Easter is a call to light.  As we emerge from the nothingness of Good Friday, the day on which darkness overwhelmed even the creator himself, we come to Easter Sunday, the day on which the creator overwhelmed even light itself.  In the sunrise of Easter, we see light as it was most meant to be:  the total and absolute witness of God's power over and love for what he made.

"Resurrection" by El Greco

     In the absolute darkness and nothingness of Jesus' death, the Son of God abandoned by his Father, the greatest of all light arose.  It is a light that eclipses and encompasses all others, a light that changed history, bent space, and permanently altered all our notions of meaning and time.  It is the resurrection.
     The resurrection is the greatest of light because it brought, from the fiercest and vilest nothingness of all deaths, a life that will never end.  It's nonsensical, its unbelievable, it's unfathomable, but it is entirely true.
The resurrection tells us that life has meaning, meaning that exceeds our greatest imagination.  It tells us that though we die, we will live again, forever.
     How can life ever be the same?
     
     By the way, I'll be traveling for the next week and will not be posting for a bit.  Enjoy your week--and thanks for reading!
     
     

     "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  Possibly the most depressing words ever spoken, they come from Psalm 22 in the Hebrew Bible.  Betrayed by one of his disciples, condemned by a farcical trial, scourged until flesh hung like ribbons from his back, and nailed to a wooden cross, Jesus felt totally alone and abandoned, even by God.
     In Jesus' hour of deepest need, God, his father, the father who had loved him, as Jesus had earlier put it (John 17), "before the foundations of the world," rejected Jesus, his only son.  He turned his face away from him, unwilling and unable to look upon him as he endured God's penalty of hell for sin.  It's an unbearable picture:  total and absolute isolation and unremitting depths of darkness and despair.  Jesus was separated from life itself.
     If we read the rest of Psalm 22, however, we see that after those words of horrific angst, the writer says to God, "But you are holy and enthroned on the praises of Israel." God had to abandon Jesus in order to embrace us.  God to turn his eyes away from his son so as to turn his eyes toward us.  God is unspeakably good, so good that he was willing to endure the totality of all that is not good in order to bring us into the totality of all that is.
     Though we often suffer terribly in this earthly existence, God is good.  His love endures.  And it pervades all things, even the utter and abject loneliness of his only son. If God's love is not present, pain and despair have no real conqueror.  And the universe, as Jean Paul Sartre (who was, ironically, an avowed atheist) pointed out long ago, is darker and lonelier than we can possibly imagine.

     Is the resurrection, as some of my atheist friends have told me, parochial?  Is it really so small and insignificant that it affects only a very small corner of an infinitely large universe?  Is one itinerant Jewish preacher's return from death really that important?
     Obviously, the resurrection is only important if we are personal beings.  Only personal beings rise from the dead; impersonal things were never alive.  If we look at the universe as the product of impersonal forces, well, we will indeed consider the resurrection to be irrelevant.  Why should a life in an accidental universe continue after it is over?  Deciding that the universe is the result of personal intelligence and intention, however, changes the equation, profoundly.  It means that the fabric of the cosmos carries a potential, a potential that would not be there otherwise, the potential to experience, somehow, some way, eternity.
     In this light, the resurrection becomes anything but parochial.  Indeed, it comprises the sum of existence.  The resurrection means that life is more than itself, that life as we know and love it is not all there is to experience.  There is more to life than meets the eye.  Or the ear.  Or the heart.  The resurrection means that this present is only the beginning of a far greater present still, a present that will never end.
     As Jesus told Martha in John 11, "He who believes in me will live even if he dies.  And he who believes in me will never die."
     Easter reminds us that only in a meaningful universe is there life again.

