do, not for ourselves, but for the world.

     Lilting about Christmas, overlooked in the holiday rush, winter comes to us softly, lifting us, soothing us, gently ensconcing us in somnolence and silence, carpeting the land, and our lives on it, with multiple auras of peace and quiesence.  Before its darkness and aphonia, we bow, riveted by its power, captured by its beauty.  We weep, we rejoice; we delight, we mourn.  We may love its beginning, we may look to its end.
     But winter comes just the same.  It's predictable, it's poignant, it's sure.  It reminds us of rhythm, it tells us of change.  Winter speaks to order, winter underscores pattern, bequeathing point, enabling irruption, shaking us, pushing us, showing us, potently and clearly, that life remains marvelous, incomprehensible, and deeply unseen.
     Wrap yourself in winter, drape yourself in its presence.  Touch the truth of God's remarkable and delightfully befuddling world.

     As we remember the fourth and final Sunday of Advent and look towards its culminating event, the incarnation, God's appearance in human flesh, I think frequently about its origins.  As the gospel accounts make clear, Jesus was born in Bethlehem (literally, "house of bread"), a town that we might today call a hole in the wall, a little village largely forgotten by the rest of the world.  Few people cared what happened in Bethlehem.
     Nor did few people care when, after God told Joseph to take Mary and Jesus and flee the country to avoid King Herod's deadly predations, Jesus lived for a time in Egypt.  Mary and Joseph were likely viewed as just one more set of refugees, one more group of aliens moving through the flotsam of the Empire, their lives a mirror of countless migrations before:  no big deal.
     But this is precisely God's point.  Though Jesus was an alien and refugee, born in obscurity and forgotten and overlooked by the rest of the world, he was the one in whom God chose to make himself known to all humanity.  Jesus was the one whom God would use to manifest and reconcile himself to his human creation, the one whom God would use to draw all people to himself.  In Jesus, the poor and forgotten refugee, was the greatest hope of all time.  It's the ultimate irony, the greatest surprise.  It's God's way of demonstrating to us that just when we think we have everything figured out, be it our views about immigration, aliens, refugees, or anything else, we really do not.
     But isn't that what God is all about?

     Light.  Most of us enjoy the light, most of us appreciate seeing a new day.  Unless we are like Anna Lyndsey, the pseudonym for a British woman who actually becomes ill when she is in light (and who wrote Girl in the Dark, a poignant memoir about her experience), we like illumination, natural, artificial, or otherwise.
     Religion speaks powerfully to this likely innate desire for light.  In the course of my contemplation about Jesus being the "light of the world" this Advent season, I have read some of the Lakota Sioux stories about the role of light in the human experience.  As the Lakota see it, light is seminal to reality.  One Lakota story tells of Fallen Star, the offspring of a Lakota woman and a star who, after his mother unfortunately passes away shortly after he is born, is raised by a meadowlark.  Because Fallen Star fused in his being the celestial and earthly, he carries the weight of all things in the light that he subsequently brings to the world.
     This story's parallels to the Christian picture of Jesus as the one who brought together the divine and human in one person are striking.  They underscore a universal religious understanding that "true" light only comes from one who grasps and holds together the union of all things, that genuine insight into reality is gained by encountering and experiencing the one who has made it.
     In this Advent season, this is the central message of light.  Light is the beginning, light is the end.  Because of Jesus, in God, throughout the world, light is the compass of all things.

    Today, at least in time zones east of the International Dateline, it's Beethoven's birthday.  What can we say about Ludwig van Beethoven?  The famous portrait of him below captures how many of us see him:  a brooding, brilliant composer.  When we think about Amadeus Wolfgang Mozart, we think of the Enlightenment and how it liberated the human mind and imagination from the constraints of a Church struggling with its response to impending modernity.  We see his music as poetry, lilting and dancing its way across our lives.

