Dmitri Shostakovich, the Russian composer who wrote in the shadow of the dictatorial reigns of Vladmir Lenin and Josef Stalin, understood the power of music as those who did not live under such cultural and political restraints can.  He used his music to express, clandestinely, his view of the regime  In his memoir, Testimony, he states, "I'll never believe that a man who understood nothing could feel the [his] Fifth Symphony. Of course they understood, they understood what was happening around them and they understood what the Fifth was about."
     When Shostakovich released his Fifth Symphony, pundits and leaders throughout the Soviet government praised it.  For them, it fit the national mood, the Russian people then laboring (although no one would dare acknowledge it) under the oppressive policies, pogroms, and purges of Stalin.  In truth, as we now know from the quote above, Shostakovich actually wrote the Fifth as a veiled commentary on what he considered to be the debased witness of the prevailing order.  He knew the power of music better than anyone could have imagined.
     So it was that conductor Daniel Barenboim in 2008 presented a concert of young Israeli and Palestinian youth in Jerusalem.  Though he knew he could not resolve the political divisions, he knew that he could, as he put it, "bring music" to the land.  Just as Shostakovich's Fifth inspired Russians who understood it, so did Barenboim's action inspire, if only for a few moments, those who were trying to think beyond the immediate conflict to continue their work.
     Though I would not venture to speculate on God's movements in either of these works and events, I will note that the power of music is transcendent.  It lifts us, it encourages, it enables us to imagine greater things.  Music speaks to us of the potential of God.

     "Without revelation, the people perish."  Translated as the first part of Proverbs 29:18 in the King James version of the Bible, these few words say volumes about the state of reality.  From the Bible's standpoint, revelation is communication, communication from God.  Revelation describes the fact of God, presents the words of God; revelation discloses who God is.
     Without revelation, as the writer says, we miss the point.  We live in a closed world, a terminal system.  We cannot see beyond ourselves.  Revelation is the higher ideal, the greater meaning without which we cannot make sense of who we are.  Absent revelation, we wallow in the speculations of our finitude, even while we remain fully aware of our tendency to look beyond it.
     A few nights ago, I chatted with one of my nephews about religion.  Long an atheist, he has now come to decide that society needs religion.  Religion, he adds, in a materialistic sense, devoid of any supernatural appendage.  In his mind, religion provides a social fabric, a basis upon which a society can construct a viable sense of itself.
     To accomplish this, he observed, religion posits some type of higher ideal, an ideal that guides and frames social deliberation and exchange.  Like (my words) revelation.
     My point is that, despite the efforts of so-called "antifoundationalists" to prove that we do not need any guiding ideal to function rationally, we need a higher vision to make sense of our lives.  I of course argue that this vision is embodied in the words of divine revelation; my nephew, and many others, will contend otherwise.  Either way, we agree that we need a greater compass on our lives.
     So whose revelation is right?  All of them?  None of them?  If we strip religion of its supernatural dimensions, we are left with a revelation of ourselves and our ideals, ideals which we and ourselves, and only we and ourselves, assess and judge.  And how do we ultimately know?  It seems that revelation and greater vision are most meaningful if they reflect the vision of a reality out of which this present one comes.

     It came out a couple of years ago, but I never got around to seeing it.  Browsing through the library recently, I noticed it, so checked it out:  "Straight Outta Compton."  If you know anything about rap or hip-hop, you may be familiar with this movie.  If not, it's the story of how N.W.A (Ni---With Attitude), a seminal rap group, emerged from the racial challenges that characterize southwest Los Angeles to find enormous success in the music world.  NWA's success flowed directly out of its members' ability to capture the anger, rage, and helplessness felt by so many young African Americans about their lot in life. Harrassed by police almost daily, shut out of the economic mainstream, living hand to mouth, and finding little future in high school, millions of disenfranchised youth found much with to identify in NWA's music.  Many of NWA's lyrics were harsh and unforgiving, and freqently offensive to many other parts of the American populace.  Yet their words reflected the reality out of which NWA had come.  For those who have not grown up with constant racism and police brutality, such pain is difficult to fathom, and enshrining it in rancorous lyrics makes it even more so.