     As I thought, yesterday afternoon, about my day, I realized, to my chagrin, I had failed to acknowledge the birthday of a very important person:  Johannes Sebastian Bach.  Wrapped in the advent of the meteorological spring, Bach's birthday comes replete with the sounds of singing birds, greening forests, and deeper skies.  And his music fits the season.  Fresh, bright, and resonant with joy, Bach's music echoes the wonder of the newly born creation.
     And regardless of how one sees the universe's origins (though the frequent reader no doubt knows my loyalties in this regard), we can all, I think, enjoy the coming of spring.  We can also all see ourselves as creatures who, like Bach, have potential, actors and thespians (as Shakespeare said in As You Like It, "All the world is a stage"), people who can create and enjoy every day.
    We thank Bach for what he has shown us about spring.  We also thank Bach for giving us a glimpse of the unfolding mystery, and the mystery behind it, of this vast, vast--and loved--universe in which we revel.
     So did Bach write on every piece of music he composed, "Soli Deo Gloria" (All Glory to God Alone).  Bach knew from whence all things come.

     If you have read any of the biblical narratives about the trial and death of Jesus, you are likely familiar with the pericope (story) of the thief on the cross.  As Luke tells it, although judging from the three other accounts, both thieves were hurling insults at Jesus in the initial moments the three of them were enduring the agony of crucifixion, one of them eventually came to saw it differently.
     "This man," he tells the other thief, "has done nothing wrong.  He is suffering unjustly.  But we are not.  We deserve our punishment."
     Turning to Jesus, this thief then says, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom."
     "Today," Jesus replies, "you shall be with me in Paradise."
     


     It's a glorious promise.  The thief's present pain will this day, this very day, be totally vanquished by the wonder of Paradise.  He can look forward to a profoundly marvelous future.  The word translated as "paradise" is a loan word from Persian, and means "garden," suggesting a place of unalloyed and endless bliss.
     Though the thief's destination is central to this passage, I want to think more about his faith.  He knew about Jesus, he knew about Jesus' deeds.  He knew that Jesus had told his audiences that he was bringing a kingdom to earth.  It was not until the thief hung on the cross, however, that he came to realize, fully, the nature of this kingdom.  He saw that Jesus' promised kingdom is not one of material gain, but one of spirit and soul.  He knew that he would therefore need to trust in what he could not see in order to grasp what he knew he most needed:  forgiveness and new life.  He knew he needed internal change.
     And that, as we move toward Good Friday, is the point.  We trust in Jesus whom we cannot see because we know that in our deepest hearts, tangled as they are in the vexations of humanness and sin, we need more than ourselves to be eternally whole.

     "Better the miscarriage than a person who lives and dies without enjoying his life."  So observes one of my favorite biblical authors, the writer of Ecclesiastes.  Having shared this verse, I add that, as one whose wife suffered a miscarriage many years ago, I do not in any way intend to speak cavalierly of a miscarriage.  It's a devastating event. Moreover, as this verse makes clear, Unlike all of us, the miscarriage will never see the light of day. Its (his or her) life will never begin.
     Ecclesiastes' larger point, however, is that if a person does not enjoy his/her life, this person may as well not have lived.  Although this may seem extreme--why cannot someone be free to live a thoroughly disappointing life?--it is making an important assertion about existence. We are made to enjoy life.  We were created to enjoy being alive.  Sure, life can be very difficult and frustrating, and yes, life can be full of disappointment and grief, and yes, we may occasionally wonder why, given the misfortunes that befall them, some people ever came into the world, but existence remains a thoroughly remarkable experience.  Who would have thought of sentience? Who would have dreamed of reality?
     The easy answer is of course to say, well, these are of God.  Though I do not dispute this, it begs a much larger question:  why is there anything at all?
     For this, I suggest we turn to a person whose centuries ago entry into Jerusalem many of us celebrate this upcoming Sunday, that is, Jesus of Nazareth.  Regardless of who we you think Jesus was/is, in dying, then rising, Jesus affirmed the indisputable worth of being and beingness.  It was worth living to live again.  While we can argue over the fact of the resurrection, we cannot ignore the far deeper issue it presents to us.  That is, we can live for today and today only, or we can accept that this life only has ultimate worth if it exists in something beyond itself.

