Although I enjoy watching some movies, I never watch the Oscars.  While I acknowledge the thespian skills of many Hollywood actors, I remain rather amused by it all.  We see a group of wealthy and extremely wealthy (and rather homogeneous) people celebrating each other for their successes and, as the world watches, subtly reminding everyone else how much they are missing by not being one of them.
     Yes, this is a rather cynical view of a night that does honor some very talented people, and yes, it's analyzing an event with parallels in almost every other occupation.  Around the world, regardless of how ephemeral their work may be, people enjoy, generally, celebrating those who do it best.  They set aside any envy they may hold toward the honorees, and come together to laud the achievements of their brethren.
     So what's wrong with the Oscars?  Broadly speaking, nothing, really.  We may loathe the morality of the film industry, we may cringe at the movies it generates, and we may despise the foibles of various actors, but most of us appreciate the creativity of spirit it reflects.  Sure, we understand that ultimately making movies is about making money, yet we can still marvel at the artistry that this quest occasionally presents to us.  It's a very big world.
     And we have a very big God.  Though we humans are capable of creating immensely dark or perfidious art, we stand alone among all other creatures in our ability to create. We speculate, we imagine; we suppose, we render.  We give ourselves new worlds, worlds of thought, word, and aesthetic wonder every day.  I do not think God would have it any other way:  it's who we are made to be.
     In the end, it's really a matter of perspective.  We can look at the Oscars as the effluent of an immoral industry or we can view them as reflections of human creativity and joy.
     Or we can take them as yet another picture of the enormous mystery of God.  Only he knows why we create.  Only he knows what it means.  And only God understands the ultimate picture.
     We can only marvel at what we know.
     

     As February draws to a close, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that, at least in the U.S., February is Black History Month.  In truth, one finds it rather odd that we must set aside a month to celebrate a history of a people whose lineage is considerably longer than that of the more dominant race in the world today, that is, white people.  In fact, as Nell Irvin Painter points out in her 2011 The History of White People, it is the white skin color that, from a genetic standpoint, is the more "aberrant" of human skin colors.  Moreover, whether we believe that humanity began in southern Iraq vis a vis the Garden of Eden, the savannah and gorges of central and southern Africa, or some combination of the two, we must admit that our earliest ancestors were anything but lily white.
     Be this as it may, we do well to remember our black brethren and not just in the U.S.   Due to hegemonic behavior on the part of other races and ethnicities in the course of human history, the virtues of black culture have often been ignored, suppressed or,worse, abused and destroyed.  This has been at our peril.  We can only enjoy and appreciate humanity when we experience all of its manifestations.  And this experience should include not just literary or historical insight, but in physical encounter.  How wonderful it would be if we could realize that over and above us all is a God who loves all of us equally and wishes for all of us, again, equally, to become everything that he has created us to be on the world he has made for all us, and to, equally and together, experience.
     As I reflect on the lengthy journey I have made with the African Americans among us, from my days of civil rights activism in California to working in anti-poverty programs in East Texas to participating in political and religious events in Chicago, Washington, and beyond, I realize that I have far to go.  I'll always be white, I'll always be a part of a traditionally Western "elite."  Yet I also realize that, as the apostle Paul wrote many centuries ago, that there is, "neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).  Immense diversity yet enormously one.
     So did God make us:  differently, yet destined to be one.  We therefore celebrate the beauty of the black experience, this month, and every month to come:  it's all part of being one.

