As the American presidential campaign, accentuated by the debate earlier this week, continues, the nation, and the world, waits, wondering what will happen.  At this point, it's anyone's guess.
     Everyone who plans to vote will do for different reasons.  Some will focus on economic issues, others cultural, still others religious or "values," national security, and more.  In the end, however, it seems that what will be most important is that people vote not so much according to their individual needs and vision but for the greater good of the nation, however, of course, they define this.
     And that's the challenge:  what is the common good?  Without question, it's more than a single issue.  It's more than one region.  It's more than one group's concerns.  The common good is about the present, but it's about the future, too.  It's individualized, it's corporate, comprehensive and holistic.  The momentary and immediate are only the beginning.
     The common good is bigger than all of us combined.  It's possible, but inscrutable, attainable but hazy.  That's the challenge of finitude, that's the vexation of temporality.
     It's why we need a transcendent God.
     Enjoy the campaign.

     Why do so many "young" people no longer attend church?  For those who have no interest in church, this is a moot question.  For those who study such matters, it is.  This notwithstanding, however, analyzing why many young people do not attend church says much, not just about the Christian church, but about the state of religion in general today.
     Historically, most of those who participate in a religion, regardless of what that religion might be, have sought to balance tradition and innovation in how they approach and utilize their beliefs.  Too often, however, the scale has been tipped toward tradition. Creativity and innovation are frequently shortchanged.
     God is a vastly creative God.  He is also a God of the new.  Although the "old ways" should not always be summarily dismissed as irrelevant, they can at times impede the input of the future.  They can inhibit the thoughts of new generations.
     For many centuries, the people of Israel had been told to expect a kingdom and Messiah.  Wait, they were encouraged, wait, wait through toil, pain, and disappointment for the revealing of God's bigger plan.
     And one day that plan disclosed itself, disclosed itself in a decidedly unexpected way. Jesus was born.  Here was someone quite new, someone quite radical, someone quite innovative in how he viewed and approached centuries of traditional Jewish theology. Few wanted to believe him, and even fewer wanted to follow him.  The old ways were too comfortable.
     When we wonder why not just young people but Westerners, broadly speaking, no longer associate themselves with religion, we can think about the radical nature of Jesus' message:  it was old, but it was also astonishingly new.  It announced a seminal change in how people were to view God.
     Yet it didn't abandon God.  It rather magnified his wonder and creative power. Properly interpreted, religion can, too.  It must only remember this:  never put God in a box.

     Goethe, surely one of, if not the most revered German writer of all time, perhaps most well known for his Faust, offered some fascinating observations about art.  Art, broadly speaking, that is, art in the sense of a work of the imagination, the birth of human sensibilities beyond materialistic reductionism, the fruit of minds and hearts set loose to think, ponder, and create outside the box, outside the box of conventional structure and form, so much so that in some instances we do not understand it.
     But that's the point.  Art stretches us.  Art challenges us.  Art makes us look at the world in ways we had not thought to before.  So did Goethe say, "Man can find no better retreat from the world than art, and man can find no stronger link with the world than art."
     Though Goethe veers between natural and supernatural in the many pages of Faust, taking us one way and then another, he understands that if art is to be art, it must be a pursuit that allows us to step back and look at life in new ways.  For some, it invokes the spiritual; for others, simply another layer of the material.  Either way, art, whatever we conceive it to be, offers us a window and vantage point into a new dimension of existence.
     At the same time, however, because it is implicit in the human being who lives in the world, art connects to what is.  So did Monet say, "I wish to render what is."  So did he wish to reframe and reimage the world and our perception of it.  From a theological standpoint which, as you know, I seemingly cannot help but wander into (!), art's dual role as absence and presence tells us of the potential depth of our experience of the universe. It reminds us that, as Goethe observed, although we can dance between being in the world and being apart from it, ultimately we realize that we are profoundly creative and imaginative beings who inevitably ponder what is beyond our immediate material ken.
     Hence, we ask ourselves:  why do we, thoroughly material beings, think to venture into what is not?
     Maybe, just maybe it's because whether we know and accept it or not, we live in a world woven by and with a God who, in the revelation of himself in all things, enables it. Otherwise, why would we look beyond what we can see?

