Ah, the New Year approaches . . . . what will we do?  A few days ago, I attended a funeral for the father of a friend of mine.  A devout Christian, my friend's father spent his life pursuing his path with God.  He gave himself completely to the work of his church community, and did his best to reflect the ways of Jesus that he felt bubbling out of him each day.  Now, as the New Testament presents and affirms it, Bill (his name) has stepped into a new life, a life more than the life of a new day, new week, new month, or New Year.  It is a life that will never end.  His family grieves (we think of Ecclesiastes 12's observation that, "A person goes to his eternal home while people mourn in the streets"), but his family also rejoices:  he lives still.
     How do we know?  In Christmas, God is born; on Good Friday, he dies.
     And on Easter, God--Jesus--rises again.
     Shortly before I went to the funeral, I read parts of a memoir, All at Sea.  It's one woman's account of how, in a tale reminiscent of how Mary Shelley watched her husband Percy drown in the Bay of Spiza, she one day a few years ago watched helplessly as her husband drowned in an undertow off the shores of Jamaica.  One minute her husband was here, the next he was gone, never to return.  The author, Decca Aitkenhead, told their two boys repeatedly not to think, in any way, that their father would ever live again, that stories about God, Jesus, and resurrection were just that, stories, fairy tales without credible basis.  Mourn, she said, but realize you'll never ever see your father again.
     So here we are, on the verge of the New Year, looking at two very different ways of seeing the world.  One is rooted in a hope in God; the other is rooted in a hope in the world.
     In no way do I wish to impugn Ms. Aitkenhead's beliefs (or lack thereof).  She is fully entitled to hold them.  Yet as I look across the divide between the old year and new, I wonder:  if Jesus rose, why will we not, too?
     Happy New Year!

     It's a familiar quote, one that has been used in many different contexts, and appropriated in countless sundry ways.  It's from Walden, Henry David Thoreau's perennially popular meditation on the joy of parsing living down to its bare necessities so as to more fully focus on the profound delights of solitude and reflection.

          "If a man does not keep pace with his companions," Thoreau observed as he drew his ruminations to a conclusion, "perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."
     Thoreau's words are timeless, snippets of wisdom that have inspired many, many people.  And why not?  Though it's difficult to tell from Thoreau's writings exactly what he believed about God (given that he was a New England Transcendentalist), Walden overflows with assertions about the importance of individuality.  Each person is special, each person is unique, gifted, he seems to suggest, by God.
     I certainly cannot disagree.  As we continue to walk in the afterglow of the Christmas celebration, we note that in Christmas's narrative we see undelible evidence of God's endorsement of human uniqueness.  Jesus came to earth as a unique and one of a kind human being--just like every one of us.  In expressing himself as a man called Jesus, God is telling us that he affirms human worth.  He is saying that he believes in us, that he wants great things for us, and that, as Thoreau rightly observes, he understands that we all have a special path to pursue in this adventure of life and existence.
     Find your place, find your calling.  Find your path, your individual path with God.  Be like God was on earth:  yourself.

     Christmas has come, and now it is gone.  People are taking their ornaments down, stores are offering their after Christmas sales, travelers are going home.  It's over for another year.
     Or is it?  If Christmas means anything, anything at all, it cannot possibly be contained in one day.  If God has really come, if God has really visited his creation, how can anything--and any of us--ever be the same?  History, and everything in it, including you and me, has irrecoverably changed.
     Enjoy the moment, enjoy the day.  Enjoy existence.  Enjoy them rejoicing, fully aware that they now mean more than you can possibly imagine.  The light of eternity, the word of the ages, the spoken beginning of space and time has entered our world.
     God has come.

