I guess I'm on an Anne Sexton roll this week.  I share today one more of her poems, this one called, "The Awful Rowing Towards God."
     It begins with lines describing the ins and outs of her childhood, "a story, a story!," filled with her affection for her dolls, her experience of school, her encounters with various people she comes across.
     Roughly midway through the poem, Sexton observes that as she continues to grow, "God was there like an island I had not rowed to, still ignorant of Him, my arms, and my legs worked; and I grew, I grew . . . I am rowing, I am rowing, though the wind pushes me back and I know that that island will not be perfect, it will have the flaws of life . . . but there will be a door and I will open it and I will get rid of the rat inside me, the gnawing pestilential rat.  God will take it with his two hands and embrace it."
     Sexton echoes a perennial human longing and desire:  to know God.  Believing that she will see a door, one day, a door which she opens, a door through which will embrace the fullness of her flaws and despair, Sexton continues rowing, always rowing toward God.
     So many of us are rowing, rowing through life, rowing through its joys, befuddlements and challenges, rowing toward an island we would like to think is there, rowing toward God, however we define him.  It is, as the poem concludes, our "tale," good and bad, sweet and not, the story of our life.
     Yet the poem finishes with this line, "this story ends with me still rowing." Sometimes God seems frightfully distant, sometimes he seems very near; we will never know everything about him in our earthly life.  Faith is believing that even though we are "still rowing," daily dealing with the contingencies of existence, we are nonetheless rowing with and toward purpose, the person of God.
     Otherwise, we're just rowing down an bottomless stream, living, enjoying, yet one day losing it all, without possibility of return.

     "God does not need too much wire to keep Him there, just a thin vein, with blood pushing back and forth in it, and some love."   So observed Pulitzer Prize winner poet Anne Sexton, who died in 1974 (this selection comes from her poem "Small Wire").
     It's no secret that Sexton all her life struggled with questions of identity, her own, the world's, God's.  In poem after poem she wondered aloud what the self and life meant, what it meant to live a life that often seemed so patently real yet so frustratingly futile. In this line from "Small Wire," she makes a telling point about our identity with or in God. If God is there, what keeps him there?  Us or God?
     Well, one might say, God is there whether we believe him to be or not.  True enough, but as a person with whom I was talking recently noted, how much of this belief do we owe to God and how much do we owe to ourselves?  In other words, if only a thin vein connects us to God, does this mean that belief is intrinsically tenuous, or does it mean that genuine belief requires very little of us?
     I might say that it's both.  Because belief, that is, the belief of faith, is inherently one rooted in incomplete knowledge, knowledge, as Paul puts it, "in part," it is indeed tenuous.  Yet because when distilled to its most fundamental components faith is exceedingly simple--trust and obey--it quite requires little of us:  we need only believe.
     Put these two together, however, and we have a challenge greater than all others: loving one whom we cannot see but who loves us more than all those whom we can.

      Believe it or not, yesterday was the first Sunday of Advent.  Christmas is upon us.  "Level every mountain," says Isaiah, "raise every plain.  Make the rough smooth, make the way straight.
     "And all flesh shall see the glory of the Lord."
     Indeed.  Isaiah is telling us to get ready, to get ready to commemorate, once more, the culmination of centuries of prediction and memory, to make ourselves ready to remember, again, that God is faithful, that what God promises he will surely bring to pass.
     Advent is about memory, the memory of God.  It brings to mind the things of God that, in the words of Gary Schmidt and Susan Felcher, may "have," for many of us, "disappeared."
     In this, Advent validates everything about who God is. Advent tells that we can remember with hope.  Advent reminds us that we can believe in the worth of the past, the past through God has been working to this very day.  It underscores the purpose of existence.
     Advent says to us that what seems to have disappeared (that is, for many of us, God) hasn't disappeared at all.  In the person of Jesus, the point of Advent, God has come, and God is here, completely and wonderfully present, available, and new.

