What is the art of rock and dirt?  This is the question we ask when we consider "City," a sculpture/amalgamation/creation of artist Michael Heizer in the hinterlands of Nevada. Heizer began working on "City" in 1972, and is still not finished.  It is a massive formulation of rock, sand, and concrete, best viewed from the air.  At present, it is over a mile and a half long.
     To our initial question, well, the more poetically minded of us will reply that, to name one example, mountains represent artwork, artwork of rock (of all kinds, though often granite) and dirt.  Or we might cite a formless beach, its nearly infinite particles of sand, worn and polished over many, many years, shimmering in the sun, waiting for the rising tide morning after morning.
     Heizer's "sculpture" asks us to look at rock and dirt differently.  It asks us to consider its beauty when it is shaped not by natural forces but by the human imagination. Moreover, it invites us to ponder the meaning of transformation:  Heizer took what many people might dismiss as ancillary to their lives and elevated it to an object of scrutiny and meditation.  He makes us look harder at what we think we already know.
     And perhaps that's one point.  We often do not see what things can fully be until we are willing to see them as we had not imagined them to be.
     So did Augustine observe many centuries ago about faith in God that, "I understand that I might believe."

     He was moving "more toward trying to figure what death is, and what my place in the world is."  So remarked a doctor who treated poet Max Ritvo in the final days of his life. A highly acclaimed young poet, Ritvo passed away last week at the tender age of, like British poet John Keats, 25.  It was a bitter end to a promising career.  A book of his poetry will appear in the fall of this year.
     As I have pondered this quote, I constantly return to the enigma of death.  Whether or not we believe in an afterlife, death remains an intractable mystery.  Sure, we can explain, through science and/or religion, why people die, but we still struggle with its immensity.  How can we grasp the notion of an earthly end, a point at which we no longer exist on this planet?  It's insuperably difficult.  And what about Ritvo's other quest, to understand his place in the world?  Do not we all wonder about this, too?  Whether we are famous and, in the eyes of many, accomplished, or relatively obscure, mere specks amidst the lengthy annals of time and history, we wonder:  what are we to do, given the inevitability of death, with this life in which we find ourselves?
     Though I (and undoubtedly many others) can offer some theological frameworks and possible answers to these questions, in the end what you decide about them will be what you believe to be, in your heart of hearts, potential, possible, and true.  No one can decide for another.
     Yet when all is said and done, we can only do what the parameters, those here, there, and everywhere, of our experience allow us to do.  For how can we really know?
     What is more probable in a universe in which matter and energy interchange constantly:  an end that is open--or an end that is closed?
     Rest well, Max Ritvo.
     

     What's history?  One of Christianity's greatest prelates, Augustine lived toward the very beginning of the medieval era.  Even today, his thought shapes countless theological inquiry around the globe.  One dimension of existence about which Augustine thought extensively was history.  History, he said, is the story of two cities, the city of man, and the city of God (for details, see Augustine's voluminous City of God).  History is a struggle between human striving and divine purpose, a purpose which, in the end, prevails.
     Yet it does so through the agency of human adventure and exploration.  God's ideas last, but human activity does, too.  None means anything without the other.
     On the other hand, Karl Marx saw history as the story of class struggle, the conflict between the workers and the owners.  It had nothing to do with God.  Spirituality is a myth.
     In many ways, both Augustine and Marx have much to offer.  We understand the necessity of God, and we understand the fact of human presence.  What we will never see, however, is what they mean when we fit them together.  In the end, who in history can ever know, fully, what this history means?  We may live history, but only God understands it.
     Otherwise, its meaning would be solely our own.  And apart from transcendent moral structure, what do we mean, anyway?  We're only here.
     And as French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre once remarked, if there is no God, then we are simply "useless passions," bundles of subjectivity with nowhere to go.

     "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, the present moment 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 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?

