It's a good month for musical birthdays. A creature of Western Romanticism, Franz Schubert, who, tragically, died at the age of 31, wrote some of the most ethereal and moving melodies of all time. Listening to his music, we feel carried away, transported to another realm, lifted above what is earthly and material. It's an intimation of transcendence.
As we celebrate Schubert's birthday today, we can remind ourselves that if music only told us what we already know, we probably wouldn't get as much out of it as we do. We do not need to be reminded of what is normal. We want to think about what is beyond normal, what breaks the apparent down, what splits the obvious apart. We want to know what we, at the moment, cannot.
Descending into the darkest recesses of his soul, Schubert talks to us about the deepest mysteries of existence, how we walk in a wisp, a gossamer veil stretched out between us and the other side of time. He romanced eternity.
As do we all. Every day is a balance, an edge perched on the borders of presence and absence, a thin line of reality and ultimate destiny.
Thanks, Franz Schubert, even if you didn't intend to do so, for showing us that life is more than life itself. Happy birthday.
"I was a stranger, and you invited me in" (Matthew 25).
Richer words were never spoken. As he moved ever closer to the events that would result in his arrest and crucifixion, Jesus reminded his disciples of how he will know who really believes in him. Yes, believing in me is a matter of heart, he told them often, a sincere and heartfelt repentance, a decided turning away from sin, but if you do not love your neighbor, if you do not put your heart change into visible action, it's difficult for me, he continued, to see it. You're my beloved child, he frequently admonished them: act like it.
We who live in the affluence of the West have been singularly fortunate. Those of us who do not, long for such good fortune. When Jesus spoke these words, he was speaking to all of us who are able to "invite" the stranger in, to all of us who have the means to "invite" those who have not been as fortunate as us into our lands of plenty.
In truth, Jesus was affirming and deepening what his Jewish brethren had known for years: God, the Hebrew Bible constantly states, commands his people to help the foreigner, the stranger, the "ger" in their midst. And he made no exceptions to them doing so.
We of course wish to be safe. We of course desire peace. But God is a big God. He can ensure compassion, he can ensure security. And he can make them happen at the same time--without compromising either one.
As can we. We only need to trust, to really trust God.
Pray for the West, pray for the rest of the world. Pray for the affluent, and pray for the refugee. God loves them all.
And we can, too.
Today is the birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Around the world, people continue to be astonished by the immense creativity and wonder of this Austrian's music. Fluent in all genres of classical music, Mozart, though he sadly died at the tender age of 34, produced an array of musical expression that most musicologists agree is unmatched. As a contemporary said of him, "He was like an angel sent to us for a season, only to return to heaven again." Most of us can only stand mute and marvel at Mozart's immense ability. How could one person write works of such extraordinary beauty?
Indeed. How? Genesis tells us that God created people in his image, in his likeness. The God who created the universe with all its immense complexity and wonder is the same God who created, with equal wonder, every human being. For this reason, every person who has ever been born and walked through the history of this planet has the potential to duplicate and express, albeit in finite form, the creativity that birthed the cosmos.
Rightly do we weep and swoon at the beauty of Mozart's compositions; they are works of unsurpassed wonder. Yet rightly do we marvel equally at God, the personal infinite God who made and fashioned this artist--with all his prodigious talents--and enabled him to be and become who and what he is.
As he does for all of us, we who are gifted beyond measure, we who are made to create in unabashed wonder.
Enjoy and appreciate the people--all people--whom God has made.
Thanks, God, for giving us Mozart.
Thank you, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
It's a rather ominious photograph, glowering and harsh, not a picture of someone with whom we might want to be best friends. Oddly, however, Sigmund Freud's ideas about the human being remain, in some form, with us even today. As we learn steadily more about how much our upbringing influences us throughout our life, even into our older years, we realize some truth in his observations.
For Freud, we consist of an id, ego, and superego. In essence, the id is "us," an "us" over which the ego and superego are doing constant battle. The ego represents our socialization, the superego our "conscience."
Why is this important? For Freud, who was a life long atheist (he died in 1939), who we are is the product of our influences. Because everything outside of us is always shaping us and "we" are therefore never the same, we may not even have a real "self."
Yet every one of us will acknowledge that we are a "self." We will say that we are a specific human being. In the absence of a God, however, maybe this isn't so straightforward. If we are simply a subjective and unplanned whim of the cosmos, then we are indeed where we live and nothing more.