     Occasionally, for enrichment and a different shape of theological communion, I attend the Unitarian church in my community.  What's Unitarianism?  Originally from Eastern Europe, Unitarianism declares, among other things, the essential worth of every human being, receptivity to all religious points of view, and the necessity of care and human community.  Although its theology seems open ended to many, it on the other hand has often been a bulwark against religious intolerance in the West.  All of us, Unitarianism says, are on a journey toward meaning, and far be it from anyone, other than for reasons of fundamental human dignity, to criticize the sincere spiritual seeker.  We are all different.
     On the particular Sunday I attended this church, its senior high school students presented the service.  In addition to leading us in the ceremony and ritual of a regular service, a few of them spent time at the pulpit sharing the current state of their spiritual convictions.  While some denied God's existence forthrightly, even stating that the search for truth and meaning "sucked," others indicated that they remained open to religious belief, principally, and perhaps predictably, given their geographic place, that of Christianity.  Raised to believe in the worth of every human being, they found great merit in Christianity's espousal of the same.  In reading the Bible, they found ample evidence that all people are equal and deserving of fairness and equity in all things of life.
     As a Christian, I of course found this heartening.  However, this was not necessarily because of their interest in Christianity, though I cannot deny this pleased me.  It was rather that these teenagers' openness to religious belief, Christianity or not, indicates that, at our core, we need meaning.  Moreover, although we can say that the quest for meaning "sucks," if we were not creatures of meaning, we could not say even this.
     Whether we like it or not, it seems that we are "captives" of a meaningful universe. Yet if we are solely material, individual arbiters of value in a teleology of our own making, how can this be?

     If you lived through the Sixties, Seventies, or Eighties, you may be familiar with Madalyn Murray O'Hair.  One of America's most outspoken atheists in her day, O'Hair made international headlines in 1963 when she successfully challenged the law allowing officially sanctioned Bible reading in public schools.  In the wake of the Supreme Court's rejection of this law, O'Hair became known, as Time Magazine put it, the "most hated woman in America."
     Unfortunately, in 1995, O'Hair met an ugly end when she, along with a son and granddaughter, were kidnapped and brutally murdered by a convicted felon who had at one time worked for her organization, American Atheists.  It was a shocking demise to a shock inducing career.  Regrettably, the least charitable people of faith among us labeled it the revenge of God.

    

  
     But there's more to the story.  O'Hair's other son became a Christian in 1980, and subsequently directed his life in a direction precisely opposite that of his mother.  She promptly disowned him.  More recently, however, O'Hair's diaries were auctioned for study.  Those privileged to read them were particularly struck by one phrase they found. It was, "All I want is for someone to love me."
     This should make all of us weep.  For all her metaphysical (or lack thereof!) bravado, in her deepest heart, O'Hair simply wanted to be loved.  Beneath it all, she longed to feel the love of another human being.  Even if O'Hair had no use for the love of God, she nonetheless desired love.
     As do we all.  I wonder, however, whether we ever think to ask ourselves why.  In a cold and impersonal universe, a wholly naturalistic cosmos, one that, to quote Bertrand Russell, is built on "the scaffolding of despair," how do we know what love is?  If we begin with meaninglessness and caprice, we likely will not end with meaning and order.
     But we insist we do.  So why do we want to be loved?  Perhaps it is because in our heart of hearts, all theological explanation set aside, we want to think, indeed, we must think, that we are supposed to be here.
     If so, why?

     What's leisure?  As most historians know, the modern idea of leisure surfaced during the Industrial Revolution in nineteenth century Europe.  Once Europeans smoothed out most of the rough and painful edges of the urbanization and capitalism then spreading through their land, they realized that, to their suprise, they had time to do things besides work.  Now that many of them worked not fourteen but "only" eight or nine hours per day, and that only five or six days out of the week, they had the means, and the liberty to pursue activities directly pleasing to them.  Out of this, the modern notion of leisure was born.
     As people who have studied non-Western cultures at length note, however, the West had merely come to realize what these cultures had noticed all along.  Ironically, it is the least industrialized cultures whose people have the most leisure time.  Although the people of the West (and the developing nations as well) have vastly more material means than their non-Western brethren, they in fact have less time in which to enjoy them. Such contrast makes one wonder whether humanity has really progressed at all.
     Many centuries ago, Aristotle pointed out that, ideally, leisure is not so much an activity as it is a state of mind.  As the Greek philosopher saw it, in leisure, people take time to reflect and meditate upon the meaning of life.  Although they may engage in activities, they view these activities as ancillary to the larger goal of deepening one's understanding of what life is.  The ultimate pursuit is a metaphysical one:  the grappling with the point of existence.
     So do non-Westerners "do" leisure better than Westerners?  Subjectively, it is difficult to say.  Objectively, however, perhaps they do.  We do anything best when we do it as a way to achieve more than mere happiness.  We do best when we frame anything we do with a vision of gaining richer insight into what really matters.
     Sometimes money and material abundance mask the enduring metaphysical abundance from which they both ultimately come.

