Memorial Day, 2013.  Alone with her two year old son, Jessica Mitford moves quietly through the cemetery.  Arlington Cemetery, which at 624 acres is one of America’s largest, is a study in valor and pain, a portrait of bravery, solace, and privation, the nation’s most revered place for the final earthly repose of those who have served in the five branches of America’s military.  For many, it is sacred ground, a hallowed site, one on which those who visit it tread with enormous respect and care.

     On this Memorial Day of 2013, Ms. Mitford had come to visit the grave of her husband, killed in Afghanistan in 2012.  She held up her son, a two year old boy named Evan, and talked to him about his father, the father he will, heartbreakingly, never know.  She wanted Evan to know about his father.  She wanted him to be aware of who his father was and what his father did.  She wanted to tell him that although his father was no longer with them, he would have given anything to be here and watch Evan grow up.

     Ms. Mitford wanted Evan to remember his father.  She wanted Evan to remember that were it not for his father he would not be here, that who he was today, and who he would become tomorrow are inseparably linked to this man at whose grave they now sit.  She wanted Evan to internalize the memory of a person who, though he would never meet him, is the person who would be one of the foundational determinants in creating the man he will one day be.  She wanted Evan to know that his memory of his father would be—should be—central to his future existence.  Don’t forget your father, she told him.* 

     We need to remember.  We need to remember our lost loved ones; we need to remember those we lose in wars; we need to remember those billions of people we will likely never meet.

     And though this may seem facile and silly to some, and patently obvious to others, we need most of all to remember God.  Why?  Without God, without an intentional cosmos, everything, absolutely everything means, in the big picture, absolutely nothing at all. Think about it.  We remember because we believe we and life have a point.  Yet if we have no real reason to suppose this universe should be here, what point is there to make?

     Memory is wonderful, yes, but memory only has significance in a remembered universe.

*  This account is based on an article about Ms. Mitford in The New York Times.

     Not long ago, a friend mentioned to me Herman Hesse's decades old novel, Siddhartha. Loosely based on the life of Siddhartha Gautama, the Indian prince and wandering mystic who became known as the Buddha, founder (although he didn't necessarily intend to) of Buddhism, Siddartha tells the story of how its character finds enlightenment.  It describes his journey through the landscapes of his native land until one day he happens upon a river.  As he stood on the banks of the river, watching it flow and flow and flow, noticing that although it was always changing it always stayed the same, and pondering how such a thing could be, he decided that, in this tiny prism of the natural order, he was seeing the essence of existence.  He must move, but he must remain; change, but not.  He must meld into the oneness of being, the dynamic stasis of the dichotomy of presence and absence.
     Though this seems a contradiction in terms, on the other hand, it helps us understand more of what life really is.  Always here (at least for next several billions of years!), life is immutable.  Yet it is ever unwinding, its various manifestations, its plants and animals, appearing, then disappearing, only to appear, through decay and rebirth, again, in new forms.  Life is always here, but it is never expressed in the same way.
     Our challenge is therefore to manage the joy of presence with the emptiness of absence.  While we are here, we rejoice; when we see ourselves fading, we become sad (even if in the end, we accept it).  We can do this by embracing presence and absence simultaneously; by accepting each one in their place and turn; or by assenting to the possibility--and this is a powerful possibility--that beyond presence and absence, there is yet another presence to live:  the resurrection and afterlife.
     We stand before the rivers of our lives, wondering what they mean, wondering what their mix of change, sameness, presence, and absence tell us about existence.  And we always stumble before the unknown.
     And in the end, it is a question of which unknown we wish to believe:  what is there and not, or what is there and not--and, in resurrection (the universal human longing and the heart of the Christian faith) there again?