     "What has been is exceedingly remote and mysterious."  So says Ecclesiastes 7:24. Whatever else you think about the Hebrew Bible (otherwise known as the Old Testament), you may need to admit that, in this case, it is correct.  Sure, with the help of modern historical research and inquiry, we can learn a great deal about the past.  We can learn what people thought, what people did, and what people wanted to do--even if they lived thousands of years ago.
     What we cannot--and may never--understand, however, is what, in the big picture, the past means.  We cannot know why things have gone the way they have.  For some, this isn't a problem.  For the nineteenth century German historian and author of Force and Freedom, Jakob Burckhardt, history is nothing more than a continuing and meaningless series of events. Some things happen, other things do not. Either way, it doesn't matter. There is no greater meaning.
     For others, like Augustine, author of City of God, history is a highly meaningful enterprise, one which God infuses with purpose and point.  Everything means something, everything matters, and everybody is necessary.
     Of course it goes without saying that everything that happens is dependent on what happened before it.  In a way, it is inevitable.  Though Karl Marx, author, with Frederick Engels, of the Communist Manifesto, was an atheist, he believed strongly that history was leading toward something, that there was a greater purpose at hand.  For Marx and Engels, this was the classless society of Marxism.  For Augustine, it was the consummated kingdom of God.  In both cases, purpose remains, but for very different reasons and in very distinctive expressions.
     So who was right:  Burckhardt, Augustine, or Marx?  Is history really without any point, any point at all?  Or is it infused with purpose?  Although I think I've made my loyalties clear in this blog many times before, I'll leave you to decide.  Either way, Ecclesiastes' dictum holds true:  we cannot, from our present vantage point, know. Either way, we cannot know it all.
     What we can know, however, is that if we insist that we have purpose, we must also  insist that history does, too.  And if we say that this purpose does not come from a higher power, i.e., God, we are left to answer the same question as before:  how do we, if we hold that we are meaningful beings in an accidental universe, know?
     

     Unless you live in a part of the world in which the ambient temperature rarely varies, you have learned to be patient with the seasons.  You have learned that regardless of how you may dislike a particular time of year, it will go on as it must.  You'll not stop it.  You simply must live with it.
     As the northern climes of the planet move ever closer to spring and their southern counterparts to winter, I realize again, how critical patience is.  In a sound bite age driven by ever more rapid information dissemination and processing, we need to think about patience.  We need to look outside ourselves, we need to look beyond our immediate needs.  We need to take in the planet.  We must accede to bigger issues.
     When I contemplate the extraordinary order with which the earth's systems are endowed, and how much some of us struggle to change it, I think:  why?  If these systems were not in place, we would not be here.  If the world was entirely chaotic (and if this happened, it would not be a world as we like to think of one, anyway), we would be as absent as the passenger pigeon.  We need the order, we need the seasons.
     All we lack is patience.  Whether we believe in God or not, if we believe the universe required fourteen billion years to birth the world on which we live today, we understand that things do not happen quickly.  We understand that they will only happen as quickly as their patterns and constituents allow.  That's all they can do.
     That's all we can do, too.  We therefore humble ourselves before purposes of which we know not; we bow our minds and hearts to inevitabilities of which we do not know.  And in the end, we have a choice:  we can be patient with an unfathomable universe, or we can be patient with a knowable God.

     Who are the Funhogs?  The Funhogs are a group of men, now in their sixties and beyond who, many decades ago, spent their days roaming across the planet in search of adventure.  Some of their names may be familiar to you.  They include people like Yvon Chouinard, founder of the outdoor clothing manufacturer Patagonia; Doug Thompkins, founder of the outdoor equipment company The North Face (both Chouinard and Thompkins have also devoted much time and resources to preserving the wildlands of South America's Patagonia); and others who are not as well known:  Dick Dorworth, once a prominent skier, Chris Jones, and Lito Tejada-Flores.
     The Funhogs are perhaps most famous for their epic 1968 driving journey from California to the tip of the Americas, where they successfully summited the formidable Fitz Roy in, of course, Patagonia.  They reached the top on Christmas Day.
     1968 is a long time ago, yet the Funhogs still look back on that year as one of the highlights of their lives.  As Thompkins later wrote, "So I give thanks, as I look back, that fate played its mysterious hand guiding me along a wonderful path, in a life with never a single moment of regret.  If I could play it over, I would let it go just as it has, with all the minor bumps that came with it.  Just like those bumps along the last 900 miles from Bariloche to the Fitz Roy valley--sometimes a bit uncomfortable, but still very enjoyable all the way."
     Thompkins's words surely underscore the joy and marvel of life, whose twists and turns he attributes to fate and its mysterious hand.  Don't we all wonder why life goes the way it does?  Do not we all occasionally sit back and ask ourselves how it is that we ended up where we are today?
     Or maybe we do what the Funhogs did:  as long as we are here, we ought to go ahead and embrace everything we can.  After all, when it's over, it's over.  If death is a blank wall, well, the Funhogs have done great.  They've lived to the max.  If death is otherwise, however, we wonder, too, yet in a different way:  what are we then to do?
     The abyss between these positions is profoundly deep.  It is in fact unbridgeable.  It all comes to what we know and, significantly, what we believe about what we know.  So we therefore ask, if Jesus rose from the dead, and every evidence indicates he did, will we, too?  Everything, absolutely everything about us, our life, and our world, hinges on how we answer this question.
     By the way, sadly, Doug Thompkins recently died from hypothermia after a kayaking accident in his beloved Patagonia.  He was 72 years old.