    "Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit," the apostle Paul writes in the second chapter of his letter to the Christian church at Philippi, "but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves."  Whether we are religious or spiritual or not, we can take these words as emblematic of a considered and worthy life.  When Mother Theresa came to Stockholm to receive her Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, she wore the same garb that she had been wearing for decades, the simple vestments of her Catholic order.  While those who gave her the prize wore their evening's finest for the ceremony, held in an opulent hall once used by Europe's highest royalty, all of this, it seemed, did not matter to Mother Theresa.  She had spent her life living out Paul's encouragement to his flock so many centuries ago, to give up personal ambitions for the good of others.  She had given her life for her fellow human beings.
     As we approach Lent's end, we should think often of humility.  It rarely comes naturally to anyone.
     Perhaps that's the point.  Sure, there are perverse and unnatural behaviors in which we ought not to engage, but humility is one of those "unnatural behaviors" in which we should engage.  It breaks boundaries, it undermines norms.  It changes the world. Looking out for others lets us know that in the biggest of all pictures, what we do for others is far more important than what we do for ourselves.
     Of course.  Just ask Jesus.
     Arrogance will not move anyone closer to God.  

     Is spirituality an emergent property?  If an emergent property is dependent upon the joint interactions of existing physiological systems, then, yes, spirituality, like consciousness, is an emergent property.  It is the inevitable product of human complexity. Put another way, complexity breeds complexity
     If this is true, then we must ask another question.  How did the initial simplicity of human systems become a complexity?  Moreover, why did spirituality emerge and not something else?
     It's too easy, of course, to say that it's the work of God, and that, as some would suggest, this is the way God chose to create humans as spiritual beings.  This doesn't really answer the question.  Better to ask about the nature of the forces previously resident in the brain and why they birthed this type of complexity.  Better to wonder why the human brain produced, as it appears to have done for consciousness, spirituality. What was it "thinking"?
     And this takes us into a much larger question.  Why did a material and impersonal brain ever come to consider or generate something exactly its opposite, a personal and immaterial experience?
     Sure, we material beings all have immaterial experiences.  We all birth complexity. But the question remains:  why?  At this point, it's difficult to explain this "why" without assenting to a beginning, however it happened, that is rooted in a personal God. Otherwise, we will keep going further and further back into impersonal materiality until we reach, well, impersonal materiality.  And we're back to square one.
     If spirituality, broadly speaking, is inevitable, and it definitely appears to be, it seems we must admit to the originating fact of its presence.  The rest is up to our physiology.
     Speaking of emergence, if you live in a colder climate, I trust you're enjoying the onset of spring!

     "I don't want to be remembered," says Yuri Orlov, played by Nicholas Cage in the movie Lord of War.  A movie I stumbled upon recently, Lord of War tells the story of real life international (and illegal) arms trader Yuri Orlov (who went by a range of aliases) and the immense web of armament exchange he built around the planet.  It's a cold tale, really, the story of a person who profited from warfare, any war, regardless of its motive or place on the political spectrum.  Money is all.
     If money is all, Orlov was entirely right in his sentiments.  Once he's gone, his money is, too.  His wealth will go to someone else.  Why should anyone remember him?  Why should Orlov want anyone to remember him?
     It's a heartless view of reality.  Yet, broadly speaking, one day, none of us will be remembered.  One day, when the earth draws to its close and whatever is still on it fades away into the darkness, no one will be there to remember anything.  Everything will be gone, forever.
     And there will be no one to judge, either.  Whether or Orlov's occupation was morally right will not matter:  who will decide?
     That's why, some say, we need a God.  Perhaps.  But it seems we need a God even more to ensure that, in an impersonal and empty universe, morality exists, that ensure that life and emotion and imagination have meaning.
     We fool ourselves if we suppose that, in ourselves, we know we have such things.  How do we, accidental as the next moment, really know?