     "From word to deed is like earth to the sky," goes an old Romanian proverb.  How true! Regardless of what claims we make about truth or our metaphysical convictions, unless we demonstrate the impact of these claims in the way we live, we may as well not proclaim them.  As the apostle John said long ago, "Little children, let us not love with word or with tongue, but in word and deed" (1 John 3:18).  Fittingly enough, those who promulgate their viewpoints the loudest are the ones who share the greatest onus for backing them up in action.  And more often than not, those who are the loudest are people of faith.
     This tells us several things.  One, it reminds us of the ferocity with which people, those of faith or not, trumpet their convictions.  Two, it encourages us to realize that of the many things that drive people apart, one of the most divisive is hypocrisy.  We tend to reject, quickly, people, particularly those of faith, whose actions do not match their words.  Three, it urges us to admit that however strongly we believe in something, unless we can display it in how we live, we are spinning our wheels.
     After all, as Jesus and many other sages have pointed out, it is not so much what goes into us that matters, but what comes out.
     When many years ago I climbed mountain after mountain across North America, I knew that with each new climb I had always had to begin at the ground floor, the earth, the base of the peak.  And I realized, acutely, that between me, the peak, and the sky beyond it lay many, many hours of work.  I was also aware that even with the planning I had done, I would likely encounter surprises and delays.  So the proverb observes:  the distance between earth--faith--and sky--truth--is always further than we think.

     What is the "Great Beyond"?  About a year ago, I blogged about this phrase, prompted by my hearing REM's song of the same name.  After hearing the song again recently, I noticed some phrases that had not grabbed my attention before.  Although I know little about the songwriter's spiritual convictions, was struck by how he seemed to posit the quest for the "Great Beyond" as one born of immense effort and struggle, of pushing, as he put it, "an elephant up a hill."
     I think REM is onto something here, and it dovetails with my ruminations about faith that I posted yesterday:  embracing the real meaning of the metaphysical is exceedingly difficult.  We can't see it, we can't touch it, we can't hear it (though some insist they do). And it's hard to believe something that "presents" itself in these terms.
     Yet as British theologian John Milbank once observed, we live before a basic "presentability," what he calls our need to "say how things are in general before we can say anything at all."  Even if we deny the metaphysical, we stumble without it.  If we say that this universe is all that is, we are still left with explaining what "is" really means. Physicality cannot happen in a vacuum.
     Nonetheless, the challenge remains:  why should we believe?  To this, I say, why should we not believe?  As I blogged last year, we all seek purpose, we all seek point.  We cannot help but do so.  And it is a purpose greater than mere survival. We all strive to do more than simply exist.
     So it is not so much a question of the "Great Beyond" than a question about who we are, and why we are this way.  Although I do not deny that evolutionary processes, guided by a divine intelligence, may well have brought the world to its present state, I do wonder why, if the goal of evolution is to ensure survival and nothing more, people still seek meaning. Every other animal does not require meaning to survive.  But we do.
     Why?  

     How much should we trust God?  One Hebrew story that asks this question in a highly acute way is the story of Abraham and his son Isaac.  One day, the account goes, God directed Abraham to take his son Isaac to a mountain and sacrifice him.  What, we might ask at this point, is God thinking?  From our understanding of the cultures of this time, we know that many peoples engaged in child sacrifice; for this reason, perhaps Abraham did not think that God's request was overly unusual.
     To our twentieth-first century eyes, however, it seems preposterous and outlandish. What kind of a God would ask one of his followers to kill his own son?
     Christians of course will say that in asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, God was foretelling the way in which he would see his son--Jesus--sacrificed on the cross for the redemption of humanity.  As God would one day sacrifice his son, so he asked Abraham to sacrifice his.
     Although I cannot quarrel with this interpretation, it still leaves me wondering:  why did God think it necessary to demand Abraham do such a thing and, subsequently, immediately before Abraham plunged a knife into Isaac, tell him to stop?  And what was Isaac thinking?
     I'm reluctant to answer this questions by saying that they are simply part of the mystery of faith, and that by its very nature faith is a walk in the darkness.  While faith is indeed often a walk in the darkness, it doesn't answer every question.
     So we're back to square one:  how much should we trust God?  If I may draw a page from the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, I note that for Kierkegaard, we either trust God with everything or we trust him with nothing at all.  It's really that simple.
     Oh, how simple, but oh, how complex!