     Beethoven's music, however, strikes us with its passion.  It comes to us almost as a force of nature, barreling its way into our hearts, taking them apart, making us contemplate the deeper forces that drive human existence.  We swoon over Beethoven's melodies and the viscerality with which he endowed them, and we wonder about the power of the universe which his songs describe.  A Romantic in the purest sense, Beethoven reminds us of the presence and possibilities of transcendence.

     I thank God for Beethoven.  I thank him for giving him to us, for giving him to show us as we are, beings of mind and creatures of heart, living, personal, and dynamic entities made to grapple bravely and meaningfully with the weight of life, to take hold of everything that is before us.  I thank God for using Beethoven to open and unfold for us glimpses of what we, and life, can be.

     All of us have experiences in which we feel we have become a part of something bigger, times from which we come away thinking that we have stepped into a plane of situation, circumstance, or thought above and beyond what we normally know.  Writing in Cloister Walk, her reflection on a year spent in a Benedictine monastery, Kathleen Norris, after watching some of the monks do their prayers and recitations, observes that, "Sometimes these people who live immersed, as all Benedictines do, in the poetry of the Psalter, are granted an experience that feels like a poem, in which familiar words that have become like old friends suddenly reveal their power to bridge the animal and human worlds, to unite the living and the dead."
     Norris has captured the heart of the "essential" experience.  When we see and touch life as poetry, when we enjoy our existential experience as a poem, a poem woven into the poetry of God's creation, we indeed gain a deeper picture of reality.  We come into new insights into the bridges that connect us and the gaps between us, new pathways crossing the span of physical and divine.  We see ourselves as we are.
     Sure, life be hard and cold at times, but if we endeavor to view it as a stanza in a much larger poem, a verse in a enormously lilting sonnet, we understand that life has boundaries and borders and openings of which we are not always aware.  We grasp that to exist is to live in a very large world, a world well beyond our intellectual and spiritual ken, and that to "be" is to take hold of the infinity, the personal and eternal God from whom all has come.
     We find the seminal meaning of human heart:  God with us, God for us, God before us.

          Grace.  For some, it's a name; for others, it's a feeling; for others, it is the face of God.  So does the apostle Paul write to his colleague Titus, "For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all people" (Titus 2:11).  In Jesus, Paul is saying, we see the visible expression of God's grace.  In Jesus, he is telling his readers, we see the physical manifestation of God's favor toward us.  In Jesus, God's grace bursts theological rhetoric and doctrinal dogma:  it is made palpably real.  Jesus presents the fullest possible picture of God's kindness and benevolence, his enduring compassion for his human creation.  Jesus' appearance tells us that, above all, God loves us, and wants to us to know him, fully and intimately.  Jesus is the grace of God.
      We grant each other grace every day, as we should.  Yet it is God's grace that enables us to see and understand that amidst the frequent senselessness of the world in which we live, there is a grace of hope, a grace of hope that transcends what we see, a grace of hope that frames and orders and gives meaning, now and eternally, to our lives.  Jesus' appearance tells us that whatever else we may think about God, what we ought to think most about him is this:  God is for us. God is for us today, tomorrow, and forever.  The creator of the universe is on our side.
     As we enter into this third week of Advent, rejoice in the grace of hope, this perduring picture of divine favor.  Then ask yourself:  God is on your side, yes, but are you on his?

     Perhaps you know, perhaps you don't:  December 8 was Bodhi Day.  What's Bodhi Day? It is the day (the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month), remembered by Buddhists around the world, on which the Buddha is believed to have attained his enlightenment, that moment when he came to definitively understand the nature of life and suffering.
     And what did the Buddha decide?  Life, he concluded, is about suffering.  And this suffering, he added, is caused by our craving for things of impermanence.  But we can eliminate this craving, he insisted, by following the Eightfold Path (the most important of these being right mindfulness).
     On many points, the Buddha was right.  Suffering is intrinsic to existence, and we all seek things that do not last.  As to whether all of our suffering is due to this craving, well, maybe not.  But the point remains:  we tend to desire the impermanent things of this world.  Even if we wish to be more "spiritual," we often frame this in the context of the present world, not in what may lay beyond it.
     The Buddha was also insightful in his solution:  right mindfulness.  We must train our mind to focus on things that matter, to concentrate on what lasts.  Mental discipline is essential to personal wholeness.
     On the other hand, history has demonstrated that Socrates' contention that knowledge is virtue, that knowing the right thing is to do the right thing, will never, in this life, be true.  While cultivating right mindfulness is good and proper, mental discipline will not prevent all moral transgression.  Moral error requires a moral response, and morality is not the product of chemical exchange.  It is the fruit of transcendent activity in the human being.
     Real enlightenment requires a real God.