     Have you read Vegetarian by South Korean writer Han Kang?  One of several highly unusual books Kang has published, Vegetarian, although some of its imagery may strike one as dark and macabre, is worth reading.  It tells the story of a woman, a woman who to this point had been living a rather ordinary life, doing what most married South Korean women do, when she had a dream.  This was no run of the mill dream.  It was a nightmare.  Though I will not detail its bloody imagery here, what she dreamed so moved her that, upon waking, this woman resolved to forswear eating any and all meat. Forevermore, she would be a vegetarian.
     As time went on, the woman clung fiercely to her intention.  Even at the cost of not eating, she steadfastly refused to eat meat.  She began to lose weight, and was soon barely a stick of a human being.  But she would not stop.  Frustrated and crestfallen, her husband did not know what to do.  He could not understand his wife's obstinacy. Eventually, he had an affair and the marriage fell irretrievably apart.
     So what's the point?  Though Kang weaves many motifs through the novel, she seems to keep returning to one:  we rarely do not understand ourselves or each other in full.  Did this woman grasp the implications of everything she was doing?  Did her husband comprehend the full extent of his--and her--actions?  Did either of them understand the other in the first place?
     Toward the end of the story, we read some words a friend of the woman posed to her. "You see," she said, "it was just a dream.  We have to wake up sometime."
     Maybe she did.  Maybe we're all in a dream.  However, it's unlikely:  we live in a real world.  Yet how we respond to this world is another story.  If reality is true, which it is, and if we are more than materiality, which we are, then however many dreams we have and however they impact us, they will do so in people who are fundamentally spiritual beings.
     And although spirituality can seem like a dream, however odd it may appear to be, it is not.  It's not bloody, it's not reactive.  It's the most logical way to frame existence.
     As Kang points out, as we rarely understand, apart from doubt and faith, everything about ourselves and each other, so we rarely understand, apart from doubt and faith, God.
     In this is the greatest mystery--and truth--of all.

     In her newest book, The Witches:  Salem, 1692, her account of the infamous Salem witchcraft trials in later seventeenth century New England, author Stacy Shiff, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for biography, makes this observation about the trials.  It was a time, she writes, "When unanswerable questions encountered unquestionable answers."
     It's a deft phrase, one that in fact captures the essence of the attitudes of many toward religion and religious dogma.  Although we all encounter unanswerable questions in the course of existence, we recoil at some of the "unquestionable" answers people propose to address them.  To pose an unquestionable answer is to say that this particular answer is beyond refutation and discussion, and that whomever voices it is sure, sure beyond any doubt, that her answer is totally adequate to respond to the question.  It is to say that, in herself, this person is the ultimate authority.
     And this, many would say, is what religion does routinely.  Countless people of faith insist that because they have a particular (and often peculiar) insight into the divine, they are correct in any assertions they make about life's mysteries.  Perhaps they do.  But how do they know?  How do they, in themselves, know that they have the truth, that they possess an answer that is beyond questioning?
     Well, many say, we have a sacred text inspired by God.  This record is fool proof.  It cannot be disputed.  And it is this text on which we base our answers.
     Fair enough.  But how do you know this?
     Here is where we confront our dilemma most acutely.  Although we can amass considerable evidence for the historicity of say, the Bible, we will still not resolve every "unanswerable" question about existence.  Likewise, while we may, on the basis of this evidence, present "unquestionable" answers about existence, we must realize that, in a sense, we remain agnostic.  We understand there are unanswerables, we understand there are unquestionables, but we do not always know, precisely, what lies in between.
     Ultimately, and either way, we walk, by faith, in mystery.  Dogma is only as good as our heart.