     If you do not spend much time reading annals of Arctic and Antarctic exploration, you probably have not have heard about Henry Worsley.  One of the most well known cold weather explorers today, Worsley died while attempting to be the first person to make the first unaided crossing of the vast and desolate mass of ice that we call Antarctica.  A life long admirer of the storied Antarctic explorer Ernst Shackelton (whose adventures are chronicled in the book Endurance), Worsley was trying to do what Shackelton, for all his strength and courage, did not.  (Shackleton died at fifty, victim of a heart attack.)
     Perhaps the most tragic dimension of Worsley's death was that he was forced to halt his quest barely thirty miles from its end.  Citing extreme exhaustion, he made one of the most difficult decisions of his life:  he called for help.  Unfortunately, when doctors began examining him in a hospital to which he was airlifted in Chile, they discovered that he had developed bacterial peritonitis.  So advanced was the infection that at the point they could do nothing for him.  He died of advanced organ failure.  He was fifty-five.
     Yet Worsley died doing what he loved doing most:  exploring one of the least explored regions of the planet.  As one who has explored many parts of the Arctic (not the Antarctic), I can readily testify to the remarkable wonder and beauty of the polar regions. Stark and austere, yet marvelously and enticingly alive, they speak of the joy of mystery, solitude, and desolation, the sublimity of travel that takes us well out of our comfort zone. They show us another side, the side of existence that, as Ecclesiastes puts it, is about "mourning" and not "feasting."
     Not that we should not "feast" on life.  God wants us to enjoy his creation.  Yet by journeying into realms which demand challenge and deprivation, we come to know more fully what life's "feast" means.  We understand why we need mourning as much as we need feasting.  We reduce our existence to its most fundamental truth.  In the end, whether we feast or mourn, we walk, as Paul put it, "in a riddle," sojourners and inquirers in the vast cosmos of God.
     It's about life, our most precious gift.  Use it circumspectly, use it wisely.  It is, to use a very old adage, the only one we have.
     Consider your life as the fruit of God.

   
     “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

     So said American author and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau in 1845. Thoreau was poised to commence living, alone and apart, on Walden Pond in eastern Massachusetts.  Out of his solitary ruminations came one of the classics of American literature, On Walden Pond.  

     

     As we continue our journey through Lent, I think occasionally about Thoreau. Although he did not have much interest in conventional religion, he captured, in his writings, much of its essential posture towards earthly existence, particularly during Lent.  Lent reminds us to reduce life to its most fundamental parameters, its most seminal components.  It tells us to set aside worldly distraction and focus on the deeper meanings of life, the most profound sensibilities that inhabit our present existence.  As did Thoreau over one hundred years ago, Lent urges us to live in the world, yes, but live so as to ponder what the world really means, to grasp that from which we and it come.  For Thoreau, this was to immerse oneself in nature (which he often spelled with an upper case "N");  for those of us on our Lenten journey, it is to immerse oneself more fully in the God who made it.  As Thoreau strove to shear himself of the extraneous, so do we strive to separate ourselves from the temporary and, theologically speaking, profane.  We aim to view life through a larger lens.  We look to the greater possibility.

     For the greater possibility is what, for us as well as Thoreau, makes life worth living.  It is what gives existence its point.  Although Thoreau identified this possibility as Nature, I'll go him one step higher and call it that which created nature: God.

     Lent lets us know that we cannot conclude we are alone in the universe.  We who would frame our lives ascetically for Lent understand that we do so because we know that it opens our hearts to what is really and most there, the center of all being.

     By the way, if you can, read On Walden Pond.  It's a classic.