     Many of us know the story.  It's the story of Jonah, the prophet who was swallowed by a "great fish" and, after spending three nights in its belly, was released.  So you may ask, how did Jonah end up in the belly of the "great fish"?  Earlier, God had told ("the word of the Lord came to Jonah") Jonah to journey east to Nineveh, the capital of the mighty and much feared Assyrian Empire and call them to repentance.  With a well deserved reputation for rapacity and cruelty, the Assyrian Empire was, in its heyday, the most powerful nation in the ancient Near East (what we call the Middle East today).  Every spring, its king and his armies ventured forth, moving across the deserts of Mesopotamia in pursuit of conquest, ever seeking to overwhelm and destroy all who stood in their way. And until the Babylonians toppled Nineveh in 612 B.C., no one could stop them.
     Hence, we cannot be surprised that Jonah was reluctant to go to Nineveh.  The Assyrians had no soft feelings for Israelites, and Jonah did not see how calling them to repentance would change that.  So he ran away.  He ran to the port city of Tarshish, got on a ship, and set west across the Mediterranean Sea.
     But God's eyes, as many a Jewish rabbi says, are everywhere.  Very soon, a storm swept across the sea, threatening to capsize the ship.  Knowing very well why the storm had come, Jonah told the ship's crew to throw him overboard.  They did.  And the storm stopped.
     Here we come to the heart of my thought.  As he languished in the fish's belly, Jonah prayed.  He told God that God heard his voice and that he would not abandon him.  He told God that he knew God would journey to the deepest depths of the earth to follow and redeem him.  It is likewise for us.  The ubiquity of God ensures that no matter what we do, no matter where we go, and no matter what we think, God is everywhere, watching and listening. And it's not an Orwellian 1984 type of watching and listening.  It's a watching and listening of love and concern, a focus of entirely good intention.
     We all will wander in our lives, looking for meaning in futile places.  Given God's omnipresence, however, and given his steady watchful care, though life is full of vanity and dead ends (as well as immense joy and delight), we can know that purpose continues to roam through it.  The world can be very capricious, and we can be exceedingly foolish, yes, but God is neither.  In an intentional world, God's intended world, we can mine everything for point and meaning.  While we may not see these right away, we can believe, as did Jonah, that because God is there, they are, too.

     "Mr. Fantasy."  It's an enticing name, an intriguing thought:  a person who can fulfill our richest fantasies and wildest dreams.  Traffic, a British rock band of the Sixties, wrote and performed a song of this name throughout the world.  "Dear Mr. Fantasy," the words go, "you are the one who made us all laugh, but doing that you break out in tears; please don't be sad if it was a straight mind you had, we wouldn't have known you all these years."
     Though I do not know whether Traffic intended to weave spiritual overtones into this song, listening to the lyrics afresh made me think:  how this is like God.  As creator and redeemer of the world, God wishes for his creation to enjoy life, to revel in its beauties, to marvel at its wonders.  God is a God of joy.
     In order to ensure this joy, however, God had to cry.  He had to cry horribly.  In the person of Jesus, God had to weep and howl with pain as he hung on a Roman cross two thousand years ago.  He had to die the worst of all deaths.  But God knew that joy would not come without those tears. He knew that redemption would not happen apart from immense suffering on his part. He knew he had to shed his tears.
     And yes, if God was nothing more than a "straight mind," a black and white line, we would never know him.  God had to rejoice, he had to weep; he had to revel, he had to cry.  Otherwise, creatures of emotion that we are, we would never be able to connect with our creator.

     "I wanna be able to live."  So said a cancer patient recently interviewed on the television news program Sixty Minutes.  Considering that this patient unfortunately died shortly after this interview, her remarks are particularly poignant.  This person knew very well that this is our only life, and when it's over, it's over.
     Not so, comes the seemingly facile religious response:  there's another life, another life to follow.  True enough.  But this doesn't negate the fact of death and the abject sense of helplessness that accompanies it.  Whether or not we live again, we will still die. It's the ultimate affirmation of future security amidst present insecurity.
     That's why trusting the resurrection can be so difficult.  Initially, the early apostles couldn't believe that Jesus rose, and neither can countless others around the globe today. If we live in insecurity, the insecurity of a finite existence, we find believing in a secure existence, the fact of an eternal existence, outside of all of our epistemological categories.  It doesn't fit.
     Quite true.  It doesn't.  But maybe that's the point.  The resurrection is indeed an anomaly.  It doesn't fit into what we presently know.  Why would it?  On the other hand, maybe that's why the resurrection is anything but an anomaly.  The resurrection really only make sense if life makes sense, and life only makes sense if all of it--beginning, middle, and end--makes sense, too.  Otherwise, why should it even begin?