On the other hand, in the presence of a God, we are the work of intentionality, subjective still, yet subjective in an objective framework, a framework of purpose and meaning. We are concrete points in a meaningful universe.
Sure, without a God we are concrete points, but we are like points on an infinite line: a self that never really happened: id, ego, and superego become no more than subjective responses to a subjective event. An event, we add, that had no reason to happen other than that it did. And if we insist that we can live this way, we fool ourselves: meaninglessness will never bequeath meaning.
We've all heard of Mt. Everest, the highest mountain in the world. Some of us may be familiar with K-2, the second highest mountain in the world. But most of us, I dare say, know little about the third highest mountain in the world, Kanchenjunga.
One winter, many decades ago, two mountaineers, Cherie Bremer-Kamp and Chris Chandler, took on Kanchenjunga at its coldest and most threatening. They didn't summit. To his surprise, as he had had much experience climbing in these elevations, Chris developed altitude sickness. It soon morphed into cerebral edema. A trained physician, Chris knew exactly what this meant: death.
And die he did, right before Cherie's eyes. Unable to carry his body down the mountain, Cherie left Chris on its northern slope, ice axe in hand, gazing endlessly over the vast valley out of which they had come many days earlier. Chris is probably still there, frozen for an earthly eternity.
Why do I tell such a depressing story? I tell it simply to invite us to ponder, once more, the astonishing mystery of existence. Here we are, free to roam wherever we (and our means allow) choose, intensely excited about the possibilities, feeling as if the world is before ever before us. It's truly grand.
One day, however, it ends. Eventually, all of us accept this; eventually, all of us realize it's true. Nonetheless, if we dig deeper, if we really come to grips with the stark and glorious enormity of existence, we do well, always and every day, to wonder: how did we get here to live it?
Apart from a meaningful and personally knowable starting point, our lives are like a mountain: ever there but, metaphorically speaking, ever not.
"His death does not separate us. My death will not bring us together again. That is how things are. It is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long."
Spoken like the atheist she, Simone Beauvoir, author of the ground breaking feminist tract Second Sex, all her life purported to be. Thinking about her life long companion, extentialist Jean Paul Sartre, after he passed away in March of 1980, Beauvoir makes clear her feelings about the terminality of existence. If we put her words into the vernacular, along with a little paraphrasing, we might say, "It's been fun, but now it's over."
True enough. But if I am to insist that life has any meaning, any meaning at all, I find it difficult to face its end with equanimity. If life has meaning, how can it be so in an impersonal universe? How I, a personal being, claim to be so if my origins are impersonal?
And how can Beauvoir speak so strongly about her life with Sartre if they both agree that, in the end, life means nothing?
However we see God, it seems that, on balance, we are far wiser to consider that he is life's end and life is not, and that life is more than a disconnected subjective experience. Life's mystery, and wonder, is that it must be birth, yes, but it must be resurrection, too.
Otherwise, we're ultimately nothing at all.
If you believe in God, indeed, if you believe anything about the supernatural, consider this dilemma. You're an adherent, a fervent adherent and advocate for what (and/or who) you believe. One day, you're asked to renounce your conviction, your faith, to forswear that to which you've dedicated your life and being. Why? If you do, you're told, you will halt the torture and execution of many other like adherents. If you renounce, your captors will set you--and them--free.
This is the challenge presented in Martin Scorsese's film Silence. Based on a book of the same name, Silence tells the story of two priests who faced this agonizing choice. Both chose to renounce. One, however, went to his grave with a crucifix in his hand. This leaves us to wonder: what did he really believe?
True belief, it seems, is ultimately a matter of the head and heart. So does Paul affirm in In the tenth chapter of his letter to the church at Rome.
But this gets us no closer to understanding the fullness of this dilemma. All of us who believe, in head and heart, in God and, in this instance, his son Jesus (in whom, steady readers of this blog know, my loyalties center) will, if faced with this choice, need to decide: how much do I really believe what I believe?
And to this, until the moment arrives, no answer can be given.
So much going on in America today . . . . the most prominent being, of course, the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States. My feelings toward Trump's election notwithstanding, I will note that his inauguration underscores that all other things considered, America's government still strives to make itself one ruled by laws and not by the people who run it. Moreover, it indicates that whether Americans know it or not, in abiding by these laws, they are living out an oft-cited yet difficult to understand passage in the thirteenth chapter of Paul's letter to the church at Rome.