     Are you a pessimist or optimist?  I ask because I'm reading a book titled, A Philosophy of Pessimism, written by Stuart Sim.  Why, he asks, given the state of the world and the many upon many challenges we face, can anyone suppose herself to be optimistic about the outcome?  Moreover, if the Calvinistic doctrines of divine sovereignty and predestination are true, how will we ever hope to change anything if God has already ordained the end of all things?  And how will those who, given sufficient circumstances, might be inclined to believe ever do so if God has not elected them to do so?
     He's asking some powerful questions.  If God is there, and if God is guiding and ordaining all things, how can we ever suppose we have any say in the matter?  How can we be hopeful if all for which we might hope has no basis?
     I don't know that anyone can fully answer these questions and, if she imagines she can, I am willing to say she is sorely mistaken.  In the end, if we wish to acknowledge, simultaneously, the fact and presence of God and the human capacity for choice, our only reason to be pessimistic is if we do not believe God is good, if we do not have evidence he is really a God of love.
     Yet we do have evidence that God is good and a God love, in the person of Jesus Christ.  Does this explain or compensate for the pessimism that inevitably accompanies this fleeting existence?  Not always.  Without this, however, given our finitude and all with which we fill it, we only face more turns in the vacuum of the unknown.

     Have you ever read, and really pondered, Romans 1:19-20?  It's an intriguing set of verses.  It reads,
     "Because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.  For since the creation of the world his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse."
     Whatever does this mean?  In short, it tells us that although we do not see, visibly, God in this world, we in fact "see" him when we examine and consider the many appearances of the natural world.  In effect, we "see" God in what he has made. The caveat, however, is that unless we already know about the idea of God or believe in the fact of his presence, however we conceive these to be, we may not necessarily affirm his existence in the creation.
     So I now share a quote from a Canadian artist named Lawren Harris.  He observed that there is an "evolution from the love of the outward aspect of Nature and a more or less realistic rendering of her to the sense of the indwelling spirit and a more austere spiritual expression."  In other words, in experiencing the beauty of nature, we come to consider more fully the possibility of spirit, spirituality and, dare I say, God.
     Most of us, including some in my atheist discussion group, will admit to the fact of spirituality, however we picture it to be.  Far more daunting, though, is when we move from spirituality to its source.
     It is then we must ask ourselves this:  can we experience spirituality without experiencing a spiritual presence?
     To wit, apart from the latter, we cannot even define it.

     "Now is the wind-time, the scattering clattering song-on-the-lawn time early eves and 
     gray days clouds shrouding the traveled ways trees spare and cracked bare slim       
     fingers in the air dry grass in the wind-lash waving waving as the birds pass the sky 
     turns, the wind gusts winter sweeps in it must it must."  (Debra Reinstra, "Autumn")

     Today, in the northern hemisphere, is the first day of autumn:  the autumnal equinox. It's a good day, a fun time.  Turning leaves and brilliant colors; cool, crisp nights and rich blue skies; the rising of Orion, his three star belt shining in the night; and light and dark woven with liminality and change:  life displays itself once more.
     In the ancient near east, the land of Egypt, Assyria, Sumer, and Babylon, autumn was a significant moment.  It marked the time of harvest and thanksgiving, a season of expectation--the life giving autumn rains were imminent--and days of ingathering and contemplation.
     So it can be for us.  Amidst our technology and worldly disenchantment, we can learn from our long ago brethren, our many ancestors who placed such tremendous faith in the certainty of the seasons, ordained, as they saw it, by the gods.  It's good to reach ends, it's good to meditate on beginnings, and it's good to remember the ubiquity of the rhythms that ripple through the cosmos.  It's good to ponder the security of an orderly world.
     And it's good to note that even though this security can at times be unnerving, even frightening, it is at the same time beautiful, a living picture of the endless grace of our creator God.  We change, the world changes, but God does not.  In autumn's changes, we see even more the necessity of his presence.