     Many of us have probably seen the poignant photograph of the five year old Syrian boy, bruised, bloodied, and discombobulated after a mortar attack.  It's almost as heart rending as last year's photograph of the even younger Syrian boy found drowned on a beach, victim of a botched crossing attempt.  For some of us, these photos are too close to home; we may witness, in our country, similar episodes regularly.  For others, though we are far away from such carnage, we may have children of similar ages whom we would not want to experience such horror.  For still others, we simply weep at the idea of such unmitigated pain and suffering.
     Unfortunately, it appears that Syria's civil war will not end anytime soon, and as is the case in most wars, it is the civilians who are taking the brunt of the fight.  It is anything but fair, and it is enormously tragic.  So we wonder:  why must this happen?  Why must innocents endure such awful lives?
     To these questions, we have no ready answers.  We lament before an opacity beyond our grasp.  Even if we aver that God is in this darkness, we are still left to wonder what, if anything, he is doing.  But we'll never know completely why.
     Setting these questions aside, however, we see that we remain singularly responsible to do whatever we can to halt the conflict.  We can question, we can wonder, but we can also act.  It's God's world, yes, but it is ours to own.
     "No greater love than this," Jesus said, "that a person lay down his life for his friend."

     Are you familiar with the Neolithic?  Based on two Greek words, "neo" (new:  remember the protagonist in the first Matrix movie?), and "lithic" (stone), it means, basically New Stone Age  The Neolithic refers to the period of human history when humanity ceased its hunting and gathering existence and began to form fixed settlements.
     For some of us, this supposition of course creates enormous difficulties.  If, as the biblical account holds, Adam and Eve were the first humans and did not live in a "settlement," why did subsequent humans decide to do so (for instance, Cain founding the city of Nod)?  And from where did the woman whom Cain married when he left his parents?
     If we can get past these theological questions, however, we see a more fundamental truth.  It is that humanity was created not to wander in tribal isolation but to interact with each other in larger community.  Sure, many people groups continue to live in relative isolation or sustain a nomadic existence today, but they are the exception.  And even they enjoy community with each other.  While we can lament many aspects of "civilized" urban life, we can also see it as the distant descendant of the ways of the Neolithic. Many thousands of years ago, people realized that it was better to come together in community than to migrate and wander apart from the bulk of their fellow human beings.
     Hence, we can celebrate the Neolithic not only for its impressive demonstrations of human creativity and prowess, but for its enduring statement of the necessity of commonality and unity and respect among human beings.
     After all, isn't this what, broadly speaking, God, the creator of us all, wants?

     If you have been to college, you probably took a course called "Western Civilization," or some variant of it, loosely labeled as the history of the world.  Unless the course tracks the history of the world outside of the West, however, the name is a misnomer.  It assumes that anything that occurred outside the West is of minor or, worse, of no importance to the state of the world today.
     Although I suspect that few historians feel this way, simply retaining the name of such a course almost seems offensive to many parts of the world.  And perhaps it is.  If we for instance assume that history is nothing more than a mix of force and freedom, a continual and senseless striving for power, we have every reason to study the world from the standpoint of other parts of the globe.  It is these areas that have felt most acutely the tension of force and freedom in their lives, and it is these regions that have sensed, more than the West, the delicate balance between force and freedom.  It is a balance for which, ideally, all peoples should strive.
     What is my point?  If all of us are made in the image of one God, no one of us is more valuable than the other, and no nation has any call to subjugate the other.  Further, no nation has the right (and, yes, I realize that "right" is an overused and misunderstood term) to decide the destiny of another country.  Even if we insist that God has a master vision for human history, we of the West err in supposing that we have a unique window into it or that we are specially called to orchestrate it.  (When God called Abraham, he made clear that the initiative and impetus was God's alone).
     Enjoy learning about the world--your world--and everyone, of whom you are one, in it.