     Are you familiar with Orion?  One of the most visible winter constellations, Orion tells a tale of greatness, of power and ambition, a story of quest and journey, a picture of humanity wrestling with itself and the gods.  The mightiest hunter ever to stride across the earth, Orion wandered the globe at will, killing any animals he wished, doing it all, he insisted, to honor the gods.  For one of the gods, Gaia, Mother Earth, however, this was too much:  she did not wish to see her animals, her offspring, perish at the hands of a mere mortal.  So she sent a scorpion after Orion, a scorpion equal to him in stealth and potency.  Bitten by the scorpion, the mighty hunter succumbed.  Seeing this, however, Zeus, the erstwhile "king" of the gods, took steps to honor this magnificent creation, setting him in the sky for
eternity.
     So we see Orion today.  As I continue to ponder the advent of winter and the Christmas celebration two days hence, I think about Orion.  I think about the legends and longing he represents, I think about the hold his stars exercise on our imaginations.  I think about how the Bible speaks so beautifully of the order and rhythms of the universe, and how these rhythms will continue until the cosmos takes its last breath.  And I give thanks for the wonder of story, one of our most gratifying experiences of humanness.
     Like Orion, we live as a story, a story of space, a story of time, a story of life in a world made by God.  Unlike Orion--and happily so--we can live this story forever.
     That's the beauty of the incarnation:  God's story, God's Orion:  God with us.
     Have a wonderful Christmas!

     If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you may know that yesterday, December 21, was the winter solstice, the "shortest" day of the year (and conversely, as Robert Frost puts it in his "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "the darkest night of the year"). Commemorated in any number of ways around the world, the winter solstice is the grand turning point of the seasonal year, the day and night on which time, or at least our perception of it, hinges.  It's the end of the light, yet its creation and genesis, too. Though we lose, we win, too, newly moving, ever so imperceptibly, to the greater light to come.
     As winter continues to bear down, most of us see at least some daylight.  Far to the north, however, well beyond the Arctic Circle, people see only darkness.  Yet do we "see" darkness?  Or do we just hear and feel it?  Though darkness seems to descend upon us, a obscuring gloom--in every way--light seems to well from within us, our spirits ineffably connecting with the illumination sparkling around us.  And we "see."
     I love the winter.  I love how it masks and shrouds, I love how it engages reflection, I love how it sends us into places we would not otherwise go.  And I love how winter helps us "see" what sight can be.  As we trek through the darker days and hours, we come to understand that light is not what we think it is, illumination and no more.  Light is rather the underlying rhythm of all creation, a continuity of divine favor, a favor that speaks in gloom as well as joy, a favor that finds its richest expression in Jesus' words in the eighth and ninth chapters of John, "I am the light of the world."
     As someone in my atheist discussion said when I wished her a Merry Christmas, "Sweet Solstice"!

     "More than three thousand two hundred and fifty years after Buddha entered Nirvana, many evil kings were born and caused suffering to all living things.  In order to suppress them, Buddha gave the order and Genghis Khan was born."
     So said Lubsang-Danzin in The Golden Chronicle, which he composed around the year 1651.  One of the remarkable dimensions of the story of Genghis Khan, the Mongolian warlord and king who amassed the greatest land empire the world has ever seen, is the hold he exercised on the global imagination.  For many European Christians of his time, Genghis Khan appeared to be the incarnation of a long prophesied "Christian king of the East" who would come to liberate the world from the grip of Islam.  On the other hand, as we see in this observation from Lubsang-Danzin, Genghis Khan was revered by Buddhists, too, that for some Buddhists, Genghis Khan was born to set the world right.
     Throughout human history, many people have longed for a king who come to save the world as they know it.  Realizing the extent of the world's flaws and problems, they have longed for one who would come to eliminate them altogether.  One of the central tenets of Judaism, one which found its way into Christianity, is that one day, a day no one knows, God will come.  One day, God will come to the earth to restore it to its original wonder, the pristine and unimaginable harmony it enjoyed before human transgression. Though at Christmas we celebrate God's coming to the planet as savior and Messiah, the God-man, God and human being, we do so understanding that one day he will come again, as king, human no more, undisputed God of all creation.
     Although many admired and longed for him, Genghis Khan is but a faint shadow of what real human longing can be, the inescapable longing for and dreaming of God.