     We've all heard, I suspect, the adage that, "You can't take it with you."  Quite true. Despite the efforts of people, from the ancient Indo-Europeans and Egyptians to the "inhabitants" of modern masoleums to preserve--and continue--what they have as they leave this life, the sad truth remains:  nothing, materially speaking, will accompany us in our earthly passing.
     Wealth, and the kingdoms, be they cultural, political, or economic, that attend them, will not last indefinitely.  I recently read book titled The Final Voyage.  An account of the rise and fall of the New England whaling industry in the nineteenth century, The Final Voyage aptly presents how once enormously wealthy whaling merchants, their coffers swollen with the fruits of years of international whaling expeditions, expeditions taken in quest of whale oil, at that time the preferred oil for all appliances, eventually lost everything.  They failed to recognize how rapidly the oil produced by the burgeoning petroleum industry would supplant that of whales, how in just a few short decades oil from the ground would become the primary substance upon which the Industrial Revolution would move forward. 
     And most of them lost literally everything.  Their once mighty kingdoms crumbled and fell, collapsing under the weight of an economic tsunami to which they proved helpless to respond.  Their world was gone.
     On the other hand, although petroleum oil continues to dominate the energy industry, one day it may not. And what then will its proponents do?
     I trust they will adjust with circumspection.  We live so fleetingly, so very much captives of a finitude and time we will never overcome.
     And why?  Deuteronomy 29:29 observes that "the secret things belong to God"  True enough.  However--and happily--Ecclesiastes 9 advises us to "do whatever we do [that is good] with all our might."  Wealth's evanescence merely serves to underscore a more fundamental truth: we live, and die, in the loving and purposeful vision of God.

     "We can be both banished from the presence of Him who is present everywhere and erased from the knowledge of Him who knows all"  (C. S. Lewis, Weight of Glory)
     As I was completing my latest book, this one on memory, I came across this passage in one of Lewis's most well known essays (an essay, by the way, well worth your time to read).  Then, and now, I'm not sure how to take it.  For one who believes in and looks forward to an afterlife with God, it conjures up perhaps thankfulness, thankfulness that she will not spend eternity apart from her creator.  Does such a fate, however, stir up fear in the heart of one who does not believe in God?  It's unlikely:  she has no categories for processing what she probably views as theological nonsense or rhetoric.
     Where do we go with this?  If God is indeed everywhere, how can anyone be erased from his purview, his knowledge and understanding?  And if God is nowhere, does this really matter at all?
     To the second question, we can reply that no, it does not.  Life comes, and it goes, and the universe moves on.  There's nothing else to say.  For those of us, and I count myself among them, who believe in God, embodied as he was in the person of Jesus Christ over two thousand years ago, however, both questions are chilling.  How can we be banished and erased simultaneously?  Is not God's memory eternal and everlasting?
     Of course it is.  But God's omnipresence is also his omniscience:  neither can work independently of the other.  As God banishes, forever, God forgets, forever.
     But in a personal universe of personal beings, though we can try to ignore the logic of our personal origins, we still face this question:  who would wish to be forgotten forever?

     At the risk of shamelessly advertising myself, I am happy to announce the publication of my fifth book, Memory as Life, Life as Memory:  The Mystery of Memory.  It's available online at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and others.  Below, I present a photo (my apologies for making you twist your neck to get a good view!) of the front cover, and below that, the book's description that appears on the back cover:





     "This is a book about memory, the power of memory, the weight of memory, the presence of memory.  It's about how memory works, and it's about how memory moves and shapes us, deeply and profoundly, every moment of every day.  Most of all, however, it's about how memory points us to some questions that, try as we might, we cannot elude altogether, questions that force us to confront the very nature of existence.
     Suppose that no one, no one at all, remembered us?  Suppose that no one, no one at all, remembered the universe?  How can we make sense of a world that one day will be utterly gone and forgotten?
     Memory makes us speak of things we may not want to accept or understand, thrusts us into things lying beyond what we can picture, imagine, or know.  Twisting itself around our heart and burrowing into our soul, memory stretches us.  It stretches us to ponder purpose, it stretches us to consider meaning.  Memory forces us to think about how unbearably complex we, and this bewildering world, can be if nothing precedes or follows them.
     Memory opens our heart to God."

     I hope you'll take the plunge and read it!