     As I blogged about liberators earlier this week, and rulers and the ruled yesterday, I was also thinking of some lands which are still looking for liberation today.  Their number is legion.  Some are in Asia, some the Middle East, some even in the Americas.  Beset by war, dictators, terrorism, and the like, these lands, and those who live in them, live lives of fear and trepidation, their hours punctuated by gunshot, kidnapping, rape, and disappearance.  Rarely do they feel safe, and rarely do they find relief:  the violence and angst are unremitting.
     We pray for these lands, we weep for those who inhabit them.  We hope for better days, we wish for improvement.  Occasionally, we watch dumbstruck as nations with the military capacity to effect some change stand by, not wishing, sometimes for good reason, sometimes not, to involve themselves in the conflict.  Unless the tremors of panic reach their shores, they seem to pretend that nothing is wrong.
     Geopolitics is of course an imprecise science, and emotions cannot always carry the day.  Yet we wonder:  did not Jesus say, quoting Isaiah (chapter 61), that he had come to free the oppressed and set the prisoners free?  Did not Mohammad advocate for the poor? Does not Judaism give primacy to good works?  God mourns over situations of pain and inequity more than we do.  It seems as if we ought to do something.
     We should understand that God is not on the side of wealthy and privileged but on that of the underresourced and exploited.  God looks after the marginalized and forgotten, the destitute and abandoned.  We therefore hold several things in balance.  We weigh God's power over times and epochs with his concern for the oppressed, and we reconcile our emotional and spiritual angst with our geopolitical realities.
     And we remember that if we, impelled by belief in the love of God, lead people to freedom--in every way--we help them find a freedom that is, as Jesus said so succinctly, "freedom indeed."
     Pray for the oppressed, pray for yourself, pray for God.  Pray that the world understands why God wants us free.

     About a year ago (December of 2014), I wrote about the rock climber Alex Honnold. Honnold has become famous for his remarkable and death defying climbs on massive rock walls throughout the world. He never uses a rope when he climbs; if he slips, he falls to his death.  Many climbers admire him.  They worry about him, too.
     Honnold is known for his ability to deal with fear.  He seems to have the capacity to work through any fear he experiences on the rock, to remain calm in every situation, to stay rational at every turn.  He is not stressed that he is climbing thousands of feet above the earth without a rope.
     Honnold does not believe in God.  In his Alone on the Wall, an account of his life and thoughts that he co-wrote with David Roberts, Honnold speaks candidly about his misgivings about religion and the divine.  He experiences a sense of awe, yes, but he attributes it to the beauty of nature, and nothing beyond it.
     Given his occupation, to some people that Honnold does not believe in God seems irrational. Why would he not, the argument goes:  he defies death constantly.  On the other hand, if we accept, as Honnold does, that we all one day will die then, God or not, does it make a difference?
     In a way, I suppose not.  God or not, one day, we all will die.  And nature's beauty is unspeakably entrancing.  Why not conclude that this world is all that is?
     Perhaps we can.  For me, however, whatever I do with my life and whenever I leave it, I would always be wondering.  Besides living with love, zest, and wonder, why am I really here?
     I need to know what I cannot, in myself, know.
     Be well, Alex.

     "It is He who changes the times and epochs; He removes kings and establishes kings; He gives wisdom to wise men and knowledge to men of understanding.  It is He who reveals the profound and hidden things; He knows what is in the darkness, and the light dwells with Him."

     So said the prophet Daniel in the sixth century B.C.  I thought much about these verses (Daniel 2:21-22) as I reflected on the unexpected passing of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia last week.  Some people see his demise as an opportunity; others see it as the precipice of destruction.  Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about what Scalia's death means for the nation and, perhaps, the world.

     Yet no one, if he is entirely honest with him (or her) self, can, at this point, really grasp the full implications of the event.  How do we know?  I'm loathe to make specific predictions or prognostications.  I'm rather more interested in how, in the big picture,w e view it.  If we believe in the sovereignty of God over creation and that he is working through all things to realize his purpose and vision, although we may find changes in governors or governing structures ominous or distasteful, we do well to grapple with them carefully.  Regardless of how we see them (and we have every right to question why they happen as they do), we must recognize that, in the end, purpose, divine purpose, persists. Somehow, some way, reason prevails, and somehow, some way, humanity will continue. Like every other nation to appear on the planet, America is a very small player in a massive, massive flow of space and time.  Kingdoms and empires rise, and kingdoms and empires fall; rulers and judges come, and rulers and judges go.  Yet God remains.

     And we rarely fathom the full scope of his intentions.  We of course should be ready to respond to political change.  But we also remember the words of Psalm 46, "Let go, be still, relax, and know that I am God."