     Well, it's almost here:  Christmas.  As I remember the fourth and final Sunday of Advent and look towards its culminating event, the incarnation, God's appearance in human flesh, I think frequently about how Christmas plays out across the world.  In the West, it is of course remembered, in spades.  Unless one is living in a dream, he or she cannot miss sit.  In other parts of the world, however, regions dominated by other religious viewpoints, not so much.
     Christmas's seminal moment and foundation, that is, the incarnation, however, came to a world not entirely prepared to believe it.  Very few people were ready to accept that God could become flesh, could become a human being.  Today is no exception.  Although there are roughly 2.3 billion Christians on the planet, this leaves over five billion people who are not, people who likely do not believe that, in Jesus, God came in the flesh, became a person like you and me.
     So why Christmas?  Precisely because it is Christmas.  If God had not become a human being, we would not really know him.  We would not really understand the transcendent, the "great beyond" (to borrow a term from REM's song of the same name).  Without Christmas, we would still be wandering in the dark, a dark of rich and profound spirituality, yes, but a dark still searching for its real meaning.
     At the time it occurred, few people cared about Jesus' birth.  Ironically, now nearly everyone on the globe has difficulty avoiding it.  Though we could, and not without falsity, attribute this to centuries of Western dominance of the international cultural discourse, this only answers the reality in part.  The logic of Christmas is inescapable:  if God had not become human, we would never fully know him.
     And this is precisely God's point.  Though Jesus was a very tiny point in a vast and unyielding global empire, born in obscurity and overlooked by the rest of the world, he was the one in whom God chose to make himself known to all humanity.  Jesus was the one whom God would use to manifest and reconcile himself to his human creation, the one whom God would use to draw all people to himself.  In Jesus, the forgotten child, was the greatest hope of all time.  It's the ultimate irony, the greatest surprise.  It's God's way of demonstrating to us that just when we think we have everything figured out, we really do not.
     Only as God becomes like us can we know him.  As John so wisely observes, "And the Word (God) became flesh" (John 1:14).

     It's Beethoven's birthday.  What can we say about Ludwig van Beethoven?  The famous portrait of him below captures how many of us see him:  a brooding, brilliant composer. When we think about Amadeus Wolfgang Mozart, we think of the Enlightenment and how it liberated the human mind and imagination from the constraints of a Church struggling with its response to impending modernity.  We see Mozart's music as poetry, lilting and dancing its way across our lives.

     Not so with Beethoven.  His music strikes us very differently.  It overwhelms us with its passion.  Beethoven's music comes to us as something akin to a force of nature, barreling and twisting its way into our hearts, breaking our souls apart, forcing us to grapple with and contemplate the deeper forces that drive human existence.  We swoon over the viscerality of Beethoven's melodies, we wonder about the power of the universe which his songs describe.  A Romantic in the purest sense, Beethoven reminds us of other worlds and things, of things unknown, of the presence and possibilities of transcendence.

     I thank God for Beethoven.  I thank him for giving him to us, for giving him to show us as we are, beings of mind as much as creatures of heart, living, personal, dynamic entities made to step bravely and meaningfully into the weighty contingencies of life, to take hold of everything that is before us.  Given the many stories and legends that surround his life, we may never know exactly what Beethoven thought about God.  Regardless, he makes us think of him.  Beethoven makes us think about our deeper meaning, our deeper experience.  He drives us to wonder about the mystery of life and the mind of its creator.

     I thank God for using Beethoven to open and unfold for us glimpses of what we, life, and God, can be.