In this chapter Paul encourages his readers to recognize that, the oppressive policies of the Roman Empire notwithstanding, governments and rules do not exist unless, somehow, some way--and this fact can be highly puzzling at times--God has acknowledged that they can do so. Though I do not pretend to fully understand why this eventuality has worked itself out in history as it has, in light of how some of us in the global community feel about the immediate future, I can find hope in knowing that in the "remains of the day" (as one long ago novel put it), purpose--and love--far greater than this "day" remains.
Does truth change? Or is it our perception of it? Over the last few weeks, I've been reading, on and off, a book containing reflections from various philosophers and theologians about how, in the course of their careers, how they've changed their minds in regard to their ideas of truth.
In every instance, no one has found cause to abandon the truths on which they've built their lives and intellectual systems. Despite everything they've learned and regardless of where their lives have taken them, they remain, to a person, committed to the truths with which they began.
Yet every one of these thinkers has changed in the way they understand these truths. Without letting go of absolute truth, they realize that as they have aged, as they have experienced different life situations and circumstances, their engagement with this truth has changed.
As it should. Truth, absolute truth, absolute truth as defined by and embodied in a transcendent God or, at the very least, a universal moral compass, will never change. But we will. While we continue to live committed to the idea of absolute truth (and in truth--no pun intended--even to deny absolute truth is in fact an absolute truth), we are made to explore it afresh each day. Absolute truth is absolute, but not static. That's its beauty: wherever we are, literally and figuratively, we can always find it.
And we can always find God.
"Freedom," the Who sang many years ago, "tastes of reality." As many of you may know, yesterday the U.S. remembered the birthday of civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr. Central to the day is the belief that freedom, the ability to do what one chooses, when one chooses to do it is surely one of humanity's greatest blessings. Those who have it treasure it immensely; those who do not, long for it deeply. Moreover, those who have freedom rarely understand what it is like to not have it. They're never known otherwise. Freedom is only real if it is responding to truth, if it is expressed in a structure of meaning. Real freedom recognizes that there is something within which to be free, being free is no more than the ability to engage in the authenticating acts of existentialism: here today, gone tomorrow, never a point to be made.
It is a freedom which those of us who enjoy it generally--and largely unwittingly--pursue. As we remember King's birthday, we should therefore remember that the freedom he preached is ultimately, as Gandhi observed in his notion of satyagraha, the discovery of truth. True freedom is the engagement with truth, the truth that because God is there, we all are to be free, in every way. We all are made to enjoy the freedom of a universe, a universe not without point, but a universe created by God. Thanks, Dr. King, for showing us the deeper meaning of freedom: in ways large and small, we cannot live without it. Oddly enough, neither can God. But that's a much larger question.
The memoir is fascinating, the movie even more so: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Once a high flying fashion mogul, Jean-Dominique Bauby unexpectedly suffers a stroke while driving through the French countryside and subsequently wakes up in a hospital to find that he can no longer speak. His hearing is fine, but only one of his eyes work. He lives in a world of sound to which he can no longer contribute.
So Bauby learns to speak with his eyes. Through the painstaking efforts of a therapist and amaneusis, he pens a memoir of his experience. It's an unbearably slow process, but he preserves. Tragically, he dies shortly after it is published.
Life is so capricious, so terribly capricious. We will never understand why things happen as they do. And we will never know, fully, what lies around the corner. We are helpless before the raw face of fate.
Yet it is often too blithe and easy to say that amidst the unpredictability and contingency of existence, God is anything but capricious, that he is immutably stable and present, and that we can therefore trust him in all things. If, however, we believe, counter to the enormous randomness of a materialistic worldview, in a personal, loving, and necessarily omnipresent God, we cannot do otherwise. We realize we can trust this fact of a personal presence, this personal presence who suffered the capriciousness of life even more than we, a personal presence in whom therefore somehow, some way, meaning and purpose prevail.
Rest well, Jean-Dominique.
Have you heard of werewolves? Unless you've never read any fairy tales or fantasy, you likely have. The word "werewolf" comes from an Anglo-Saxon word, "wer," which means man. Hence, a "man" wolf.
What's so important about werewolves? As I've been studying, of late, magic and superstition in early modern Europe, I had occasion to focus on werewolves and other mythical, magical, and otherworldly entities. Unlike some of its fantastical counterparts, however, the werewolf actually has some basis in scientific fact. Medical researchers have long identified a condition called lyanthropy, that is, wolf like behavior in a human being. Lyanthropy is analogous to a condition called boantropy, cow like behavior in a human being (the most well known example being the Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar).