     Yet NWA's lyrics talk of a world that is all too real to many, many people.  We can wonder why this world happens, and we can assert the possibility, given sufficient work, of escape or remedy from it.  Or we can ask about religion, even about God.  But unless we step into the shoes of those who have lived in this world, we will have trouble seeing a viable path through the angst.
     Yet if there is a transcendent God, if there is a larger picture to this world--every part of it--and if all people are valuable because they've been made in the image of this God, we can say that we are beholden to fuse our best understandings of sociology and scripture to find solution.  We grasp the anger, we believe the transcendent.  We feel the pain, we point to supernatural relief.
     We suggest Jesus.  But we should never forget the reasons from which NWA's lyrics were birthed.  We cannot dismiss the world that easily, cannot posit eternal bliss quickly. Heaven and hell aside, we live in the reality of the now.
     Rest well, Eazy-E.  Thanks for opening our eyes.

     By now, from my vantage point in the American Midwest, the leaves are falling all the time.  Each day I see another tree barren, stripped of its chlorophyll, alone, its summer splendor gone.  Yet come spring, every tree will return, bursting with green once more. The land will live again.
     A few days ago, amidst these autumnal contemplations, I took some time to scatter my aunt Jeanne's ashes.  As you may recall, she passed away roughly a year ago, her life taken by cancer at the age of 85.  The trees by which I scattered them, colorful and plenteous when she and my wife stopped to paint them, had nearly vanished.  Only the limbs remained, bending and flexing in the breeze.
     I thought about how much Jeanne loved life, how much she loved my siblings and me, how much joy and wonder she brought into our lives.  And I thought about where she is today, secure in the eternity to which she so much looked forward.  I marveled at the astonishing fusion of ubiquity and temporality of which life consists, the gaping abysses and ground into which it seems so often to plunge:  the vexing puzzles and doors of existence.
     Before me this existence lived, manifesting itself in the final throes of autumn, teaching me, teaching us, teaching the planet about the rhythms and patterns of what is. We live, we bloom, we die.
     And enmeshed in the compass of eternity, we, like the land, we live again.

     I remember his words well.  As America careened amidst the countercultural machinations of the Sixties, Tom Hayden's insights captured for many of us the heart of what the movement was about:  liberating government for the good of the people. Profoundly disappointed with the Johnson and Nixon's adminstrations' handling of the war in Vietnam, millions of us came to think that the government, the establishment, lived only for itself.  We wanted a voice.
     And Tom Hayden, who passed away yesterday, was one of our icons.  Primary author of the Port Huron Statement that called for participatory democracy, testifying to the House "UnAmerican Activities" Committee about his convictions, enduring the circus trial of the Chicago 8, and much, more more, Tom Hayden spoke for a generation of disillusioned people, people who believed that the country, gripped by a seemingly fascist Nixonian regime, could do better.
     As I was writing my first book, Imagining Eternity, and making my initial explorations of my journey out of the Catholic church and into the political radicalism of the Sixties, I wanted to use some of Hayden's words to illustrate my angst.  So I wrote him, requesting permission to quote from one of his books, a transcript of his testimony to the House Committee I mentioned above.  "OK with me," he wrote back, "go ahead."
     The U.S. government, he said in the book, is a government "which relies more and more on the use of force, on the use of police to maintain itself rather than relying on consent or persuasion or traditional techniques of democracy.”
     Though we may wish to dismiss Hayden's words as artifacts of their time or distortions of some form of religious truth, given the way in which wealth and highly connected lobbyists shape so much of the American government's policies today, we eer if we overlook his essential point:  democracy only works if it works for everyone.
     We're all equal before God.
     Thanks, Tom Hayden.  Farewell.

     By now, most of the international news media have left Haiti, off to cover the next natural disaster to visit the planet.  Likewise, most of the people of the West, unless they have been reminded of the hurricane in recent days, have moved on to other causes. Though many Western aid organizations are on the ground in Haiti, most have ended their fund raising appeals for the aftermath of the hurricane.
     But the people of Haiti remain.  Thousands remains homeless, thousands are mourning loved ones, thousands more are dying of cholera, and the entire country languishes, crumpled under the weight of the second major natural disaster to hit the nation in four years.
     Who's still thinking about Haiti?  Granted, few of us can leave our responsibilities to offer help, and sure, even fewer of us can direct resources sufficient to make even a dent in the country's ills.  Perhaps the most important thing the rest of us can do at this point is to pray.  Yes, many of us can raise all kind of objections of the efficacy of prayer, but unless we are prepared to acknowledge that this world is entirely without purpose or meaning, we do so in vain.  Although God may seem indifferent to Haiti's pain, we make our day even darker if we assert that this means he is not there at all.
     For this makes us no more than a warm, soon to be cold plop of matter in an equally warm, soon to be cold universe.  If we care about the people of Haiti at all, we must care about God.
     And that's why we pray.