     Are you familiar with Christopher Hitchens?  Before he passed away in 2011 at the age of 62, Christopher Hitchens was one of the so-called "Four Horsemen" of the (equally) so-called "New Atheists."  In book, column, interview, and debate, he did everything he could to argue against the notion of God.  His most popular book was titled god is not Great.
     A book that appeared recently, The Faith of Christopher Hitchens, written by an evangelical Christian, seems at times to convince us otherwise.  It presents another side to Hitchens, a side that leads some to think that he was not so stridently anti-theistic after all.
     Larry Tatum, author of the book, states unequivocally that Hitchens didn't convert to Christianity before he died.  However, he cites a number of episodes in which Hitchens seemed struck by expressions of sacrificial love.  On several occasions Hitchens appears to be moved greatly by his observations of people who are acting totally selflessly on behalf of others.  He wonders out loud why anyone would do such a thing.
     In a nutshell, at least for me, this captures the essence of Christianity.  In the end, people will not believe in God because they are afraid of him.  They will believe in God because they believe he loves them. 
     Doctrine is important, yes, but Jesus didn't preach doctrine.  He told stories about God's love.  Most of all, Jesus made known God's love.
     For love--a simple yet terribly complex love--is what God is most about.

     What is our identity?  I thought about this anew as I listened the other day to a presentation on human trafficking in the world.  The speaker made the point that perhaps the most insidious aspect of trafficking is its tendency to deprive those trafficked of their sense of identity.  Abused and exploited for in some cases over thirty years, trafficking's victims never have any opportunity to establish who they are.  Reduced by the trafficker to regard themselves as worthless and without any merit, they live unaware of their fundamental worth as human beings.
     This is tragic, unbearably tragic.  No one is made to never know who she is.  No one is created to never know why she is here, or to be told, day after day after day, that she is totally worthless.  But here is the challenge.  If we believe people are valuable simply because they are human beings, we in truth have no basis for doing so other than that we are human beings, too.  We have not solved the greater issue:  what makes us so important other than us telling ourselves that we are?
     Though I endorse any and all efforts to rescue people from the horrors of trafficking, I also hope that those delivered come to understand that they have been saved not just because they are human beings but because, ultimately, they are human beings who are creations of God.  We are valuable in and of ourselves, yes, but unless we are in this world through divine intention, we really have no reason to suppose ourselves any more important than anything else:  we're all accidents, anyway.

     With what are we born?  Are we like John Locke's blank slate?  Do we come with Immanuel Kant's intuitions of space, time, and causality?  Are we born with, as linguist Noam Chomsky, claims, the ability to speak?  What do we learn and what do we not?
     Though we cannot answer all of these questions in a blog, I ask them because I am reading a fascinating book called Inborn Knowledge by Colin McGinn.  As McGinn sees it, a large range of our knowledge is inborn, that is,it is not something we acquire through our senses.  We are not shaped entirely by our empirical experience.
     Wonderful, proponents of religion might say:  this demonstrates that people could well be born with what some commentators have called a "God shaped hole" in their hearts. The human longing for God is innate to the species.  It is not Sigmund Freud's idea of a desire stemming from our material neuroses.
     Perhaps.  Yet as McGinn cautions, while innate knowledge is a fact, it remains a mystery.  How can we envision a brain that comes with knowledge already built into it: where did such knowledge come from?  And how did the brain know to accumulate these types of knowledge and not others?
     Nonetheless, McGinn's thesis seems to confirm a larger point.  Although we may well be able to reduce the human being to a product of chemical exchange, we will never be able to argue that this is all that a human is.  As a neuroscientist friend of mine told me recently, "I believe in an evolved mind, but I cannot dismiss the notion of spirit."
     Indeed.  In fact, it is our very desire to consider these questions that belies any contention that we are no more than their sum.