     If you live in America, you may be aware that today is President's Day.  This is a day on which some Americans remember two people who are generally considered to be among America's finest chief executives, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.  Washington of course is viewed as the father of the United States, the one whose leadership carried the fledgling nation through its revolt against Great Britain and oversaw the process by which the former colonials developed a constitution with which to govern their newly minted land.  Lincoln, on the other hand is remembered as the one who held the Union together during the difficult days of the Civil War and who issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed America's slaves.
     Rightly do Americans remember Washington and Lincoln; their actions have exercised profound effects on the country.  On this day, however, as I contemplate their lives, I also want to honor liberators in other nations, people who devoted their lives to setting their own countries free from foreign oppression.  I think about Simon Bolivar, the so-called George Washington of South America, whose energetic leadership and military prowess enabled many Latin Americans to find the liberty which they enjoy today.  Inspired by Bolivar, countless peoples across that southern continent rose up to wrest control of their lives from their Spanish overlords.  In a sign of the region's emergence into the company of the nations, we note that Brazil will host the 2016 Olympics.
     I also think about Mahatma Gandhi, the wise and forgiving Hindu of India who, by implementing his notion of satygraha (grasping the truth) in his vast country, led his people to evict the mighty and exploitative British Empire from India in a nearly non-violent way.  Today, although it is by no means immune from problems, India is rapidly taking its place as one of the largest economic engines on the planet.
     In addition, I remember Nelson Mandela of South Africa.  Imprisoned for twenty-seven years for crimes which to this day no one can prove, absolutely, he committed, Mandela, evinced nothing but forgiveness and magnanimity upon being released.  He continued in this vein as he led his nation to break the back of apartheid, the horrific system of racial segregation sustained by, regrettably, their British rulers.  Although South Africa continues to struggle with the vestiges of its past, its people are now free to do so on their own.  The West must stand by.
     President's Day reminds us that every human being deserves freedom.  God did not make people to be enslaved and imprisoned unjustly.  He made them to discover themselves and to flourish.  God desires that everyone find his or her capacities and life vision.  He wishes for all of his creation to be who they most ought to be.
     God is a God of freedom whose intention is to set us all free.  Be it moral, physical, or emotional, God wants us to be free.  He wants us to be free to pursue the absolutely greatest thing:  his love, in Jesus Christ, for us.

     It's an age old question:  how do we delineate reason and faith?  For some, the answer is clear:  we do not.  Faith has no place in today's world.  For others, the response is that, yes, we need reason to make sense of the world, but we cannot make full sense of it without faith.  We will inevitably encounter questions we cannot answer.
     Ah, the first group will reply, this doesn't mean that we must necessarily turn to God to fill in the gaps.
     Maybe not.  Yet in the life and work of Rabbi Eugene B. Borowitz, a prominent Jewish teacher who died recently at the age of 91, we see that perhaps we have no other option if we wish to fully come to grips with who we are.
     Borowitz made his mark by insisting that we must balance reason with a commitment to the covenant if we hope to understand ourselves, the world, and God.  We know what reason is; what's the covenant?  It is the understanding of every Jew that she is in a unique relationship with God.  Out of all the peoples of the world, God is unreservedly loyal to the Jews and, in the best of all possible worlds, Jews are totally loyal to him.
     Without getting into a contentious debate about what this means for the geopolitics of the modern Middle East, we can nonetheless realize that the fact of a covenant affirms several critical dimensions of reason's limits.  If we insist that we must never exercise faith to understand our world, it seems that we are saying that, in our reason and in our reason alone, we can understand what we now cannot.  All it takes is further research and time.
     Maybe so.  But if we are totally honest with ourselves, we must admit that there are things that science will never tell us.  Foremost of these is the query:  why are we here? Why us?  What's the point?
     Perhaps we do not understand or accept all the ramifications of the covenant, but we can certainly comprehend that without admitting that we cannot possibly know it all--and why this is--we cannot assert that we can fully explain the life, here and there, we have now.
     As one of my Jewish rabbi friends has often told me, "Reason ponders the small questions after faith settles the larger ones.  Reason tells us how to get there after faith tells us where to go."
     Rest well, Rabbi Borowitz.