     Do you believe in ghosts?  I ask because I recently read a short piece about how the ancients (people who lived up to the fall of Rome) perceived the notion of ghost.  In it, the author makes the point that the ancients used the same word to describe ghost and image.  A ghost is therefore an image.  So it is real?
     Moreover, the author (Patrick Crowley, a scholar of the art of the Roman world) goes on to say, for the ancients to develop an image of a ghost was to make an "image of an image."  Deciding how this might work raises interesting questions about how we moderns view the idea of image.
     To begin, we note that in the world out of which Rome was born, the only people group that believed humans to be the direct image of God were the Hebrews.  When they looked at themselves, the Hebrews therefore saw evidence of God.
     How do we make an image of an image of a divine image?  For this, we need to look past the Hebrew scriptures to the writings of the New Testament.  In these, we see that, as John puts it in the first chapter of his gospel, in Jesus, God became flesh, a living human being.  In Jesus, we therefore see not just an image of an image of the divine image, but a physical picture of an image made real in our reality.  Not an image of a memory, not an image of an image, not a ghost, but rather a living vision of what those who are made in the image of God can one day be.

          Will you enter the hut?  "Two Old Men," a short story by Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, tells the tale of two brothers, Elfin and Elisha.  Devout Christians both, one day Elfin and Elisha decide to do a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.  Not too many hours after they left, they came upon a hut.  Decrepit and barren, it did not look like a place in which they thought they should linger.  They soon heard, however, calls and cries of pain from behind the door.  Elfin and Elisha therefore faced a decision.  Should they remain focused on their pilgrimage or should they look inside the hut to see whether they could help?
     In a decision reminiscent of that of the two men who ignored the Samaritan man on the road to Jericho, Elfin replied, no:  his journey to Jerusalem was more important.  He continued on his way.  In a move on which the entire story hinges, Elisha, on the other hand, did the opposite:  he "entered the hut."  Elisha set aside his own concerns to attend to those of others.  Once he stepped into the hut, the brother realized that he had come upon a group of people greatly in need of assistance.  He remained for several days, days that soon stretched into weeks, lending his energy and resources to alleviating the suffering he found.
     Once Elisha felt as if these people were well enough to live on their own, he took his leave.  Realizing that he could not possibly get to Jerusalem to meet Elfin, he began his journey home.
     Meanwhile, Elfin was walking home when he saw the hut again.  Immediately, he noticed a change.  The people in it were happy.  Their lives had been restored.  What he asked them, had happened?  When he heard, he was amazed:  who would do such a kind thing?
     As Elfin continued, he and Elisha met each other on the road.  Once Elfin related his experience and realized what his brother had done, he grasped that, in words that end the story, "The best way to keep one's vows to God and to do his will is for each man while he lives to show love and do good to others."
    Wherever we think we ought to go, we should always take time "to enter the hut."

     Peace?  Every October 9th, Yoko Ono Lennon, widow of the former Beatle John Lennon, places a full page ad in selected newspapers around the country.  Timed to Lennon's birthday, its message is simple, yet profound:  "Give peace a chance."  Don't we all wish this for the planet?  Don't we all wish that humanity, from its politics to its culture to its international disputes, would strive not for hegemony but for unanimity and concord?
     On the one hand, Lennon's plea seems frighteningly idealistic.  Total global peace is not likely to happen.  On the other hand, his vision, like all meaningful visions, should cause us to ponder its possibilities.  Amidst the horrific displays of conflict and hatred around the world, we do well to step back and consider what the world could be.
     Even if we believe it will never be so.  Like most acts of faith, the hope of absolute peace is grounded in rational assessment of the potential before us.  As the letter to the Hebrews describes it, faith is a rational belief in a point and future we may not now necessarily see.  That's why it's called faith:  it's not all before us today.
     So it is that faith in peace understands its reality, yet it also understands that it is perhaps not for this one.  But this doesn't mean that we should not hold to it.
     God wants for us to believe, not in the circumstances of the moment, but in his ability to make them whole.