     "God opens his hands," writes the psalmist, "and satisfies the desire of every living thing" (Psalm 104).  Although we all have much for which to give thanks in this coming season of celebration, perhaps the most important thing for which we can be thankful is that we can give thanks.  We can rejoice that we can be aware of who we are, that we can experience the gracious bounty of the universe, that we can know, really know, that we are beings who can create life, culture, and moral sensibility.  We can be grateful that we are here.
     Many a theologian has observed that all truth is God's truth.  If so, we can also give thanks for that which enables us to know everything else:  truth.  Even more important, we can give thanks that truth is embodied in a living being and that, in the providence of God, we can find it.
     Give thanks that despite the fractured state of modern spirituality, God is nonetheless able to disclose to us truth, the truth of life, the truth of death, the truth of existence, existence as it was communicated in the most wondrous existence of all, the person of God's son, Jesus Christ.
     Happy Thanksgiving!

     Ah, adventure, unemcumbered adventure.  Amidst the personal pilgrimmages that marked the Sixties in the West, many people sought to find their peace and meaning in venturing into remote and wild places.  On the Loose, a compendium of thoughts, reflections, and meditations on the virtue of wildness and all things apart, written by Terry and Renny Russell, two then college age students, appeared in 1967.  Published by the Sierra Club, On the Loose celebrated the joy of adventure.
     Its opening page contains this famous line from James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:  
   

"He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.”

     Joyce captures the moment perfectly.  To be alone, open, questing, and alone before the raw forces of existence, to have the moment to step into the wonder that hovers ever before us, the storehouses of marvel that existence holds.  To seek, to simply seek with no thought of what will come, only that it will be something other than now.

     As we move towards Thanksgiving in America--and remember similar days around the world--we think about the gift of life, the unrivaled astonishment of sentient existence and all that it bequeaths us.  We ponder the essence of what it means to be here, alive, moving, breathing, living--and dying.  And we pursue the spirit of inquiry and journey, the many opportunities we have to step into what life most deeply means.

     Some years ago, I read a book by Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God.  An atheist, Ehrenreich nonetheless found cause to wonder about what the Celtic religions called the "thinness" between this world and any others that may exist, that we perhaps live in the midst of a very slender boundary of immanence and transcendence.  I cannot disagree.  Moreover, as I re-read On the Loose, I find even more reason to do so.  The Russells offer us the greatest mystery of all:  why do we want to be free?

    Perhaps you've heard of the band Led Zeppelin?  One of the biggest bands of the Seventies, Led Zeppelin, a four person band from the backroads of England, rocked the world for nearly a decade until its drummer, John Bonham, died, tragically, of an alcohol induced overdose in 1979 at the age of 27.
     Driving this morning, I bumped into one of, to me, the group's most poignant songs, "Going to California" (maybe I find it particularly moving because I am originally from California!).  I share some of the lyrics:

                   "The sea was red and the sky was grey
                   Wondered how tomorrow could ever follow today.
                   The mountains and the canyons started to tremble and shake
                   As the children of the sun began to awake.
                   Seems that the wrath of the Gods
                   Got a punch on the nose and it started to flow;
                   I think I might be sinking.
                   Throw me a line if I reach it in time
                   I'll zmeet you up there where the path

                   Runs . . . "

     In lilting fashion, these lyrics present an image of simultaneous fear and wonder.  It wonders how tomorrow could ever follow today even as it recognizes that the mountains and canyons began to tremble and shake.  Perhaps this is the wrath of the "Gods," it continues, so, it adds, throw me a line and, I hope, I will reach it in time.

     Rightly do we fear the forces of nature.  Try as we might, we will never master them. Despite all our prognostications, we will never be able to time or predict meteorological upheaveals precisely.  We live in the "mercy" of the "gods" of our world.

     So we look for a line.  And we hope we reach it in time.  And we wonder how tomorrrow could ever follow today.  We wonder how, in this crazy and bewildering world, one thing could possibly follow another, how we can, in the seas of chaos that sweep across our lives, expect the sun to rise the next morning.

     But it always does.  The planet trembles, the planet shakes, but the planet continues. And we rejoice that we live in a world that, despite its fractures, endures.

     We rejoice even more in the dreams and meaning this world engenders.  Even today, California remains a dream for many people, a place of marvel and imagination, a land of ethereal potential.  Maybe it's your dream, maybe it's not.

     Either way, California, and the world in which it is planted, endures.  And it endures with meaning, a meaning birthed and sustained by the only possible thing that can:  God.

     Thanks, Led Zeppelin.