     Although we are well into February, I take time today to write about an event that is commemorated in January:  the Epiphany.  Perhaps you know the story.  Around the time of Jesus' birth, a group of magi ("people of insight") journeyed from the highlands of Persia (modern Iran) to Palestine (Israel).  Trekking, likely with camels, over the imposing Zagros Mountains, then following multiple ancient trade routes through the deserts of what is today Syria and Arabia, they pursued their objective steadfastly.  They sought to see the God-child whom they believed had been born.
     How did these men, living as they did hundreds of miles from Palestine, know?  And why did they wish to seek?
     We can assume that the magi were followers of Zoroaster, the founder of Zoroastrianism, a religion highly popular in Persia at the time.  We can also assume that they were familiar with the contents of the Jewish scriptures, the Torah, the histories, the prophets, and the writings.  In the Hellenistic world into which Jesus was born, culture diffused readily:  everyone knew each other's legends and stories.  Moreover, like Judaism, Zoroastrianism talks of a savior, a being named Saoshyant who, like Messiah, was predicted to one day come into the world.
     Not all of us believe we need a savior.  Not all of us assent to a need for the divine or God.  Not everyone thinks she must obey a creator.  The magis, however, did.  They believed that, if God is there, if God had made his dwelling on the planet, they needed to experience it.  They believed that they must see God on earth to find their deepest meaning.
     And why not?  If we cannot see God in our reality, why should we suppose that he exists?  The magi understood that although revelation, that is, communication from God, is central to human existence, it is only genuinely life changing when it confronts us face to face.
     Going into Lent, it's a good question:  what do we really believe?

     Today is Ash Wednesday:  the first day of Lent.  Ash Wednesday is a call to humility.  It is a call to recognize that we are, indeed, ultimately no more than collections of chemicals which, one day, will be dust.  Ash Wednesday is a sign to all of us that life is not so much about getting what we want, but about learning from this life what we have been given.  In contrast to the vapid frivolity of the global culture of celebrity, Ash Wednesday reminds us that we cannot escape our mortality.

     Even if you do not celebrate Ash Wednesday, savor what it means.  Savor the  i

t means.  

goodness of humility, taste the joy of circumspection.  Bask in repentance and forgiveness, human and divine, and revel in resolving to admit to your place, to let go, and move on.  Delight in the journey, the journey, as the prophet MIcah puts it, to "walk circumspectly with your  God."  
     And delight in Lent's end:  the remembrance and celebration of the reality of resurrection.
     God will yet win.
     As I did last year, I offer this prayer by Jan Richardson:

     Will you meet us
     in the ashes

     will you meet us
     in the ache
     and show your face
     within our sorrow
     and offer us
     your word of grace.

     That you are life
     within the dying
     that you abide
     within the dust
     that you are what
     survives the burning
     that you arise
     to make us new.

     And in our aching
     you are breathing
     and in our weeping
     you are here
     within the hands
     that bear your blessing
     enfolding us
     within your love.

     Traveling as I was in the days immediately following Christmas, I missed remembering Kwanzaa.  What's Kwanzaa?  It is a week long celebration of the Africana in African-American culture, particularly its focus on the harvest.  Although Kwanzaa ended on January 1, as we in the Northern Hemisphere move ever more closely to spring, we may like to ponder the notion of harvest.  We may wish to remind ourselves that despite the apparent somnolence of the land, soon, sooner than we think, its fecundity will show itself once more.
     In ancient cultures, the harvest was a time of great celebration:  once again, the land had yielded its bounty for humankind.  In the material appurtenances with which we wrap ourselves and our lives, we usually miss the harvest.  Thanks to modern supermarkets, we can obtain almost any type of food any time of the year.  We rarely need to wait for the "harvest."
     As a result, we often miss the point.  We miss the fact of the land's nearly inexhaustible bounty, we miss the marvel of a world that continually provides for us.  We miss that from which we have come.
     As I look back at Kwanzaa, I think about the harvest.  I think about the wonder of the world, the fertility of the planet.  Though I am well aware that certain parts of the globe are not as productive as they once were, I nonetheless believe that, given proper thought and ingenuity, the world will continue to speak to us, to continue to provide for its inhabitants, human and other creatures alike.
     We need only remember who we are and why we are here:  wayfarers on a vast, vast sea, a sea we could not imagine nor make, an ocean which we are obligated to preserve for the generations which will follow us.  We are humbled.  We are humbled before the inexhaustibility of a world created by an inexhaustible God.
     Also, as you may know, today is Shrove Tuesday.  Shrove Tuesday is the day, commemorated by the Christian church (and festival goers at Mardi Gras) as the final day of bounty before Ash Wednesday and Lent (about which I will say more tomorrow).  It's a good day to contemplate the remarkable fact of our existence.
     And God.
     