     Silence.  Do we live in a silent world?  Do we live in a noiseless world, a world without sound, absent of speech?
     Of course not.  The world is a cacophony of sound.  For some of us, however, it is a thoroughly silent world, a world in which we, and only we speak, a world totally void of any revelations or intimations of God.  This is the world of Ingmar Bergman's Silence, a film I watched recently.  Silence tells the story of two women, two sisters, and the young boy who belongs to one of them.  It has very little action, barely any dialogue.  The plot is tragic, the outcome heartbreaking.
     But that's the point.  If God is not there, all of us live in a world of silence, a world of our own furtive making, a world devoid of anything other than our own broodings on the joy and fleetingness of existence.  It's a world of bravery in the face of absurdity, a landscape of magnificent ardor amidst certain futility.  Like Jean Paul Sartre, Bergman understands that if there is no God, we live in a lonely world, a world spinning through a universe that cares nothing about it a world whose creatures mean, in one moment, greatness, and yet the next, nothing.
     In his novel Silence, Japanese novelist Shusako Endo paints a world of similar proportions.  At one point in his narrative, however, he presents the notion of God.  God, he suggests, is like an onion, an onion whose layers we peel one at a time, carefully unfolding each nuance of who he is to us.  Though God does not speak immediately, though God does not display his totality at any point, he is there.  We just need to find him.
     Even if I do not always see and hear God in this silent world, I know he is there.  I know I have purpose, I know I have point.  All of us do.  As Bergman asserts, however, in a silent world, we have neither one.

     If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that we do not always do the right thing. No one among us eludes our own fallenness.  We all, as many religions put it, sin.  We all do not always do what pleases or sustains the divine fabric of the universe.
     Few religious groups understand this as well as the Jews.  Yesterday, Jews around the world celebrated Yom Kippur, or the "Day of Atonement."  On this day, Jews acknowledge their sinfulness before God.  They admit their wrongdoing, own up to their prevarications.  And they repent.  They tell God they are sorry for disobeying and violating his commandments and laws.  Then they announce their intention to begin anew to live lives that please their creator, to live lives of justice and good deeds.
     Although we may not agree with the specifics of the Jewish approach, and though we may not see wrongdoing in quite the same way, we must all admit that, to repeat, we do not always do the right thing. Every one of us is (or ought to be) aware that, at times, he or she upsets the delicate balance of freedom and order that governs the cosmos.
     If this balance is to be more than relative, there must be a God.  The Jews recognize this clearly.  So do Christians, and so do Muslims.  Adherents of countless other religions do, too.  Genuinely meaningful morality is impossible without God.  Otherwise, repentance is no more than shouting in a relativistic darkness, the darkness of an accidental, and therefore, as scientist Steven Weinberg observes, pointless universe.

     "And what's the good of it?" I said, "What reasons made you call from formless void this earth we tread . . . Yea, Sire, why shaped you us, 'who in this tabernacle groan'--if ever a joy be found herein, such joy no man had wished to win if he had never known!"
     So said an imaginary person, perhaps one through Thomas Hardy himself was voicing his thoughts, to God, in his poem "New Years Eve."  Why did God make and "shape" us? Why do we need to be, to live?
     Because God loves us, is the oft used Christian response.  Though I do not dispute the fact of God's love, the sentiments of Hardy's poem do cause one to wonder why, even if at the end of all space and time God will redeem all things and restore all that has been lost, humanity must endure such pain and tragedy to experience such bliss?
     Because of humanity's sin, is the oft used Christian response.  Again, I do not dispute the fact of sin, but to an outsider looking in, one might wonder why it happened, why Adam and Eve made the fateful decision, why the world was plunged into moral darkness.
     The fact of human choice is a frightfully difficult one to grasp, a notion I do not pretend to understand fully.  But I will offer that without choice people are deterministic robots, bereft of any point, captives of a nothingness of destiny.  Why do we live?  Why do we choose? Frustratingly, we cannot meaningfully do one without the other.
     In this is the puzzle and conundrum of humanness.