     At one point in his intriguing and thoughtful The Poetics of Space, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard observes, "Would a bird build a nest if it did not have its instinct for confidence in the world?"
     All of us have seen, I suspect, bird nests.  Some of us have seen them from afar, some of us up close, some only see them during the winter, when all deciduous leaves have fallen, and still others see them, seemingly randomly, on the ground.  Bachelard suggests that we find comfort in the idea of a nest, that a nest connotes, for most of us, a sense of protection and security, a haven and enclave in which we set ourselves apart from the vicissitudes of life, the pains of the world.
     Yet Bachelard notes that a bird would not build its nest unless it had "confidence" in the world.  Ironically, we would not build a nest if we did not believe in the fundamental goodness and resilience of the world.  Even though we may build a nest for protection from the world, we nonetheless believe in the worth of that world.  We want to keep living in it.
     Indeed.  Although nests are havens, those who live in them understand that they are not permanent abodes.  They pass constantly between them and the world.  They use the world to build their nests, they need the world to sustain themselves.  They understand that despite its insecurities, they require the world's presence in their lives.
     Even if we dismiss or fear the world, we cannot live without it.  We would not be here if not for the world, we would not be able to live without the provisions we find in it.
     In many ways, we live between nest and world, hiding as well as appearing, ensconced yet visible and active.  We live as if both are true. We live as if both have dignity and worth.  We live as if, even if we may not necessarily believe it, the world and whatever we do to avoid it, are worthwhile and true.
     We live as if, apart from trying to fathom an accidental universe, there is a God.

     Norbert Schemansky, who won weightlifting medals at four Olympic games early in the last century, died last week at the age of 92.  If you've never heard of him, you're not the only one.  Very few people have.  Although Schemansky shone in the tiny community of Olympic weightlifters, he was a virtual unknown everywhere else.  In fact, when he returned to his home town after winning a medal at the Olympics, he had to flag a cab to get home.  No one was there to greet him, no one was there to remember him.
     In an interview he gave later in his life, Schemansky observed, "You give up so much. Yeah, sometimes, I wonder why I did it."
     It's a familiar dilemma, one we noted yesterday in considering a quote from Franz Kafka:  why do we do anything, anything at all?
     Because we're here, because we can.  Because we live.
     True enough.  The far larger question, however, is this:  why do we live?
     In ourselves, we'll never know.  How can we?  We're finite.
     That's why we need God.  Though we can live with mystery, and do so every day of our lives, we may not find it as easy to die with it.
     Absent God, we will leave short of understanding the greatest puzzle of all.

     "All is imaginary--family, office, friends, the street--all imaginary, far away or close at hand, the woman closest of all, but the truth is only that you are pressing your head against the wall of a windowless and doorless cell."
     So said Czech novelist Franz Kafka, perhaps most famous for his books, The Castle and The Trial, two novels that, along with his Metamorphosis, explore the disenchantment and alienation which, as he saw it, plague the human experience.
       In some ways, Kafka, along with Karl Marx, was absolutely correct.  Many people living in this "modern" world feel lonely and apart from their lives and the days in which they live them.  Though they get up each morning and go about their tasks and callings, they frequently wonder why they do, and they often feel deeply separated from what these activities really mean for them.  They indeed feel as if they are banging their heads against a blank wall.
     We think here of the rock band Pink Floyd's acclaimed film, The Wall.  The Wall chronicles and explores the inner journey of its protagonist Pink, returning again and again to the image of him standing before a high wall, a wall that, try as he might, he can never climb.  His life seems pointless, as if he is always confronting a wall he cannot overcome.
     Perhaps some of us relate.  We all encounter walls, walls of challenge, walls of futility that, despite our best efforts, we will never be able to conquer.  Death is certainly one. Paralysis is another.  Birth defects are one more.  If we view these challenges through the lens of a terminal planet, a planet with no hope and no future, a planet governed by the opaqueness of life's end, it's often no stretch to lapse into the hopelessness of it all.
     Yet most of us do not.  We keep going.  We keep on pressing our heads against the walls of the windowless cell.  All things considered, we would rather live than die.
     Life is indeed grand, a sweet gift to us all.  Even if it one day ends.
     The good news, however, is that if life is indeed meaningful--and almost all of us agree it is--it will never end.  Life is only meaningful in a meaningful universe.
     We can't have it both ways.  Rest well, Franz Kafka.
     