     "What would it take?"  So did a person in my atheist discussion group ask me a few weeks ago, "What would it take for you to give up your faith in God?"
     The too easy answer is to say, well, nothing.  My faith is rock solid.  Yet we fool ourselves if we think this is always true.  By its very nature, faith is tenuous.  It's there, but it's not, present, but absent, too.
     So, this person asked, on what basis do you hold your faith?  Evidence, I reply, evidence that God is there, evidence that only the presence of a personal intelligence explains the nature of humankind and the world, evidence that, all things considered, it's more logical, in every way, to attribute cosmic origins to a cognitive personal rather than an impossibly metaphysical nothingness.
     Ah, this person responds, this is bad evidence.  It will not hold up.  By whose standard, I say?  Moreover, even if one finds the physical evidence lacking, in the big picture, we do not build our faith on physical evidence alone.  Faith doesn't work that way.  In its core, faith is a sense of trust, a sense of trust in the veracity of a presence with whom we have a relationship.  It's subjective, yes, but it's a subjective response to an objective truth. It's no less a leap to suppose the world "just is."
     In the end, I add, my faith in God rests upon a finely woven tapestry of objective evidence and subjective truth.  Those who enter into this faith must decide that we cannot understand existence apart from grasping both, together and simultaneously, the necessary metaphysical and the essential facts of humanness, past, present, and future.
     Predictably, he was not convinced.  Maybe you're not, either.  That's quite all right.  We will not believe unless we decide we are willing to do so.
     It's really that simple.

     Have you heard of Francis Picabia?  Picabia was a French artist whose life spanned two centuries.  Born, in 1879, he died in 1953.  Picabia's art takes some getting used to, but when we juxtapose it with some of his prose, we venture into some intriguing dimensions of the human imagination.
     Picabia once wrote a short piece of poetry which he titled "I am a beautiful monster."
     Here's the text:

     I am a beautiful monster who shares his secrets with the wind.  What I love most in 
     others is myself.
     I am a beautiful monster; I have the sins of virtue for suppport.  My pollen stains the 
     roses from New York to Paris.
     I am a beautiful monster whose face conceals his countenance.  My senses have only 
     one thhought:  a frame without a picture!
     I am a beautiful monster with a velodrome for a bed; transparent cards populate my 
     dreams.
     I am a beautiful monster who sleeps with himself.  There are only seven in the world 
     and I want to be the biggest.

    And one of his most famous paintings, "Tetes Superposees" ("a head set above all else"):

     Picabia says he is a "beautiful monster."  Perhaps he is.  Perhaps we all are.  Perhaps we all wander through life focused solely on ourselves.  Perhaps we are all disjointed selves, broken beings, disconnected amalgams of body, mind, and soul.  Perhaps.  In truth, we all are a bit narcissistic, and in truth we all are a bit fractured.  We are broken selves who live in a broken world.  If this is so, we must ask ourselves:  how do we know? In a broken world, a world torn asunder by existential form and folly, we measure our brokenness by our brokenness, hardly a reliable guide. 
     We admire Picabia's insights into the enormity of our human condition, we learn much from his theses about who we are.  But where do we go from here?
     If we are, as the Smashing Pumpkins suggested, "rats spinning in a cage," there's nowhere to go.  On the other hand, if we live in a personal "somethingness" from which all things have come, we have real and meaningful direction and vision.
     Whether he intended or not, Picabia should make us all think about our point.

     Somewhat lost amidst the tumult of the recent election was the passing of poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen.  He was 82.  Though not necessarily a mainstream musician, Cohen had a solid following throughout the many years he wrote and performed his music. His most famous song is "Hallelujah."
     "Hallelujah" is an interesting observation on the mechanics of the Christian faith.  It revolves around the ethical morass into which Israel's ancient king David plunged when, overcome with lust at the sight of another man's wife, proceeded to pursue her.  The deed done, he then, as the king, ordered that this wife's husband be placed at the head of the army in its next battle.  Uriah the Hittite died, as did, tragically, the offspring of David and Bathsheba's union.  The story is a mirror of numerous Greek tragedies, plays in which a royal figure, fueled by hubris, commits a grave moral error, dragging himself and his family into generations of strife.
     In a letter Cohen wrote to a friend about "Hallelujah," he remarked that, "I wanted to stand with those who clearly see G-d's [out of respect for the Shema, the name of God, many Jews do not write the full word] holy broken world for what it is, and still find the courage or the heart to praise it.  You don't always get what you want.  You're not always up for the challenge.  But in this case--it was given to me.  For which I am deeply grateful."
     In eloquent prose, Cohen captures the heart of the human experience.  We live in a holy but broken world, yes, but it is a world of joy and wonder, a world for which we can every day be grateful to the God who made it.
     So does Genesis say that, "God looked on everything he had made, and it was good." The world was good when it was created, and it remains good today.  Why?  Because God is still--and always will be--good.
     And for this we can be forever grateful.  As former Beatle Paul McCartney remarked in an interview with Rolling Stone about his days as a Beatle, "We lived it, and it was great."
     So it is.