     A few nights ago, I had dinner with one of the people from my atheist discussion group.  A former Catholic (like me), this person described for me her gradual journey from a schoolgirl frightened of God and his prophecies of hell and destruction to a now rather elderly woman totally committed to life and the present moment and thoroughly unafraid to die.  She has, she said, written off God.  For her, life is better without him.
     Before she came to this point, this person told me, she decided to read the Bible.  She didn't get far.  After reading the numerous instances of God's vengeful attitudes toward the enemies of Israel, and his seemingly unremitting desire to kill off anyone who didn't believe in him, she concluded, "I'm more moral than God."
     Unfortunately, she has a point.  The Hebrew Bible overflows with stories of what seem to be divine cruelty, historical moments in which God commands the decimation of everyone--man, woman, and child--who does not believe in him or who is opposed to his chosen nation, Israel.  Even the most devout of believers must acknowledge that these are indeed difficult passages of scripture, not amendable to pleasant interpretation.
     I suggested to this person that, given these accounts, we might conclude that it's far easier to not believe in God than to believe in him.  Faith will always be an ambiguous experience.  It's fraught with tension.  It is not something we can wrap neatly in a box.
     But that's the point.  Yes, it is easier to not believe in God.  We resolve, or so we think, all our epistemological concerns.  On the other hand, we have every reason to believe.  The world is ambiguous and, in many ways, so is God.  That's why we need faith. Faith recognizes the ambiguity of the world, faith acknowledges the ambiguity of God. Faith doesn't ignore life's uncertainties.  It embraces them.
     Faith is the challenge of knowing that recognizes life for what it is:  the greatest of all epistemological challenges.
     It's hard to escape the fact of God.

     If God is everywhere, and if God has made all of us in his image, we can conclude that all of us may, if we choose, engage with him.  We can all find a way to connect with our creator.  Regardless of the religion or spiritual perspective, we can admit to the ubiquity of the human pursuit of the divine.
     I thought of this often as I read Witches in America recently.  It's a compendium and meditation on the various expressions of Wicca currently sweeping through the West.  It faithfully records the efforts of hundreds of Wiccans to commune with their perception of the divine, to connect with the "oneness" they believe is there for them.  I found some parts quite moving, struck by the passion with which the Wiccans strive to find "it."
     Are these Wiccans wrong to pursue the divine?  Are they wrong to seek wholeness?  Of course not.  Would that we all seek God our creator.  On the other hand, many Christians, particularly those in the West, are quick to recite John 14:6, in which Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father but by Me."  Jesus is the only way to God.
     This I do not dispute.  For those ignorant of Christian theology (not a Wiccan excuse), yet who earnestly seek after God, however, the picture gets more complicated.  But it does not for God.  He knows everyone's heart.  God knows where every person is at.
     I hope we encounter many surprises on the other side. I hope that, in the end, we will all see that when everything is said and done, only thing will remain:  God.  And in this life, this is a God whom we will never know everything there is to know about him in full. Eternity is there, yes, heaven as well as hell, and, yes, one day the cosmos will be no more, but how can we, from our present finite vantage point, know, fully, what all this will look like--and what it all, really, means?