     As I have been adjusting to "real" life again, living far, far away from the mountains of the West, I often take time to remember what it felt like to be immersed in the quiescence and beauty of the alpine landscape.  For me, it is the finest place in which to be.  Unfortunately, however, I cannot be in it all the time.  Many of us, I suspect, are no different.  We often would like to be somewhere other than where we are now.
     But we are not.  I once read a book by Gaston Rebuffat, one of the most famous, in his day, mountain guide in the Alps.  Rebuffat writes eloquently of his affection for the heights and his love for all things remote and wild.  He offers some poignant thoughts and insights into living life with mountains, and not.
     As he closes his book, Rebuffat writes, "It is raining in Paris, and I am dreaming of high hills."  He cannot wait to get back to his beloved mountains.  He knows that in the mountains he--we--encounter a deeper awareness of life, an awareness that seems to break into the ethereal and transcendent, that we cannot experience in the land below. He realizes, as did the famous American naturalist John Muir, that a day in the mountains, treading in the light of their heights, is like a day that we would have nowhere else.
     It is this sense of transcendence, this feeling of lilting and otherworldly beauty that draws people, including me, to the mountains.  The mountains, the lofty landscapes of tundra and rock that roam about the planet, speak to us powerfully about the promise of our human condition.  There is always more to know, there is always more to find.  We dream of better and higher things.
     So do we need God to experience this transcendence?  Let's consider that, yes, mountains are remarkable and amazing, but if they are our only source of transcendence, we miss the point of what transcendence is all about.  It cannot be real unless God is, too.

     Rain.  Sometimes we welcome it; sometimes we do not.  As I write these words, too many people have more rain than they want or need, and even more people have too little, far less than what they want or need.  It's a mystery, really, the rain.  Though we can understand the science behind it, we often find it difficult, if we are spiritually inclined, to balance the fact of rain with the sovereignty of God.  Why does rain fall on some rather than others?  And why, as Jesus remarked in Matthew's gospel, does God send rain on the just as well as the unjust?
     In some ways, these are unanswerable questions.  In other ways, they are not.  If there is a creator, a personal and loving creator, however bewildering he and his actions may be, we at least have a path to follow.  Science is grand, indeed, but science cannot explain why, the point and purpose in human affairs.  It can only tell us how things happen, which of course all of us enjoy knowing.  Beyond this, however, as biologist William Provine once remarked, we are no more than a plop, here today, gone tomorrow. What's the point?
     Trying to construct a "theology" of rain, however, is difficult.  How do we know?  Yet we do know that we cannot live with purpose or point.  We also know that finding these things in a pointless universe is clearly impossible.  This is why we must say that the next time we see the rain, whether we find it lovely or horrific, we also know that it's not happening in an empty cosmos.  It's not falling on a bunch of plops. How can we insist otherwise?  
     However, it is falling, the rain is falling on creatures created and loved by God.

     Perhaps you've been watching the Olympics.  One of my favorite sports to watch is swimming.  Of course, we cannot talk about Olympic swimming without mentioning the American swimmer Michael Phelps.  We can all be amazed at Phelps's abilities, we can all be astonished at his achievements, we can all be awestruck at the human capacity for physical prowess that he embodies in his person.
     And we should.  He is a marvelous specimen of homo sapien.  Like Kenny Baker, whom I mentioned yesterday, Phelps found his niche and proceeded to excel, to excel beyond what anyone might have imagined (except perhaps his coach Bob Bowman who early on identified Phelps as one who could have enormous success swimming).
     Given the public nature of Phelps's life, most of us know that he has experienced some very dark moments, some heart rending of mental and emotional angst.  He's had quite a journey.  Phelps definitively demonstrates that darkness is often essential to personal fulfillment and success.
     Religions around the world would agree.  Sacred writings are filled with examples of people who endured enormous tragedy and darkness as they walked in faith with their god.  In the end, however, every one of these people found profoundly greater communion with this god.  They judged the darkness to be worth it.
     This side of darkness, we often find this difficult to swallow.  We live in a glorious yet broken world.  Pain and loss are inevitable.  Yet if God is there, and he is, a constant and continuing source and presence of love, we can know and believe that however dark our journey may be, ultimately love will prevail.  It will not be our love, but God's love for us. It will be God's love for us that will carry us through our pain.
     Pain can last for a lifetime.  To this, we can often make no decent response.  Yet God's loving presence ensures that purpose and meaning will endure.  How and why, we frequently do not know.  But we know they do.
     The world may be fractured, but it is open to God.