     Peace is a wonderful thing.  As I, along with millions, perhaps billions of other people across the globe, remembered September 11 over the weekend, I attended a vigil for peace at a United Church of Christ church in my community.
     Regrettably, peace was not a prime topic of conversation immediately after the events of day fifteen years ago.  For many, it was revenge.  Yes, many Westerners, Americans in particular, came together in a beautiful and largely unprecedented spirit of community, many also longed to avenge the loss of nearly 3,000 lives on home soil.
     And who can blame them?  When we are hit, our first instinct is to hit back.  Without cataloging the many conflicts that the exercise of this instinct has unleashed upon the planet, and without minimizing the deep, deep pain suffered by people who lost loved ones in tragedy of September 11, I, with no small amount of trepidation, might suggest that perhaps the little noticed at the time calls for peace had some merit.  Yes, nations need to defend themselves, and yes, justice is essential, and yes, it is a profoundly fallen world, a world to which total peace may never come.
     Yet as we at the peace vigil remembered Sunday night, when violence and evil come upon us, we do well to respond to it with not more violence and evil (properly understood), but as Romans 12 reminds us, deliberately considered and measured good.
     In the end, peace must--and one day, in the hidden and often unfathomable purpose of God, will--reign.

     The end of last week's work week was September 9.  Here is the blog I wrote but failed to post.
     Sixty-six years ago on this day in Los Angeles, California, my parents were joined in marriage.  Though they are now gone, my father since 1983, my mother since 2010, I cannot help but remember the import of the day.  Had it not happened, neither I nor my three siblings would be here, would not have had the opportunity we've had to live this life and experience some of its wonders.  So we are all thankful for September 9.
     We all have our dates of memory, signal points in our lives, days of liminality from which much significance has sprung.  We delight and rejoice in them even while we touch the pain with which they leave us when the people involved in them are gone.  It's a funny, life, a curious blend of dark and light, an enigmatic mix of insight and ignorance. We know it, we love, but we can't own it.  Regardless of the date, irrespective of the event and moment, when all the dust settles, we are still powerless to retain it beyond what they will give us.
     This is of course frustrating, even depressing, but what can we do?
     On the one hand, nothing:  life is how it is.  On the other hand, everything:  life is precisely how it is.
     Is life about God or is life about us?  Or is it about both?  In his sermon (Acts 17) on Mars Hill in first century Athens, the apostle Paul observed, "In him [God] we live and breathe and have our being."  This seems to hit the mark.  We will wrestle with finitude's vexations until the day we die.  And we do so because, in ourselves, we will never know anything else.  But we are not everything there is.
     I miss my parents, but I would miss them even more if I knew it was just me and a dark, insouciant universe.

     "Sometimes I wish I was never born at all . . . "  So sang Freddie Mercury, the late lead singer for the band Queen.  It's a poignant yet tragic desire, a desire, however, I suspect many of us, at times, might have shared.  Sometimes life overwhelms, sometimes who we are inundates us, and sometimes the thought of being born simply to die is, as Albert Camus pointed out long ago, "absurd."
     Perhaps.  Thinking about what he believes to be, in context, the futility of existence, the writer of Ecclesiastes observes, "Better off than both of them [the living] is the one who has never existed, who has never seen the evil activity that is done under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 4:3).  Better, he contends, to not have lived than to live and be witness to the vexing machinations of the human species.
     On the one hand, Camus and Ecclesiastes are correct:  if life is indeed absurd, why bother with it?  Yet if we, through no effort or fault of our own, find ourselves here, here on this planet, here in this life, are we not better to, as Paul Sartre noted, to take hold of it and live it to its fullest?
     It seems that we are.  However, unless we resolve the essential conundrum of life's absurdity, we will still live and die in existential contradiction.  We'll never know why we ever lived, except that, well, we lived.  Though this is certainly true, I think that, in our heart of hearts, we all wonder about it:  why us?  Why anything at all?
     In the end, it's either absurdity and bravery or faith and God.
     Be thankful:  you're here.