     Unless you've been living in a cave, you are likely aware that, even if you cared nothing about it, the 50th Super Bowl took place yesterday.  Set in sunny and picturesque Santa Clara, California, the game and its attendant pageantry, from a commercial standpoint, certainly lived up to its billing.  Lady Gaga did not disappoint in her rendition of America's national anthem, and Coldplay, Bruno Mars, and Beyonce rocked the stadium in their various and unique ways.  With all this accompaniment, the game, though I didn't watch it all the way through, seemed almost ancillary.
     To the avid football fan, however, it was not.  The NFL's continued stonewalling of the growing evidence of CTE in professional football players notwithstanding, the game thrilled many.
     As I thought about the day, although I do not disparage anyone who loves football and genuinely enjoyed watching the game and all the entertainment it brings, I could not help but consider its context.  Here we are, fat and happy in the affluent West, focusing our time and money watching a spectacle about which too many of our brethren in the developing world could care less.  They are more concerned with where they will find their next meal.  Or where they will spend the night.
     Disparity runs rampant on the planet.  It always has and it always will.  But this does not obviate its tragedy.
     What can we do?  I draw your attention to an observation of Paul in his second letter to the church at Corinth that, "And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work."
     In other words, although we can certainly enjoy, appreciate, and be thankful for what we have, we must also realize that, when we give generously from it, God will ensure that we will always have enough.  We will meet our needs.
     And maybe we will have what we want.

     Over the last few months, as you may recall, I have shared about my aunt Jeanne.  I have talked about her death, I have talked about her memorial service, and I have talked about her legacy.  I have striven to remind myself of the power of her memory still in me.
     One of the objects I retrieved from Jeanne's apartment is a mug on which appears a painting by French artist Paul Gaugin.  Jeanne loved Gaugin, and traveled often to the Pacific islands on which he did his famous paintings of the natives.  Whenever I use the mug, I of course think of her.

     I also think about Gaugin.  Although he came from a very different philosophical and artistic viewpoint than Raphael, whom I mentioned yesterday, he nonetheless shows us human wonder.  A lover of the aesthetic, a seeker of the beautiful, Gaugin opened us to another world:  we saw the Pacific as we had not seen it before.  There is more to these distant islands than palm trees and pure white sand.  On them live people, people with real lives, people with genuine longing and need.  People who look for hope, people who look for meaning.
     While the two women pictured in this painting are long gone from this planet, I see them as such wondrous pictures of who we are.  Made to live, made to wonder; made to enjoy the earth.
     We are thankful for the fact of existence, the fact of a meaningful existence, the fact of a meaningful existence in a meaningful universe.  There is point, there is meaning.  We see it in ourselves, we see in others, we see it in human creativity and, most significantly, we see it in the fact of God.
     Enjoy who you are.

     Looking through a book about Renaissance art a few weeks ago, I came upon Raphael's famous work, "School of Athens."  Featuring the finest minds of antiquity--Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Ptolemy, and more--this painting reminds us of the absolute wonder of the human mind and imagination. If we bear in mind that Raphael's stylistic intentions centered on fusing classical style with Christian thought, we see that he is telling us that the deepest and most glorious thought is that which drinks, drinks deeply, of the best of humankind and the best of God.  God creates us, we create in turn.  God births us, we birth in turn:  we live empowered by the continuous presence of divine purpose in the cosmos.  Though we create with our gifts, and though we envision with our human ken, we do so because, as Raphael rightly understood, over and above it all resides a power beyond knowing, a power that gives point to the profoundest of human longing. Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Ptolemy, and many others walk in the aura of an enduring divine creation.  We thank them for their minds, we thank them for their vision.  And we thank God, in all of his expressions, incarnations, and manifestations, for an existence with meaning.