     A couple of days ago, I invited you to pray for the United States.  Today I ask you to pray for another country, a country much different and far removed from America:  Albania. I received last night an email from a missionary friend in Durres, a city on the country's Adriatic coast.  Due to some extremely heavy rains, parts of Durres are flooding uncontrollably, rivers overflowing, houses washed away, livestock dying, and crops ruined.  For a people who still rely heavily for food on what they can grow themselves, the latter is particularly damaging.  The little church my wife visited when we were in the Balkans last summer may soon be inundated, the many hours its congregation put into making it ready for use literally washed away.
     When I asked you to pray for America, I cited Psalm 24.  I mention it once more today. This is a big world.  Things happen every moment of every day.  If God is there, however, even though none of us can see everything that is going on, he does.  Despite everything, the world remains his.  Whether I pray for the people of Durres or the people of the U.S., I only do so because I know that God is there, that he sees, and that he cares.  He is not a God of end but one of beginning, not a God of perfidy and condemnation but a God of redemption.
     Over and above everything, yes, hope remains.  It remains because God does, too.
     Pray for America, pray for Albania, pray for the world God has made.

     Faith or conversion?  Given that my "conversion" to Christianity was a rather dramatic one, an encounter from which I emerged feeling distinctly and forever different, I enjoying comparing my experience withh those who did not encounter Jesus in the same way.  Given that we are all different people with different backgrounds and circumstances, it is logical and fitting that we would encounter God in our own and unique way.
     In truth, conversion and faith both tend to engage us in rather black and white terms. Consider Jesus' words to Nicodemus in John 3 that to see or experience the kingdom of God (put another way, a personal relationship with God) we must be, as he phrases it, "born again."  To be converted, that is, to exercise faith in Jesus, is a "do or die" experience.  Either Jesus is there or he is not; either we believe in him or we do not: there's no middle ground.  We must let go of what we think we know to find what we do not.  We will not be converted without faith, yet we will not exercise faith unless we believe that we will become someone "new," that is, be converted, on its other side.
     Bottom line, the essence of conversion is a decision to trust.  We trust in someone who sees for what we do not.  We do not need to trust the world; we're already in it.  But as I was observing yesterday in citing Psalm 24, we do need to trust God to give the world meaning.  So it is very black and white.  We either believe what we see, or we believe that which sees what we see.  We see in a box.  God does not.
     The faith of conversion is never what we plan.

     In the aftermath of, to me, the electoral darkness that has enveloped America, I know little else to do other than remind myself of the opening lines of Psalm 24.  "The earth is the Lord's, and all that is in it."
     Befuddled and enormously disappointed in the American people, so many of whom were driven to elect the new president out of ignorance, hatred, misogyny, and bigotry, attitudes that I fear this election result will only exacerbate across the nation, I find this to be one of my few solaces.  God is still there.  Though I'm not sure what he thinks of all this, I still believe that he is good, that he is light, and that he cares about his human creation.
     I only hope that the presidential administration that assumes power on January 20, 2017, does the same.
     Pray for the United States of America.