     Poor Aleppo.  When I consider the enormity of its devastation, the untold suffering inflicted on its inhabitants, and the continual pleas of the global community for the killing to stop, I once more ponder the depths to which humanity can go in its quest for power. On the one hand, I see a man who wants at all costs to preserve his power, and on the other hand, a diverse set of other men (and women) who wish with equal fervor to gain power of their own.  The former has had it all along; the latter has not.
     Why, we wonder, cannot people share something that is so achingly transient anyway? Throughout history, we see people holding power.  Some hold it for centuries; others for only a few hours.  Either way, it doesn't last.
     What about religion?  Unless a religion is extraordinarily inwardly focused, it does everthing to disabuse itself of power.  As it should.  True power lies in its ability to give itself up, to let itself be used to greater good.  We see this in Buddha, we see this in Jesus.  Both gave up what they had, Buddha (once Siddartha) his family's wealth and heritage, Jesus the privileges of divinity.  Both suffered, yet only one died in his suffering. That one was of course Jesus.
     We can deny that Jesus was born, yes, but as we look upon the carnage of Aleppo, we cannot dismiss the possibilities of the power implicit in his life.  It is a power that seems otherworldly, so sacrificial was it, a power that could have only come from one who understood its dimensions with absolute clarity.  We wish for peace for Aleppo, we wish for an end to its horror.  And we hope for a renewed commitment to Jesus' power, a power of humility, a power of grace, a power that finds its impetus and hope in the sacrificial presence of God.
     Pray for Aleppo, pray for God.

     Are you a humanist?  That was the question we tried to answer at my atheist discussion group last night.  After listening to an informative presentation about the history and rudiments of humanism, we discussed some of its essential concepts.  Ironically, given that this is a atheist discussion group, we spend the most time parsing the humanist notion that there is no supernatural and that therefore humanity does not require anything from the supernatural to better the world.
     I of course questioned the legitimacy of this contention.  What concerned me was the corresponding assumption that people of faith care nothing about improving the lot of the human being, that so beholden are they to authority and dogma that they simply dismiss the problems of the world as challenges that only God can solve, and will do so, moreover, in his " own good" time.
     Yes, some people of faith blithely ignore the issues that trouble the world, asserting that one day God will make all things new and why should they therefore worry about them.  On the other hand, many more people of faith, committed to Genesis's statements that God pronounced the world "good" upon completing his creative work, labor tirelessly to ameliorate the ills of this fractured, by sin, planet.  Like a humanist, they believe firmly in the worth and dignity of every human being, and also like a humanist, they believe that people are responsible for humanity's destiny in this life.
     So, I wondered, what's the problem?  Belief in the supernatural is certainly a major dividing line, one that, absent a profound (and divinely impelled) change of heart on the part of an unbeliever, will never be crossed.  This notwithstanding, however, humanists must recognize that people of faith, though for quite different reasonsa (a trust in the presence and historically attested activity of God), care deeply about people and the creation.  They laud the wonder of the human being, they are awed by the marvels of the planet.
     As the meeting drew to a close, most of those in attendance did not dispute the worth of religion.  They rather have a different vantage point on it.  We can work together, we can join in common cause to tend and cultivate the beautiful world and beings whom God has made.
     And as we do so, I dare say, we will uphold human dignity while honoring the person of God--and more richly establish the necessity of his presence.

     "Nothing is less real than realism.  It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis that we get at the real meaning of things."  So said American artist Georgia O'Keeffe.  One of my mother's favorite artists, O'Keeffe made her name doing interpretational painting of the remarkable sights of the American West.  The work below this text, "Clouds," on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, pictures clouds as lily pads, lily pads floating in the sky.  "Red Canna," the painting to the right, hanging at the museum of the Arizona State University, is an almost surreal depiction of the Red Canna flower, opening to the desert sun.  At first glance, yes, these paintings seem rather abstract.  If we look more closely, however, we see the wisdom of O'Keeffe's observation.  Whether we engage in science, art, religion, or some combination thereof, we understand it best when we probe and explore it, when we constantly dig away at its outer layers, when we unpeel it and get at its core.
     We can look at life this way, too.  We can slide through life, dancing on the lily pads of clouds, reveling mindlessly at the opening of the red canna plants to the sun, but we miss the point.  At its core, life is really quite simple.  All science, religion, and philosophy aside, life is nothing more--and nothing less--than a gift of God.  That is its reality, that is its wonder, that is its truest meaning.
     And that about says it all.