     1492.  It's one of the most pivotal years in human history.  "In 1492," as the school kids' song goes, "Columbus sailed the blue."  As almost everyone knows, what Columbus found on the other side of the "blue" changed the world.  Humans of two hemispheres, neither of whom had been aware of the other, suddenly were, almost overnight, finding themselves confronting worlds that literally blew their collective minds.  No one would ever be the same.
     Sadly, however, as anyone who has read the late historian Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (and similar works) knows, although 1492 may have been a momentuous and lucrative year for many Europeans, it was a terrible one for the natives of the Americas. 1492 marked the beginning of a lengthy European oppression and exploitation of the peoples of the Americas, a run of centuries of difficulty and pain, pain which, in some cases, continues, in multiple forms, to this day.
     The worst of it is that in too many instances this exploitation was justified in the name of Christianity.  It was an awful stain on the love of God.
     Historian Erna Paris once observed that, "Attaching God to history is the most powerful nationalism of all."  Whenever we try to juxtapose God and the history we are trying to create, we blur a line we cannot possibly cross:  the boundary between what is here and what is not, the difference between the visible speculations of finitude and the hidden certitudes of infinity.  We think we speak for God.
     And God, it seems, whether he is talking about politics, economics, religion, or inculturation, does not need us to speak for him.  He doesn't need our societal connections and associations to give the planet purpose or meaning.  But we need God. We need God to speak to us.  And as long as we unilaterally construct our sense of greatness and purpose on our limited and necessarily incomplete perceptions of divine will and judgment, we will never hear him.
     Ah, Christopher Columbus.  What a puzzle, what a glorious and messy puzzle, you bequeathed us!

     Desert Trip?  If you're a baby boomer or if you enjoy classic rock and roll, you are surely aware of what is being called the "rock event of the decade" coming up this weekend.  For three nights in the desert community of Indio, California (set below the San Gorgornio Mountains, near Palm Springs), this concert will feature performances by the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, the Who, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and Roger Waters (formerly of Pink Floyd).  It's a classic rock aficionado's dream come true.
     In preparation, many rock stations around the U.S. are playing songs from the massive music catalogs these bands/individuals have accumulated over the decades they have been doing music  So it was that this morning I heard a song I had not heard in a long time, Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush."  "I dreamed," he sings, "I saw the silver space ships flying in the yellow haze of the sun, there were children crying and colors flying all around the chosen ones . . . they were flying Mother Nature's silver seed to a new home."
     It's an idyllic vision, a call for destiny and restoration, a summons to look for the greater picture beyond the political compromise and environmental destruction, driven by the West's immense thirst for oil, of the early Seventies.  It's a paean to hope.  Listening to the words, I recalled where I was when I first heard them, and where I am today, on the other side of faith.
     And that has made all the difference.  For it is faith which enables us to see that genuine hope, though it is certainly rooted in our human abilities, must have a framework grounded in transcendence, a God made human being in whom all things come together, to really ring true.
     We will not likely make a fully restored world on our own.
     Enjoy the show.

     Security or compassion?  That seems to be the locus by which many Western nations are choosing how they will respond to the continuing refugee crises sweeping the planet. Comfortably affluent, secure in their laws and traditions, most of the wealthiest countries on earth appear to be astonishingly indifferent to the plight of the many millions of people who are not enjoying the fundamental comforts of human agency and form. The appear to be blithely cavalier about the desire of these waves of human beings for a safe place in which to raise their families and contribute to the world's adventure.
     The people of the West of course desire safety, too.  Don't we all?  If I may, I offer a line from the seventh chapter of Ecclesiastes, which reads, "It is good that you grasp one thing and not let go of the other, for the one who trusts God will come forth with them both."
     Turning this verse to the refugees and the West, I say that, all things considered, we can do both.  We can harbor battered refugees while ensuring safety at home.  We lack only the political will and, more importantly, the courage of faith, to do it.  Though I do not claim intimate knowledge of the mind of God, I can note that, on the basis of numerous passages in the Hebrew and Christian bibles, God wants us to exercise love and compassion towards our fellow human beings.  He longs for peace, he longs for care, he longs for unanimity on the planet.  Yes, we must protect ourselves, and yes, we must look out for our families but, equally yes, we must love our neighbor.  As did the Good Samaritan (Luke 10), we must go the "extra mile" for our human brethren.
     And if we are to place any faith in the truth and validity of this verse from Ecclesiastes, we can conclude that if we do this wisely and rightly, yes, we can do both. We can look beyond ourselves.  We can look to the love of God.