     A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from a missionary friend who works in Romania.  As always, he's been busy.  The bulk of his letter was devoted to the time he has been spending among the gypsy population of the country.  Marginalized and forgotten by most of the nation, the gypsies live largely alone, toiling away, farming as if they were still living in medieval times, gathering in communities whose primal structures have not changed for thousands of years.
     What does my friend tell the gypsies?  God is present in their lives, he says, and God cares about them.  God wants to be their friend.  God remembers them.
     Many gypsies respond eagerly.  Yet in the crowded and bustling streets of Bucharest, words like this fall unnoticed.  People do not believe they need a divine friend.  They do not care whether God remembers them.  They have all the friends they need.  Eternal memory is irrelevant.
     This is not to say that we must be poor and forgotten to truly appreciate the claims of Jesus.  Far from it.  It is to say, however, that the more with which we fill our lives, the less we think we need anything outside of them.  The more we have today, the less we think we need tomorrow.  It's difficult to imagine anything beyond us.
     But that's my friend's point.  To the gypsies, he says there is someone for them, and to the citizens of Bucharest he says there is someone for them, too.   They just need to think more realistically about the meaning and import of their contingency and fragility in a wondrous but indifferent universe.
     To wit, apart from an externally driven point, why are we really here?

     Earlier this year, I commented on a movie, God on Trial.  Today, I return to it, as a recent conversation I had about the Holocaust brought it to mind.  Towards the end of the movie, one of the actors, all of whom are inmates at the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, contends that God is not good, but merely "on our side."  In other words, the only reason a Jew might say that God is good is because he has made them his covenant people and is therefore "for" them.  If God wasn't on their side, then perhaps he would not be good.
     If this is true, are those who do not believe in God simply doomed to be born and die, eternally separated from their creator?  What is the point of their lives?
     On the other hand, if there is no God, if there is really just you and me in a vast and insouciant universe, how can we assert that anything is good or, for that matter, bad?  How can we know?  In an accidental and indifferent universe, we have no way to determine such things.  We can insist that certain things are good, but we do so in a moral vacuum:  there's no reason why we cannot just as easily say that these things are bad.  It's an exercise in epistemological futility.
     Yet if God is there--even if we cannot physically, apart from the person of Jesus, see him--upholding moral fabric and order in the cosmos, then, and only then, can we know what is genuinely good.
     And that God is not simply on our side.

     Do you know, really know, what you are doing and where you are going?  Reading in the third chapter of Ecclesiates this morning, I was struck, again, by the enormous tension in which we live our lives, perched as they are between being and non-being, existence and non-existence, tottering on the edge of time and destiny.  And who can resolve this tension?  Who can overcome this apparent, as Albert Camus put it, absurdity, that we are born to live yet born to die?

     God, says the author, God.  It is God who shapes the world, God who forms space and time, God who moves through the temporalities of our lives, God who grants meaning to the puzzle of existential absurdity.  It is the eternality of God, he continues, it is the eternality of God that undergirds the transience of our days, the evanescence of our months and years.  It is God's presence, he opines, God's continuing presence of vision and design that informs the cosmos.

     And so today, as I think about my birthday, I think about Ecclesiastes's observations about the rhythms of life, the steadfastness of the patterns that define existence:  birth and death, laughter and sadness, planting and uprooting, gathering and scattering, and more.  I think about my mother, I think about my father, once here and now not, and I think about my siblings and oldest friends, still here, thankfully, still walking in the everpresent and ever unyielding planes of existence.

     And I ponder that from which it all has come.  I'm grateful to have experienced what I have, humbled by the weight of the life given to me, moved, and deeply, by its seminal mystery and wonder:  I'm here.
     Here's to birthdays, here's to meaning, here's to God.

     It's a phrase bandied frequently in the early years of the last century and, for some, still true today.  It is this:  there is not one Jesus, but two.  There is the Jesus of history, and there is the Christ of faith.
     What does this mean?  At a conference a number of years ago, I met a young philosopher who, when I asked him why he had dismissed Jesus as having little to do with the belief system of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, he replied, "Are you talking about the Jesus of history or the Christ of faith?"
     In other words, he meant that although we can talk about Jesus as a historical entity, we cannot know, precisely, who he was or what he did.  The gospel records, this narrative goes, are unreliable and therefore inadequate for determining who this man was.  Better, this narrative continues, to focus on belief.  Better to focus on what Jesus means to us today, what Jesus means to each of us in our life of faith with, we presume, God.  Don't worry, this narrative concludes, about what Jesus did in history; concentrate on what he is for you today.
     Without offering this person copious proofs of the historical veracity and reliability of the gospel accounts, I asked, "If we cannot know who Jesus was historically (or if he even lived at all), on what rational basis can we claim to find a meaningful faith in him?  We're grounding our present trust in a myth.  Billions of people live this way, of course, every moment of every day.  But it's not an honest way to live."
     If Jesus never lived, and if Jesus did not do what the gospels claim he did, there's no reason for us to believe in him.  There are enough myths floating around the world right now.  We hardly need another one.
     If you believe in Jesus--and I encourage you to strongly consider doing so--understand that you are believing in a person who really did live, die, and rise again.  You have ample historical support for your belief, you have more than sufficient rational basis for your trust in him.
     Take away the historical Jesus, however, and we are left with the observations of playwright Samuel Beckett that, "The greatest sin is that we are born."
     Belief, of any kind, no longer has point.