     "Everyone asks for firmness in faith, but few firmness in love.  They ask for faith and are ashamed of love, such arrogant hearts; faith has no idea of the place where love transports you."  So said seventeenth century Sufi Muslim Bahu.  What does he mean? 
Perhaps he is suggesting that however much we believe in God (or, for Bahu, Allah (the Arabic word for God) in this life, we really do not have any idea of the glory that awaits us in the hereafter.  We cannot, on planet earth, comprehend God's fullness, we cannot, in the here and now, grasp fully the ultimate richness of God's love for us.  Though we believe it, we cannot see it; and while we live and die by it, we will not experience its completion until we leave this world.
     As Paul notes in his first letter to the Corinthian church, "Things which eye has not seen and ear has not heard, and which have not entered the heart of humankind, all that God has prepared for those who love him" (1 Corinthians 2:9).
     How can we measure such things?
     This, I think, is Bahu's point.  In this life, we cannot.  All we can do is trust, in faith, in God's love, to believe in its certainty, to hold to its permanency, to hold to its ultimacy.  
     And how do we know this love?  In this second week of Advent (to jump from Islam to Christianity!), we have our answer:  Jesus Christ.  Because Jesus was born in history, died in history, and rose again in space and time, we have reason to yes, be firm in faith, but even more to pursue the firmness of love.
     As Paul notes later on in the same letter, "But now faith, hope, love, abide these three, but the greatest of these is love."
     

     As the world continues to recoil over the recent shootings in Paris and San Bernardino, California, bombings in Syria, and a stabbing in the subways of London, as people around the planet wonder out loud who will be next, and as peace loving beings the world over seek to come to grips with what seems to be, for most present lifetimes, unprecedented waves of evil, we rightly ask:  what about God?  What does God think?  What is God doing?
     Though I do not pretend to know all answers in this regard, I can say that, as I consider the shape of the Advent season through which we are journeying, God is working. Thousands of years passed from the time of God's initial promise to send a Messiah to the day on which Jesus "finally" came into the world, thousands of years of war, crime, pain, suffering, and uncertainty, thousands of years in which people wondered:  what is God doing?
     But in the "fullness of time," as Paul puts it in his letter to the church at Galatia, Messiah came.  In the crowning moment of kairos, the culminating confluence of human and divine destiny, Jesus appeared on earth.  At the prophetic point of truth, God came. When people least expected it, God appeared.
     In the face of the horrors we have witnessed recently, it's exceedingly difficult to believe in God's presence, highly challenging to believe in the fact of divine love and compassion.  But we must.  We must believe in God's fullness, we must believe in God's time. We must that even if we do not seem to see him, God is there.
     Why?  Because we can.  We can believe that God is, as the writer of Hebrews asserts, the same "yesterday, today, and forever."  Of this, the evidence is clear.  God is here, and he is working, his sight unclouded, his vision intact.  
     And he's inviting us to believe it.

     Have you heard Donovan's (a singer popular in the Sixties) song, Catch the Wind?  A rather melodic piece replete with dreamy lyrics and an aura of otherworldliness, it sings of a person's desire for his lover.  For all these desires expressed, however, the singer cannot seem to reach her inner heart.  It's like, he says, trying "to catch the wind."  So he says, "For standing in your heart is where I want to be and long to be; ah, but I may as well try and catch the wind."
     Many of us spend our lives trying to "catch the wind," seeking constantly to capture the deeper heart of our existence, ever striving to penetrate beneath the surface of what we see, to find the richer piece that makes life meaningful and worthwhile.  Some of us find it; others do not.  Most of us, however, find something.  In his Wind, Sand and Stars, (published in 1939), French aviator and explorer Antoine de Saint-Exupery observes about the enormity of the Sahara Desert, "Let it form, deep in the heart, that obscure range from which, as waters form a spring, are born our dreams."
     Indeed.  To love and seek meaning amidst the various deserts and winds, the mountains and valleys of our lives is the most noble of pursuits.  It is to find the center of our existence, the core of who we are, our heart of hearts, our place in God's personal universe.  We live to dream.  And even if we "catch the wind," even if we do not meet, fully, in this life, that which we love most, we seek anyway, for we know that because God has made--and, in Jesus, validated--the world, its present, past, and future, we will one day find it.
     Happy trails!

