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.