     Perhaps you've heard George Frederick Handel's famous oratorio, Messiah.  Countless church choirs and various secular choruses present it during the Christmas and Easter seasons.  It is loved the world over.  While some like it for its melodies alone, others appreciate its melodies as well as its religious sentiments.
     Less likely, however, is that you've heard of Handel's "Jupiter" aria.  This aria appears in Handel's Semele, a musical drama in three parts.  Who's Semele?  She is the god Dionysus's earthly mother by Zeus (or to use the Roman word for the chief god of the Greco-Roman pantheon, Jupiter).  Now most of us would not wish to write an aria glorifying a philanderer like Zeus, and that was not Handel's intent, either.  The aria of Jupiter rather serves to signify the way in which a god like Jupiter (Zeus) can, because of his immensely superior power over human beings, have his way in all earthly affairs, and the havoc this often causes.
     On balance, if we believe in a god, most of us would prefer for this god to be morally upright.  We would want this god to refrain from engaging in behavior which we find distasteful.  But this begs the larger question:  how does a god decide what is moral?  And how do we know whether it is indeed moral?
     When we consider Zeus's predilection for earthly woman, we wonder about this even more.  That is, which came first:  the chicken or the egg?  Was God moral before we?  Or do we project our morals upon God?
     To answer these questions, we must consider that, absent a transcendent standard, we really have no way to decide what is moral.  We're only talking to ourselves.  So why is God the standard?  Simply, and despite the problems that this raises, because accidental beings will never be able to establish one.
     Look for Semele.  Listen to Jupiter's aria.  Ponder how by reflecting our personal foibles in his behavior, Zeus/Jupiter aptly serves to undercut any thought that we could, on our own, decide what is true.

     "Sometimes I wish," sang Freddie Mercury, lead singer for the band Queen, "I'd never been born."  Considering how Mercury spent the last years of his life, playing both genders in his quest for sexual fulfillment, and gradually descending into a morass of drugs, alcohol, and other things, his words strike me as particularly tragic.  Despite his personal difficulties, however, I'm not sorry Mercury was born.  He brought us some striking music and dazzling performances on the stage.
     So why do I bring him up?  A few days ago, I received two emails.  The first informed me that one of my last living aunts, who turned 90 last November and had struggled with dementia for a number of years, passed away.  Hardly had I processed this news when another email came my way.  This one told me that my aunt's youngest son, in his late fifties and who had taken a bad fall a couple of weeks ago, had also passed away.  He never woke up after his head hit the floor of his home.
     Even more tragic, this is the aunt who was also the mother of my cousin who died of cancer a little over a year ago.  In the space of less than two years, her surviving children lost a mother, sister, and brother (and their father passed a couple of years before this). It's heartbreaking.
     What can one say in the face of such a confluence of pain?  It's surely not that the dead or the survivors should never have been born.  It is rather to note that, despite the way that my aunt spent the final years of her long life in mental isolation and the singularly awful way in which my cousin died, I am thankful that I knew them; I am thankful that they had some time on the planet; I am grateful for who they were in my life.
     Before heartrending tragedy, however, these platitudes seem facile and supercilious. All grief and retrospection on the planet will not bring our loved ones back to us.  What can we do?  We remind ourselves that our vision of life rests not in the vagaries and unpredictability of humanness, but in the immutability of a personal and meaningful creator.  In an accidental world, accidents and downturns, yes, happen, all the time.  In an intentional world, accidents and downturns, yes, happen, too.  But they do so in the compass of a meaningful cosmos.  Though we may not know the fullness of this meaning, we know that it is present.  That's all we have; no more, no less.  And as hard as this may be to say, it's all we, at this point, need.
     Rest well, Aunt Joan and cousin John.  One day, I'll see you.