     Although I gain much from the great art of the distant past, the sculptures of ancient Greece, the often misshapen yet devout depictions of the Middle Ages, the marvelous style of the Renaissance, the stirring colors of the Impressionists, and more, I often find its more contemporary successors more thought provoking.  In particular, I think of American artist Jackson Pollock.
     


     At first glance, one might wonder what is Pollock trying to convey in this painting.  At first glance, it looks to be no more than a random mishmash of color.  At first glance, it appears to reflect an absence of thought and rationality.
     If we understand the pressures under which Pollock labored for most of his life, if we can grasp the angst that drove him to frequent bouts of turmoil and despair, if we can see how much his art reflects the heart of a troubled but highly visionary individual, we can perhaps comprehend.  Though the art of the more bygone past certainly reflected the inner worlds of its creators, in Jackson Pollock we see art that endeavors to present an artist's inner world as it more deeply is, as the artist directly experiences it, as he meditates and responds to who he is in a bewildering world.  It is life, it is death:  it is existence.
     Though Pollock died in 1956, his art endures.  It's art as perhaps art, in the fractured planet on which we live today, most is.  It's art that reminds us that life is more than what we imagine it to be.  It's art that, rightly viewed, underscores the necessity of transcendence, and that, without transcendence, life is no more than what our personal angst makes it to be.  It comes, it goes, and it is no more.
     It's a hard way to go.

     Amidst the turmoil sweeping across the globe, the wars, disputed elections, famines, contentious migrations and abandoned refugees, and more, one often wonders why, in the sated affluence of the West, millions of people devote hour upon hour to . . . college football.
     For those who play, college football is a way of life.  For those who follow it, it is, in many cases, likewise.  For those who earn their living from it, and there are many, ranging from the coaches to the commentators to the people who serve food at the stadiums, it is, for some, highly lucrative.
     Numerous pundits have commented on what they term the sorry state of college football, citing the enormous amounts of money spent on it, the inordinate attention paid to it, the way in which it seems to eclipse all other functions of a college, and more.  I cannot disagree.  The money is excessive, the exploitation deplorable, the myopic focus befuddling.
     It's a tough call.  The sport entertains millions, keeps millions more employed, and provides a way for many people to attend college, after a fashion, they would not have otherwise.  If we measure all things with a financial yardstick, this is fine.  If we make our measure transcendence and larger meaning, however, we will view the sport more circumspectly.  We will remember that meaning is bigger than present joy and glory, more profound than temporal achievement, that genuine meaning is found in the degree to which we align our finitude with eternity, in the extent to which we ground our moment with the eternal fact and truth of God.
    Only then will it really matter.

     Think about our Jewish brothers and sisters today.  At sundown last night, Jews around the world entered into the holiest time of their year:  the high holy days, the Days of Awe.  Beginning with Rosh Hashana (the New Year) and culminating in Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), these days give every Jew opportunity to reflect on the past and prepare for the future.  These days are marked by repentance, discipline, singing, gathering, reading, and meditation, days of intense inwardness--always in community--regarding one's relationship with his/her fellow human beings and God.
     All of us can learn from the Days of Awe.  All of us can profit from taking time to think, to really think about what and how we are doing with our life, about where we have been, spiritually, vocationally, and personally, and where we want to go, come tomorrow.  In this highly charged and media driven age, we all can benefit from setting ourselves apart to ponder deeper things, to contemplating the greater meaning and realities in which we inevitably move.
     Although we may not believe we move in a bigger picture, we fool ourselves if we think we can live meaningfully without accepting the fact of its presence.  We are born for transcendence, we are made to look beyond the immediate and present.  In these Days of Awe, our Jewish brethren remind us that we are more than material concoctions, more than nexuses of chemical exchange.  They tell us that we are creatures of this earth, yes, but simultaneously, to borrow the name of an REM song, creatures of the "Great Beyond."
     Enjoy your pondering.