     "For the people who walk in darkness," wrote the prophet Isaiah, "will see a great light (Isaiah 9:1)."  Isaiah speaks of Messiah, the one who would come to illuminate an Israel darkened by disappointment, abandonment, and sin.  He speaks of the Christ (the Messiah, "the anointed one") who would enlighten and save all those who longed for him.  He speaks of the light that would come.
     On the third Sunday of Advent, we remember this fact of Messiah's light.  We remember how, like the sun exploding over a frigid mountain ridge, Messiah--Jesus--has brought us light, the light of enlightenment, the light of hope and meaning that shines through the cold of an often Munchian (The Scream) existence.  It is the light of purpose, the light of meaning, the light that, if we embrace its rising, embrace it as fervently and without reservation, will change our lives forever.
     In God's world, the sun is always rising.  In the world that God made, light, even in the darkest of darknesses, is always there.  Because Jesus came, because in Jesus God made himself known, light is before us, always and forever.  Though we may struggle with the idea of eternality, though we may question the presence of God, we all long for light. We all long for hope and meaning.  We all long for a window into a richer existence.
     In an accidental universe, however, richness is impossible, for value and morality cannot be.  Only in the light, the light of transcendence wrought in Jesus, Jesus the image and person of God, will hope therefore be, infused in its necessary light.
     And once we touch this light, we'll never be the same.

     For the "Greatest Generation" it was December 7:  Pearl Harbor.  For many of their offspring--the Baby Boomers--perhaps in addition to November 22, 1963, the assassination of JFK, it is December 8:  the murder of John Lennon in 1980.  An enduring icon to many a Boomer, John Lennon, the former Beatle, was gunned down as he entered his apartment in New York City.  It was a very long night for all of us.
     I've listened to Lennon's classic "Imagine" more times than I can count.  Though I look at it differently than I did on the other side of my embrace of Jesus and Christianity, I still marvel at the simplicity of its vision.  Though I may take issue with "Imagine's" seeming exclusion of the transcendence, I can nonetheless identify with its passion to imagine what I do not now see:  global peace.  While Lennon did not see world peace at the time he wrote the song, he nonetheless longed for it and, it seemed, believed it would one day happen. Similarly, as I understand Christianity's view of the world, I can say that although I do not now see the fullness of that for which around which I construct my life vision, I believe that one day I will.  I believe that one day, a day perhaps decades in the future, I will experience the full measure of God, here and beyond.
     In the end, peace will come.  It will come as a work of human agency and endeavor, undergirded and sustained by the fact and activity of God.  Humanness craves it, God guarantees it.
     Imagine.

     If you lived through World War II, you remember December 7.  You remember the day that the heretofore seemingly invincible United States of America was attacked, attacked in a way it did not suspect (although as most historians know, there is considerable debate about how much of an inkling the nation's administration had beforehand), attacked quickly and brutally, leaving over two thousand people dead on the shores of Hawaii.
     In the seventy years since this attack, much has changed.  America and Japan reconciled long ago, and the world moves on.  For those who remember the day, however, the pain remains.  As it should.  Although we should do what we can to mitigate our memories of suffering, we do equally well to not let go of them entirely.  Pain shapes us, pain molds us.  In many ways, pain, the scourage of a fallen world, defines us.  That's why we remember Pearl Harbor, that's why we remember the Holocaust.  In an odd way, there is merit in remembering such pain.
     Many religions realize this, too.  As Buddhism remembers the travails of Siddartha, Hinduism the struggles of Krishna and Arjuna, so does Christianity remember the cross on which Jesus died.  We remember these pains because through our trust in their effects we come into new life.  We arrive at new understandings of existence.  We change for the better.
     Pearl Harbor drove stakes deep into many hearts.  So does the Christian cross.  Why? Only through this cross, the divinely sanctioned cross, and our appropriation of its memory and effects, do we come into the fullest understanding of the necessarily transcendent character of redemption, the liberation, ultimately, from all worldly pain. 
     Remember.  And believe.