     How can we know which version of the Bible is most accurate and true?  It's a legitimate question, one that was posed at my atheist discussion group last night.  The short answer is that, well, we must be careful.  We must look at each translation in a nuanced way, realizing that although the same original Greek and Hebrew text is used for every version, those translating come to the text from a wide range of background, agenda, and perspective. As any translator knows, any time we translate a text written in one language to the language of another, we inevitably change the meaning of the text.  We cannot help but do so.  In more ways than we might think, we produce a "different" text.
     On the other hand, if we all rely on the same original language text (and we do), then it stands to reason that if we are share common information about the cultural, linguistic, and historical backdrop of a given biblical passage (also which, in general, we do), we will arrive at roughly the same understanding of the text.  Sure, we may use different words to represent the meaning of the original language text, but if we are translating with any degree of integrity, we should not end up too far apart.
     So how do we know?  Unless we are conversant in the original languages, we must trust the decisions of the translator.  We do so realizing, however, that if we systematically compare multiple translations, we should arrive at a common meaning.  It really is possible to know what the Bible is saying.
     It really is possible to know what God is telling us--IF, and this is a big if, we are willing to allow the text to speak for itself.  If it claims to be revelation, we must be willing to begin with that assertion and see whether it rings true.  We must be ready to accept the Bible for what it purports to be.
     Subsequently, IF, and only if, the entire text doesn't add up, we are free to set it aside.  I can safely say, however, that this will likely not happen:  if God is there, we will not miss him.

     As I looked at my calendar the other day, I realized to my great regret that I had failed to mention International Holocaust Day, each day commemorated on the fourth day of May.  If one is not a Jew (and I am not), although we can--and should--weep over the unmitigated horrors of the Holocaust, we in no way can genuinely relate.  How does one identify with the loss of over six million of his brethren?  How does one connect with a person who lost the sum of his lineage in a concentration camp?  How can we possibly grasp being the object of such virulent hatred and racism?
     The thought of either of these is horrifying; the reality that at one point in history all three occurred at once is overwhelming.  And that's the point many Holocaust scholars make:  the Holocaust is an event that surpasses the widest and deepest boundaries of our ken and imagination.  It's beyond intelligibility.
     Yet it happened.  Writing to me nearly three decades ago, an American then living in Jerusalem and who had made clear to me that he did not believe in God, allowed that the Holocaust caused even him to acknowledge the reality of the metaphysical.  Why, he reasoned, would anyone with a hatred other than one rooted in the tenebrosity of a twisted notion of the metaphysical engage in such horror?  And why, he suggested, would a God other than one committed to the sanctity of human choice allow such a thing to happen?  Finally, he asked, why, unless Jesus really is humanity's savior, would God ever run away from such pain?
     Weep for our Jewish brothers and sisters, and pray for those who persecute them. And believe:  at all costs, believe in the ultimacy of God.

    Yesterday, Mother's Day, is a good day.  Whether we have good or bad memories of our mothers, we must admit that without our mothers, we would not be here.  However old we are, we must acknowledge that we could not have lived even a day without our mother.
     But a mother is more than a source of physical life.  A mother is the heart of love. When a number of years ago I spoke at my mother's memorial service, I stated that although I, regrettably, had engaged in behaviors as a teenager that saddened and burdened my mother deeply, my mother never stopped loving me.  Regardless of how much I hurt her, regardless of how much emotional scarring I caused her, my mother never ceased to care about me, her first born son.  Her love for me was wholly unconditional; I never for once doubted that she loved me.
     Similarly, when I consider everything my mother did for me in the course of my lifetime, all the times she helped me, all the times she supported me, all the times she made clear she was always on my side, I'm amazed.  From a middle of the night response to stomach flu to shepherding my very unruly Cub Scout den to comforting me when a good friend turned on me to fixing wonderful meals when I came home from college, and much, much more, my mother was a steadfast presence in my life, never doubting, never complaining, always ready to be my mother.
     In July, my mother, who would have been 94 had she lived to this Mother's Day, will have been gone six years, but I still remember her vividly.  As I type this blog, I look frequently at her photograph on a nearby shelf, her face shining, radiant with love and joy.  Hard to believe she is gone, yet equally hard to believe she was ever mine, so wonderfully did she love me, a person so undeserving of such attention and acclaim.
     Thanks, God, for mothers.
     Love you, Mom.