     Have you seen Star Wars?  Chances are you have.  I ask because I noticed this morning an obituary for Kenny Baker.  Who?  Kenny Baker played the role of the much loved robot R2-D2, who appeared in six of the franchise's films.  Never taller than 3 feet, 8 inches, Baker originally didn't want the part.  Later, he agreed to do it, and is happy he did.
     As I reflected on Baker's passing, I thought of the remarkable way in which many people find a unique niche, a niche that seems made for them, and go on to shine.  In any other age, Baker might have been dismissed as a genetic oddity, fit only for a traveling freak show.  Happily, in our relatively enlightened age, a film director, George Lucas, recognized Baker's potential and gave him a role loved by millions, perhaps billions around the world.  His life and vocational success testifies beautifully to the human capacity, rightly cultivated, for insight, creativity, and compassion.
     Though all of us are well aware of the pain that people inflict on each other every hour of every day, we can rejoice in this moment.  Despite our shortcomings, flaws, and sins, we still can do good (and yes, I am well aware that good is a highly subjective term) things.  We can still recognize our individual greatness and potential.
     It's almost enough to make one believe we've been made in the image of God.  To wit: could plasma and chemicals really produce the capacity to love?

     Yesterday, I talked about a black bear.  Today I mention the marmot.  A resident of the alpine ecological zone, the land beyond the trees, a land of tundra, rock, and flowers, the marmot spends all summer looking for food with which to sustain him/herself through the long mountain winter.  By the time snow falls, any time after the end of August, the average marmot looks enormously fat.
     Although I've seen many, many marmots in my days, I came across one on my most recent trip that exceeded all of my expectations for how marmots look.  It was the largest and fattest marmot I had ever seen.  Initially, I thought it was a wolverine.  But no, it was a marmot, hearty and hale, perfectly adapted to this rugged environment, singularly bent on stuffing his/her face every moment of the lengthy mountain summer day.
     I love this land, the land of rolling tundra and snow covered rock, but without my mountain gear I could not survive it.  During the day, the warm summer day, I'd be fine. Come night, however, I would be very cold, even freezing, with little access to food. Absent a compass and map, I'd be lost, wandering over peak after peak, not knowing precisely where I was.  Life would not be easy.
     The marmot doesn't worry about any of this.  It is beautifully designed for the alpine landscape.  The tundra, snow, and rock are its home.  How wonderful it is, then, that we homo sapiens, ostensibly wise and clever tool making animals, must bow before the superiority of creatures much smaller and intellectually dimmer than we.  We pride ourselves on our greatness, we revel in our achievements.  Really, however, in the end, we are no more than highly intelligent creatures without a permanent home.

     Now that I am finished traveling for a while, I write to first, send readers a greeting from the heartland of America; and second, to try, once more, to offer some thoughts which I hope people will find edifying, useful, and otherwise.
     There is much to say, of course, and I hope that all of us can say the same.  We definitely owe it to ourselves to engage with and meditate on the world so as to develop new perspectives on what life and meaning are all about.  For me, I often find the most meaningful insights in being in the mountains.
     So it was that in the course of my recent wilderness wanderings, this time in the wilds of the Canadian Rockies, I one morning came upon a young black bear.  Knowing that unlike their larger counterparts, the grizzly, black bears rarely attack humans, I had no fear of being so close to him/her.  So I watched.  S/he was steadily making his/her way through an expanse of berry bushes, munching away at everything s/he could see.  I was happy for this bear, happy that s/he could pursue his/her culinary desires in safety and freedom, happy that s/he had such a luscious harvest of treats from which to eat, happy that s/he felt comfortable doing so even as I stood nearby.
     In the course of my decades of wilderness exploration, I've seen more black bears that I can count.  Some looked very healthy, some not.  The bear before me appeared to be extraordinarily healthy.  His/her fur was a glistening black, shiny and full, and his/her teeth and claws looked polished and sharp.  It was a delight to see.
     Ah, I thought, how wonderful, how amazing.  How remarkable that we live alongside such magnificent creatures, how marvelous that this planet hosts such an enormous diversity of life and existence.  Many theologians would argue that these wonders attest to the existence and activity of God.  Although I do not disagree, I often think this to be a rather facile conclusion, that there is more to this than we can readily see.  The Jewish Mishnah, written in the first few centuries after the appearance of Christ, describes God not so much in terms of activity but in terms of constant presence.  I like this. It allows me to take in the splendor of the natural world without trying to account, in black and white propositional terms, for how God might have brought it about.  If we believe God to be there, we do not always need to know how he is working or making himself known.  If God is there, he is; if he is not there, he is not.
     And sometimes that's all we need to know.