     "Then I looked again at all the acts of oppression which were being done under the sun.  And behold I saw the tears of the oppressed and that they had no one to comfort them; and on the side of their oppressors was power, but they had no one to comfort them" (Ecclesiastes 4:1)
     The writer makes a good point.  Although we rightly weep over at the pain and oppression that roam across the world, and often crater at the immensity of coercive suffering that visits too many of our fellow human beings, we can realize that those who are causing this pain, though they have power, and though they have authority, as the writer notes, they really have nothing.  In truth, they are separating themselves from their humanness, ripping apart who they really are.  They are giving up their place in the human community.
     And there is no one, as the writer observes, who will invite them back.  Though Josef Stalin ruled Russia with total authority for over twenty years, his word and will unchallenged, he lived a life alone and apart.  He became, in the narrative of Aleksandr Solzhenitysn's First Circle, one whom no one could know, who could not be loved, a person who, in making victims of so many, had become a victim himself.
     This of course doesn't justify Stalin's actions, nor does it offer much comfort to those whose lives were destroyed, utterly destroyed by his rabid paranoia.  Such things will never be remedied in this present existence.  But these words do allow us to better understand the character of an oppression that, unfortunately and broadly speaking, affects, in some way, all of us.  Oppression is never right, and it is, tragically, driven by a thirst for power which will never be satisfied.  Such thirsting is, as the writer opines elsewhere in Ecclesiastes, "vanity."  It's worthless.
     As Lord Acton cogently put it, "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely."  So did Stalin (and all other oppressors as well) die, corrupted absolutely by the absolute nature of their power.

     Yesterday, America celebrated Labor Day.  It's a good day.  It's a day to take time to think about and honor those who work, those who, day after day after day, engage in some type of vocational occupation.
     Most of us accept work as an inevitable fact of existence.  In many respects, it is.  Most of us must work. Not all of us of course necessarily like what we do.  And not all of us enjoy getting up for work each day. Nonetheless, to work is to be human, and to be human is to work.  Working enables us to discover our humanness most fully.  It challenges us, involves us, enables us, fills us.  Working gives us a more complete grasp of who we are in our world.
     More broadly speaking, work has a point.  When we work, however enthusiastically, imperfectly, or apathetically we do so, we echo the fact of a personal creator.  We are people who, when we work, whether we know it or not, are contributing and communicating.  We are contributing to the greater good of the planet, we are communicating the presence of a good God.  Consciously or not, we are underscoring that life has a meaning greater than living day to day.  We are stating that although, yes, we must in most instances work to survive, we nevertheless see hope and meaning beyond it.
      Absent an intentional beginning, the cosmos has no reason to be.  And we have no reason to work.  But we do.  So it is that we testify daily to the necessity of an intelligent and personal creator.

     Fear is a powerful thing, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill.  I think about this whenever I hear or read about a municipality or, worse, national government enacting measures or making decisions which have the net effect of denying adherents of religions other than those which they pursue the freedom to enjoy the various expressions of those beliefs.  We saw this rather acutely in France a few weeks ago, when police officers walked onto beaches to order women wearing a "burkini" to remove it; we notice it in America when municipal governments from Illinois to Georgia to Massachusetts deny Muslim groups permits to build a mosque or, oddly enough, a cemetery; and, looking at it from another vantage point, we see it when assorted factions of a religious worldview seek to prevent members of other factions from exercising their propensities in worship or practice.
     Ultimately, these responses to expressions of religious belief are driven by fear, fear of physical harm, fear of ideological tarnish, fear of political upheaval, and more.  As I said earlier, fear can help, and fear can harm.  In these instances, I believe it to be harmful. Yes, differences, particularly religious ones, make many of us uncomfortable, occasionally filling us with dread and trepidation.  On the other hand, we should recognize that we will never agree on everything, nor will we ever live in a world (unless it is one like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World) in which everyone thinks exactly alike. Jesus was not born in a monotone world, nor did Mohammad or Buddha emerge in a homogeneous culture.  But their beliefs thrive to this day.
     It seems that the power of God, however we define it, is more than able to surmount and overcome and resolve the fears of human beings.  We are simply called to believe.
     And we should--in every way.