          I recently took in an exhibit of Hindu art at the Art Institute of Chicago.  It's a highly diverse sampling of how Hindus have sought to represent their deities and their relationships with them.  I could not help but be reminded of the art I observed in an Hindu temple which I visited a number of months ago, the many strikingly beautiful statues and icons that the devout have built to worship their gods.  The craftsmanship is joyous and remarkable.
     Of course the most skeptical of us may well ask, how do the Hindus know they are even talking to a real person?  In fact, how does anyone know she is really communicating with God.
     These are complicated questions.  Even if we assert, correctly, from my standpoint, on the basis of ample historical and textual evidence, that the appearance of Jesus confirms, definitively, the presence of God, we remain in mystery.  We remain amazed at the mystery of how, the world over, people, whether Hindu, Muslim, indigenous native, Jew, or any other, continue to seek out an experience of the divine.  It says much about us and our human condition.  It allows to be, God's image and its conditioning of us notwithstanding, in awe.  We are awed because regardless of what we may say, we all need ethereal sublimity and beauty, we all need personal wholeness and, I dare say, we all need to take hold of something, something that we sense or intuit that explains why we are here.
     And Krishna, Jesus, Allah, or not, we must recognize that we, finite beings only unto ourselves, will never find the full answer in ourselves.  How could we think otherwise?
     In short, why do we keep seeking that which we cannot see?

     The Secrets of Roan Inish, an old movie which I chanced to see recently, tells a delightful tale of whimsy and fancy.  Rooted in ancient Irish and Welsh mythology, it is the story of a man who meets and marries a selkie.  What's a selkie?  A selkie is a seal, a female seal, who becomes a human being.  However, even though a selkie voluntarily rises out of the water to enter the human experience, she still longs for her original self. If she comes upon her "skin," she immediately dons it and returns to the sea.  She's gone.
     That's what happened to this young man.  One day, as he was out at sea, pursuing his family's traditional fishing trade, his children, of whom he had many, came to their mother as they sit together on the beach, the beach of the island Roan Inish.  "Mother," they say, "why is there a brown jacket stuffed under the roof?"
     The mother, the selkie, realized immediately that this jacket was actually her shed skin.  As all selkies do, she rushed to the house, donned her skin, and returned to the sea. Her husband came home to his wife gone.
     Woven into this plot was another one.  It is the story of a baby who was inadvertently set adrift on the sea and, as legend would have it, drifted to the island, the island of Roan Inish.  Many years later, the descendants of the young man return to Roan Inish and, after some intrigue, find the baby, now a young boy.  They wrap him up and bring him home.
     As they do, we see the seals, the seals out of whom the selkie had come, the seals with whom the boy had grown up, approaching the shore.  In their movements, they seem to say to the boy, "Go with them.  Leave us.  You have found your real home."
     What's my point?  In the selkie becoming human, and in the seals telling the boy to return to his human home, we see a reflection of mystery, the mystery of God, the mystery of humankind.  We see that we humans, and God, drift about our corporate earthly experience, meeting each other, leaving each other, and meeting each other again.  We go away, we come home.  We find, we lose.  We become each other (the incarnation), we become alone (the cross).  We talk, we are silent.
     We share the universe.  And neither of us is alone.

     Not as well known as Mozart and writing in a different era of European idea and thought, Franz Schubert was nonetheless one of the most remarkable musicians in Western history.  Immensely productive and profoundly creative despite passing away, tragically, at the tender age of 31, Schubert is known for writing some of the most ethereal and moving melodies of all time.  Listening to his music, one feels carried away, transported to another realm, lifted above what is earthly and material.  It's an intimation of transcendence.        Yesterday, January 31, was Schubert's birthday.

     Schubert's music gives us pause.  If music only told us what we already know, we probably wouldn't get as much out of it as we do.  We do not need to be reminded of what is normal.  We want to think about what is beyond normal, what breaks the normal down, what splits the obvious apart.  We want to know what we, at the moment, cannot.
     Music offers windows, and music opens doors.  And we do not see these windows and doors until we have stepped out of what we know.  But isn't this how we ought to live?  Descending into the darkest recesses of his soul, Schubert talks to us about the deepest mysteries of existence, how we walk in a wisp, a gossamer veil stretched out between us and the other side of time.  He romanced eternity.
     As do we all.  Every day is a balance, an edge perched on the borders of presence and absence, a thin line of reality and ultimate destiny.
     Thanks, Franz Schubert, even if you didn't intend to do so, for showing us that life is more than life itself.