     In my sophomore year of college, I wrote a short story about a boy named Denali who, as a result of a global nuclear holocaust, woke up one day to find himself the last human living on the planet.  Hiking through a forest preserve the other day, I came upon a pond with a single crane, perched in the middle of the water, sitting, waiting, I guess, though I'm not sure for what. Given the time of year, I surmised that perhaps all of his fellow cranes had already flown south and only he remained.  Seeing no evidence of a nest or other signs of additional cranes, I wondered why he was still here, planted in a pond which might, in a month or so, be frozen over.
     As I watched the seemingly lonely crane, I thought of Denali.  I also thought of a time, many decades ago, when I was solo hiking through the Brooks Range in far northern Alaska, over three hundred miles above the Arctic Circle.  It was just me and the wilderness; no one else was even a little close to where I was.  I was utterly alone.  One day, I chanced upon a pond, framed in the fading flowers and grasses of the turning tundra.  In the pond was a duck which, like the crane I was seeing today, was alone.  All of his companions, it seemed, had gone south.  Only he was left.  And what was he planning to do?  Why was he still here?
     All of us, Denali, the crane, the duck, and I, were alone in a wilderness, a wilderness of space as well as time, immaterial as well as physical, a wilderness that set us on the raw edge of existential possibility.  All alone.  The French philosopher Paul Sartre once observed that if there is no God, we humans are the loneliest beings in the universe.  And what will we then do?
     Life dangles before us, enticing, vexing, inviting, taking us into multiple journeys and explorations, opening to us countless horizons of the new and unknown.  Indeed.  So are we like Denali, the crane, the duck, and me in the Brooks Range?  Are we alone, absolutely alone in the universe?  Do we live, finding love and enjoying hope, then die?
     Or are we, in autumn's pictures of life ebbing, lonely creatures, yes, but lonely creatures who are players in a drama of meaning, a personal, transcendent, cognitive, and fulfilling meaning beyond our understanding?

     "Not faith (in the sense of a specific faith in orthodoxy, in progress, in man, in revolution, etc.) but a feeling for faith, that is an integral attitude (by means of the whole person) toward a higher and ultimate value."
     So said Russian writer Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin.  What can we make of this?  If we dig into Bakhtin's other writings, we see that he is not advocating faith as total subjectivity (which would render it inutile), but rather faith as a response to rational perceptions of an ultimate value.  What does this mean?  Fideism describes a faith in faith, a faith with no rational basis, a faith that simply makes us feel better.  For instance, when we hear of a person who is facing medical difficulties, we may respond that we will cultivate good thoughts about her situation, perhaps hoping that our thoughts will somehow shake loose a bit of good from the frigid and serrated mountains of the universe.  Yet how can they?
     Not that hope is not important.  It indisputably is.  But hope in hope or faith in faith will not physically remedy an objective concern.  Unless faith is rooted in a tangible, perceptible, and intelligible ultimate value, as Bakhtin implies in his other writings, it will assuage feelings but not palpably affect the situation.  So yes, faith is a feeling, but faith is also a commitment to and trust in the proven reality of a higher value.  Genuine faith is trust in the worth of a personally embodied value, a value embedded in and expressed by a larger cognitive presence.  Love and hope are wonderful things, true, yet they are most wonderful if they find origin and definition in a creature unencumbered by the vicissitudes of finitude, a creature of perpetuity, a creature who has the power to make all things new.
     A creature like, well, God.