     "For the grace of God has appeared," writes the apostle Paul in the third chapter of his letter to Titus, "bringing salvation to all people" (Titus 2:11).  As we remember the second Sunday of Advent, we can realize, again, that in Jesus, God in the flesh, we see concrete expression of God's grace, physical manifestation and display of his truest posture toward us.  In Jesus we see the fullest possible picture of of who God is:  benevolence, favor, and compassion.  In Jesus, we see the endless grace of God.
      We grant each other grace every day, as we should.  Yet it is God's grace that enables us to grasp that amid the frequent senselessness of the world in which we live, there is hope.  And this hope is not a hope of the moment.  It is a hope of the eternal, a hope of eternity, a hope grounded in the truth that reality, that is, "real" reality is born in a reality greater than its finitude can possibly make it be.  It is a hope born in the conviction that the essence of reality comes from a love which defines and, in an entirely gracious way, overwhelms it with compassion and power.  Jesus' appearance tells us that whatever else we may think about God, what we ought to think most about him is this:  God is loving, God is gracious, and God is for us, for us today, for us tomorrow, for us forever.
     As Johannes Sebastian Bach put it, "Jesus, joy of human desire."

     "Everything may change in our demoralized world except the heart, man's love, and striving to know the divine."  So said Jewish artist Marc Chagall, born in Russia in 1887, died in France in 1885 (and whose tomb I was privileged to see a number of years ago when I was traveling in France).  Perhaps most famous for his work with a variety of color and medium, Chagall here gives us perhaps greater insight still, an insight born in his view of art and the human experience of it.
     Yes, he correctly notes, the world can indeed be demoralizing.  It's not always easy to be optimistic about humanity and its future on the planet.  Yet as Chagall also correctly points out, even if the world crumbles, its enculturations collapsed and fallen into the debris of history and abandoned rationality, love and heart will remain.  Even if all else seems lost, the longing of the human being for wholeness and connection, her passionate desire for care and communication will not leave us.
     Why?  Because, as Chagall points out, people will not stop striving to know the divine. Driven by this love and desire, a love and desire necessarily embedded in the fabric of a purposefully birthed creation, human beings will continue to seek a greater love still. They will not cease from trying to understand why they are here and why they are the way they are.  And if they are wise, they will not stop doing so apart from the compass of their innate wish to know the divine.
     If there is love, there is wonder; if there is heart, there is mystery; if there is passion to know, there is God.  How else can we affirm and fathom the presence of moral desire?

     As we make our initial forays into the many mysteries of Advent and all that these imply, we might draw a page from the period of Western history known as the Renaissance.  Its name, which means "rebirth" or "revival," describes the birth of a new vision of human potential.  The Renaissance celebrates the magnificence of the human being.
     We remain creations of the Renaissance even today.  We see ourselves as beings who are capable of doing whatever we set our minds and hearts to do.  We believe that we, we human beings, are marvelous and astonishing creations, be it of inert matter or, gasp, of God.  Our possibilities are nearly endless.
     Curiously, however, the people of the Renaissance believed, for the most part, that their wonder was of God.  Ironically, although many of us today dismiss God as being irrelevant to our lives and human potential, we in fact live in the shadow of those who, for a very short time, believed the precise opposite, rooting human possibility in the inexhaustible creative power of God.
     As we ponder the mystery of Advent, as we contemplate how it remembers the "birth" of God in our reality, we learn from this insight.  We learn that however we view ourselves or God, because God appeared in our world, because he expressed himself in our experience, we cannot conclude that we are accidents.  If this was true, God would not have bothered to come.  What would be the point of repeating an accident?
     Today, in your life today, enjoy and treasure the Renaissance's fusion of human and divine.