     Although we can argue about Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan's motives or timing for pledging to give away %99 of his Facebook stock, we ought not to impugn their implications and effects.  Zuckerberg and Chan may not be familiar with the verses from Paul's second letter to the Corinthians which I shared a few days ago, but they certainly embodied and expressed its spirit:  to give far more than the 10% of one's income that many people of religion assume they are obligated to give.
     It makes sense, culturally, spiritually, and politically, to give, and to give much.  If everything we have and own is a gift from God, and we have had no say in enabling our presence in the world, we have no call to withhold what we have from our fellow human beings.  We did not come into our lives or possessions by accident.  The world is purposeful, and so are we.  We must take care of ourselves, yes, but as British poet John Donne pointed out many centuries ago, "No man [or woman] is an island."
     Because God created the world, we all have a point.  We all can participate and share in the bounty of the earth we are privileged to inhabit.  Indeed, did not God, in Jesus, give all of himself for us?

     If you've ever seen the movie Woodstock, you know the song.  It's a song by Canned Heat of San Francisco, Up to the Country.  Sung in a high pitched voice by lead singer Bob Hite, it describes, in very upbeat tones, the adventure of going to the "country," of dancing in the forest, of playing in the water, of getting out of the city to a enjoy, for a while, a new home.  Hite makes the prospect of leaving a city seem a dream fulfilled.
     Contrast this with Neil Young's words in Here We are in the Years on his first solo album that "the people of the city can't relate to the slower things that the country brings."  Maybe so.  Maybe one must have lived in the country to appreciate it most fully. More of us, however, live in the city than not.  And almost all of us enjoy or at least appreciate the natural beauty of the world, whether we live in the country or city.  Hite and Young's words seem to tell us different things; the one, to go into the country with abandon, the other to go into the country acutely aware that we will not be able to relate to it fully.
     Perhaps they're both right.  Yes, the country, in all of its various manifestations--mountain, prairie, forest, desert, tundra, and sea--offers enormous prospects for fun and discovery.  Yet unless we go into it wanting or expecting to find something, we may not find such things.  We may never connect, fully.
     Theologians talk about natural revelation, the idea that the natural world, its beauty, order, and balance attest to the fact of God.  Across the planet, the creation testifies to the presence of its creator.  God speaks in what he has made.  Hence, any time we go into the "country," we will find something, sometimes big, sometimes small.  Moreover, since as many observers have noted, all truth is God's truth, we will always find inklings and intimations of God.
     Go to the country!

     As we move through the Advent season (this past Sunday was the first Sunday of Advent), our thoughts turn often to memory.  We think about Christmases past and the joy they gave us; we think about those with whom we enjoyed those  Christmases but who are no longer with us; we think about things as they were, we think about things as they now are.  We ponder the present moment.
     Advent is a work of memory.  It remembers millennia of divine promise, it recalls centuries of messianic prophecy.  And it centers and fulfills them in the present time. Advent brings time and memory together.  It does what Gary Schmidt and Susan Felcher, compilers of Winter:  A Spiritual Autobiography, say of memory that, "memory can preserve in a very real way those things that have disappeared."
     Though this seems obvious, in the light of Advent, it's worth thinking about at length. When we consider how Advent culminated and fulfilled hundreds and hundreds of years of memory, hundreds and hundreds of years of preserving those things that "have disappeared," we see that it in fact validates everything about how we remember.  It tells that we can remember with hope, and we can remember with faith.  Advent reminds us that we can believe in the worth of the past, and that this worth portends goodness for the future.
     Advent says to us that what has disappeared hasn't disappeared at all.  In the person of Jesus, the point of Advent, it is here, completely and wonderfully present and new.