     Today, May 5th, is Cinco de Mayo.  Although it is not Mexican Independence Day (traditionally celebrated on September 16), it is nonetheless a day to remember:  Mexico's 1862 liberation from the oppressive machinations of French occupation.  A stronghold of economic and political might before the Europeans arrived on its shores, Mexico spent several subsequent centuries toiling under the weight of various foreign nations who, unfortunately, viewed Mexico primarily as a land to be exploited for their own use. Independence was too long in coming.
     It's an all too familiar story:  imperialistic Westerners marginalizing and abusing the rest of the world.  Thankfully, much of this is over.  Many issues, however, remain.  Much of Mexico, as well as many of its southern neighbors, continue looking to establish their way and place in the world.  Happily, they are now free to do so.
     Though freedom can be complicated, we must always remind ourselves that despite its complexities, freedom to be, whatever we become, is preferable to never finding freedom at all.  God wants all of us to be free.  He wants us to find economic freedom, he wants us to find political freedom.
     Most of all, however, as Jesus tells us in the gospel of John, God most wants us to find the freedom of truth, the freedom of the truth that sets us truly free:  the freedom we find in trusting in his great love for us all.

     Have you read When Breath Becomes Air?  It is a memoir of Paul Kalanithi, a highly regarded and successful neurosurgeon who, at the age of 36, was given a diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer.  As he faded away (unfortunately, despite chemotherapy and other treatments, the disease could not be stopped), he summoned all his remaining energy to pen this moving account of life, existence, and mortality.  He passed away in March of 2015.
     Why do I mention this book, a book that speaks of a topic most of us would rather not talk about:  death?  At one point in his meditations, Kalanithi ponders faith and the idea of God.  Although he is a scientist, one who strives to formulate decisions on empirical evidence alone, he says, "to make science the arbiter of metaphysics is to banish not only God from the world but also love, hate, meaning--to consider a world that is self-evidently not [his emphasis] the world we live in.  That's not to say that if you believe in meaning, you must also believe in God.  It is to say, though, that if you believe that science provides no basis for God, then you are almost obligated to conclude that science provides no basis for meaning and, therefore, life itself doesn't have any."
     Kalanithi makes a crucial and necessary point.  If we rely only on empirical evidence to understand the world, we have no answer to the mysteries, the mysteries of emotion, longing, and transcendence that course, in various ways, through our hearts and lives.  We can't measure those in empirical experiments.  Yet we know we experience them.
     So what do we do?  We must acknowledge that, as Kalanithi points out, science gives us much but does not provide a basis for meaning.  That's not science's job--and most scientists admit that.  We must look elsewhere.
     But in a material world, where else is there to look but in what must necessarily be beyond it?
     If we are whom we suppose ourselves to be, we will never be able to entirely dismiss the notion of God.

     Have you seen the movie "Lucy"?  Almost by accident, I saw it a few weeks ago.  It tells the story of a woman (Scarlet Johannson) who receives extraordinary mental powers, so much that she is able to manipulate physical objects as well as look into the thoughts of a human brain.  As the plot unfolds, we see how Lucy herself becomes the object of intense study:  how could such a thing be?  She is questioned, she is examined, she is considered and discussed.  Yet no one can figure out why she is capable of such things.
     In addition, Lucy becomes the object of predation.  A team of international wrongdoers make it their aim to capture her and exploit her for their perverted ends.  At the end of the movie, all parties--scientists, wrongdoers, and Lucy--come together in a laboratory.  As the the wrongdoers close in, Lucy undergoes a stunning transformation, growing, in tree like fashion, limbs of knowledge and understanding to epic, almost ethereal proportions:  she dwarfs everything else.  Then she implodes, sending, as she promised the scientists she would do, everything into one flash drive for posterity.
     And Lucy is gone.  But she speaks.  She is everywhere, she says.  The only thing that matters, she adds, the only thing that really exists, she insists, is time.
     It's a interesting thought.  Is time the sole measure of reality?  Is time the only way to shape and determine what is real?  Consider the nature of the universe:  time and space exist together.  Absent a black hole, one cannot happen without the other.  No space, no real time; no time, no real space.
     Now consider the idea of eternity.  Above and beyond space and time lies eternity.  It is from eternity that all things have come, it is within eternity that all things find ground. Virtual particles notwithstanding, things do not simply pop out of nothing.  On its own, temporality cannot just "begin."  We need a continuous "present."  We need an eternity.
     Is time therefore the only thing?
     Maybe.  One day, however, even time, as we understand it, will cease to exist.  And at that point, what has been "here" all along, eternity, will be all that remains.
     Religion or not, we need more than time to have time.  Otherwise, life just could not be.
     Thanks, Lucy.