What fascinates me about werewolves is the way they demonstrate that, lyanthropy aside, even in our "modern" age, people retain a belief in the fantastical and otherworldly. Despite the primacy of science and its elevation of unbiased reason (a surely unattainable quality) above all things, human beings find value in what they cannot--and likely never will--understand.
Yet it fits. We are mysterious beings living in a mysterious world. Why would we not look for answers in mystery?
Even, I dare say, the mystery of God.
Central to any quest for meaning is the notion of silence. Be it religious or not, a quest will not succeed unless the entrant is taking time for silence.
Buried in one of the historical books of the Hebrew Bible is the account of how the prophet Elijah, thinking that, due to his forceful resistance to the spiritual declinations of the Israeli monarchy, everyone was against him, fled to a high mountain to rest and pray.
As he prayed, Elijah encountered what we might call a series of epiphanies, appearances of God. First, he experienced an earthquake. Then, a fire. Finally, he heard a gentle blowing. And in this gentle blowing, God spoke.
What does this have to do with silence? Like we often feel, Elijah felt himself overwhelmed by challenges. So he prayed.
More importantly, however, he waited. He waited, in silence, for God. Elijah had to let go of everything around him in order to hear the voice of the divine.
As do we. If you do not find it necessary to believe in God, realize that you perhaps have missed the most crucial part of being a human being: apart from listening, in silence, to all the realities in the boundaries of what you see, you will never hear what is most true.
We must be quiet if we hope to understand, fully, where we are.
"All is futility," Ecclesiastes often observes, "all is futility." I thought of this phrase anew a few days when I was privileged to take in a once in a life time exhibition of the famous Terracota Warriors of Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang. Their construction ordered by the emperor to guard him in his afterlife, these 7,000 soldiers--infantry, charioteers, generals, and more--have stood silently for thousands of years, protecting a monarch long since gone. Until a farmer, preparing the soil for his crop, stumbled upon them in 1974, no one living was aware of their existence.
We marvel at the pyramids of Egypt, their power and majesty; we swoon over the beauty of the Taj Mahal; we find astonishment in the massive crypt of Halicarnassus; and we wonder: why? Sure, we do well to remember the departed, and yes, we are grateful to recall their presence in their lives, and yet we are also aware that once they are gone, they are gone. Qin Shi Huang, the Egyptian pharoahs, and countless other royalty (along with many of us) have gone to tremendous lengths to ensure a meaningful afterlife. Oddly, however, we die with absolutely no physical inkling of what to expect the instant we take our last breath.
So why do we do it? Because it's so very hard to let go of what we see for what we cannot. Death hovers before us as a engimatic abyss. We cannot stop it, we cannot halt it. It's always with us.
At the risk of appearing simplistic, I offer this thought. If we term ourselves meaningful and this life worthwhile, we do not wish to see either end. We are born to long for more.
Unless a personal and eternal God is there, however, we long--for everything--in vain. Even the afterlife.
Just ask Jesus.
After a brief hiatus in posting due to a number of pressing academic issues, I post once more. Today, I mention Epiphany. Epiphany is, in effect, the last gasp of the Christmas season, the day on which this profound and happy time finally draws to a close. In celebrating Epiphany (a word meaning, literally, the manifestion of a divine being), we most of all remember the faith of a group of travelers from Persia in the Zoroastrian and biblical prophecies which they had encountered in their studies.
After much examination of these texts, these magi ("wise" men) concluded that the world was on the precipice of a momentous event: the birth of a new king. And, they understood, this king would be unlike any other. In contrast to other royalty, this king would emerge from humble circumstances, a stable outside Bethlehem, a tiny and forgettable village in southern Palestine. Significantly, however, this king would exceed all of his counterparts and predecessors in the essence of his person.
He would be, these scholars realized, human and divine. In him, the magi saw, God had really come to earth. Small wonder that they made the arduous journey over the Zagros Mountains, across the arid expanse of Arabia, and onto the international trade routes that coursed through the Levant. Who would have imagined such a thing?
And that's the point: who would have imagined God would be born as a human being?
Because God was born as a human being, however, everything else we understand about ourselves and our reality falls into place: our worth is affirmed. It is affirmed not by us telling ourselves that we are worthwhile simply because we are worthwhile, a circular argument to be sure, but by the only person out of which worth and a meaningful world is possible.
We may dismiss Ephiphany, we may reject Hanukkah, we may let go of Kwanza. Yet we cannot let go of our need for meaning. Epiphany demonstrates that only when we let inklings of the divine into our hearts will we understand what the world is really all about.
Good to be back!