     In his Frenzy of Renown, Leo Braudy describes fame as, "the interplay between the common and the unique in human nature."  In other words, to be famous is to occupy a holding pattern between human commonality and individual uniqueness.  Famous people are not unique; they have rather managed to straddle the fine line between what is and what can be.  They hold up our oneness, they hold up our individuality of vision; they help us see our possibilities, good or bad.
     Russia's Ivan the Terrible was famous, famous for showing us one vision, a rather twisted one, of human possibility.  Francis of Assisi was famous for giving us another vision, this one of human goodness, the extent to which humans are capable of serving each other.  Both of these people echoed, one negatively, the other, positively, this middle ground, this holding space between commonality and uniqueness.  In their own way, they've given us ideas about where we might want--or not want--to go.
     Some people of faith lament that Adam and Eve (and similar characters in parallel stories from the ancient world) made the wrong choice in the Garden.  They wonder why God had to arrange the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil as he did.  They question why he allowed them to make a poor choice.
     God didn't want robots on the planet.  He wanted people who were able and willing to think for themselves, people who, though they recognized their commonality, wished to carve out a vision unique to themselves.  Although God is surely disappointed with many of humanity's choices (and this is why, after all, Jesus died on the cross, to propitiate God's dissatisfaction in this regard and, in so doing, redeem humankind from its moral bondage), and many of us are aghast at the people who have become famous, we can recognize in them something central to human dignity.  We are born to be in common, yet we are born to be individuals.  We are born to remember our fellow humans even while we give each other visions of the possibilities of human individuality.
     We are born to step outside our normative parameters and find our place, our place that, we hope, will encourage others to find theirs, too. 
     We are born to find, in the inexhaustibility of a divinely moral universe, our deepest dream.

        The great Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), is a person worth reading.  Consider this line:  

     "I slept and dreamt that life was joy.  I awoke and saw that life was service.  I acted and behold, service was joy."

     Tagore's observations let us see the universality of our human compulsion to help each other.  Whether we ground this in religion or not, we realize that we are deeply personal beings who feel called to engage in personal interaction with each other.
     Yet if we adhere to a strictly material view of human nature, we wonder why we do.

Here's another one:

    "Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark"

     Religion notwithstanding, faith is the grand challenge of every human being.  We are finite, we are incomplete; we cannot always see the dawn.  When I got up the other morning, I heard something I had not heard in many moons:  a bird chirping.  The sky was still dark, the morning still cold.  Yet this little bird knew that neither of these would last. It already "felt"  the light.  Every migratory bird would say the same thing:  although during the winter it may be many thousands of miles from its summer home, somehow it can "feel" the warm to come.  And it goes north.
     As faith is:  more times than not, we "feel" God more than we will ever "see" him.  Yet all evidence indicates he is nonetheless there.

One more:

     "Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky."

     When smog regularly enveloped Los Angeles, its inhabitants saw the most remarkable sunsets over the Pacific Ocean.  Now, although the sunsets are still remarkable, they're not as colorful as they once were.  We rarely enjoy the clouds in our lives, but in hindsight we recognize that they added something of value, broadly speaking, to our time here.  We appreciate their color, painfully acquired though it may be.
     And as we reach our life's sunset, we recognize that our years have not been about sun or storm, but rather about "seeing" more of the world, of seeing the clouds and the color they have brought us.  We see a bigger picture.  And, I hope, we see more of God; we see that, through it all, love and purpose, transcendent love and purpose, have been present.
     

      Do you listen to opera?  Not everybody does, and not everyone enjoys it.  Some operas, however, are worth listening to.  I say this because yesterday marked the birthday of Gioachini Rossini, the famous Italian composer of the Enlightenment and Romantic Era. You may have heard of some of Rossini's most famous works, such as the Barber of Seville (a delightful comedy) and William Tell (a dramatic presentation of the life of William Tell, one of the people who, legend has it, helped birth modern Switzerland).
     Interestingly, Rossini's break with musical tradition, particularly in opera, represented yet another, though, in its own way, uniquely singular, picture of the way that his predecessors, including Mozart and Handel, had already broke open musical possibility. Steeped in the Romantic tradition, Rossini was able to infuse his music with emotions the West had not yet seen.


     As I ponder this and listen to a few of Rossini's most famous overtures (like the one from William Tell), I often return to contemplating the remarkable way in which humanity has become itself.  Creativity bequeaths creativity, newness births more newness, and what has been, as Ecclesiastes observes, is always becoming what is.  Like Arthur Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being, life opening more and more in history and time, music opens too, ever speaking to us of future and possibility, steadfastly reminding us of the near inexhaustible character of humanity and the cosmos.
     Music makes us see that reason alone will not give us meaning.  We need the emotion, the emotional moral force of music in our lives to tell us that life has hope and that life is more than mind.  For reason alone, as philosopher (and atheist) Kai Neilsen points out, will not lead us to what is moral.  We need the transcendent, a realm to which Rossini's soaring arias point us, to know what is most valuable and true.