Are you privileged?  Many of us who live in the West are.  Born into affluence, largely white, having access to good educational opportunities, bred to seek greater and greater success (whatever that is), we occupy positions of power, broadly speaking, which few other people on the planet share.
     Yesterday, as I was mingling with the congregants of an Unitarian Universalist church which I attend occasionally, primarily to dialogue with fellow members of the atheist discussion group in which I participate, I came across this observation:

"When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression"

     How true, I thought, how true:  privilege tends to color how we see everything else. On the other hand, consider the radical counterintuitivity of the imperative, rooted deeply in the pages of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, that for those to whom much has been given, much is required.  Sharing out of our abundance, particularly in a way that results in increased equality of opportunity for all people, is in no way oppression.  Quite the opposite.  It simply affirms the fact of God's love for every human being.

     James Baldwin?  Most famous for his memoirs articulating the African-American experience in the Sixties, Baldwin's unfinished memoir was recently made the basis for a movie, I Am Not Your Negro.  For those of us who lived through the civil rights movement of the Sixties, Baldwin's recollections and observations ring frightfully true.  It was a highly tense and volatile time in America.  Too many people died, too many people were hurt, too many people lost everything.  And regrettably, way too many people emerged unchanged, racists still, even today.


     Although the whites who participated in the movement were thoroughly committed to its goals, they--and they readily admitted to this--would never be able to fully understand what it felt to be a black person in America.  Nor do they today.  People who are born into what I will call white privilege, though they may do their best to expunge it from their psyche and worldview, will never be able to shake it off completely.  Like it or not, its legacy endures.
     When we therefore consider Baldwin's points about the African-American experience, we do well to view them not through the prism of our often mishapen perspective, but through the lens of a God who loves all people in equal measure, a God who enabled and encourages genetic and cultural diversity, a God who dearly wishes for all people to come together in loving community.  Would it be that we, all of us human beings, all of us who find outselves living together on this often bewildering planet, look beyond ourselves to the transcendence that defines, undergirds, and frames the rhythms of the cosmos.  That we set our hope in something bigger than ourselves.

     And see the movie:  you will not soon forget it.

     Another day, another musician birthday.  Today is the 332th birthday of George Frideric Handel.  Born in Germany, Handel spent most of his life in London.  He is perhaps most famous for his stirring religious oratorio, Messiah, a glorious paean to the salvific love of God.  We frequently see Messiah performed around Christmas and Easter.  Another of Handel's most well known works is his Water Music, for which my wife and I have a special spot in our hearts:  it was the processional music at our wedding.
     As I listened to Messiah's "Hallelujah Chorus" this morning, I reflected, again, on its power, spiritual as well as political.  As the story goes, when George II, then British king, heard its opening strains he stood up.  In an era when people sought to emulate, out of respect, what their king did, the rest of the audience stood up, too.
     Perhaps the king stood out of reverence, perhaps not.  Either way, a tradition was established.  To this day, even the most hardened unbelievers will, if they attend a performance of Messiah, stand up for the Hallelujah Chorus. Through it all, a long ago custom remains.
     This notwithstanding, however, when we review the lengthy span of biblical history which Messiah presents, we find new ways to consider the depth of God's purpose in creation.  As Handel understood very well, though God may appear to be hidden and unknown, he in fact has been working in the world since its beginning.  He's not a deistic entity.  Transcendent in essence, yes, God is nonetheless thoroughly immanent, constantly speaking into our life experience.
     Only if, however, as Handel, quoting words from the fortieth chapter of Isaiah, notes, we level the mountains and smooth the valleys of our hearts to listen.
     Enjoy the day.

     We live in a tension, do we not?  Each and every day we balance who we are with what we can do.  We leverage our immanence even while we wrestle with our transcendence. Where do these come together?
     Answers abound, but Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik's The Lonely Man of Faith offers some clues.  We are, he said, two Adams, First and Second.  Both Adams are made in the image of God, both are gifted by their creator to do marvelous and extraordinary things.  First Adam is a person who engages with the world, who steps into the world, who uses his gifts to create exceptional displays of human ingenuity. First Adam is concerned with "how": how can we use and enjoy this world in a way that maximizes its blessings for us?  Equally gifted, Second Adam, however is concerned with "why."  Why are we here? Why are we human? What are we to make our existence?
     We need both Adams to be whom we are created and destined to be.  God wants us to enjoy and enhance this world even while we wishes for us to understand why we live on it.  We must act as much as we contemplate.
    Yet ultimately, as the Rabbi points out, Second Adam is lonely.  Loneliness, he suggests, is the essence of faith.  We believe in a God whom we cannot see.
     Fair enough.  However, though the Rabbi may not agree, God has in fact made himself known, visibly, in history, space, and time.  It is in the person of Jesus that, although a person of faith will still experience physical and existential loneliness in this present existence, she understands the real truth of God:  he is here, he has come.

     Yesterday America remembered President's Day.  In years past, the nation remembered, on separate days, the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. More recently, these dates were fused into one, now an official federal holiday, President's Day.

     People of course remember these men for a variety of reasons.  The nation's first president, George Washington, a man of unerring probity, guided the fledgling democracy in its initial years, a steady hand on the national helm.  President during America's Civil War, Abraham Lincoln strove to keep the nation united and, when it appeared that it would not remain so, sought to bring it back together. And it was Abraham Lincoln who made one of the most prescient observations about the  American political scence.  in a time when people were fighting, they thought, in the name of God, he said that, Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side."
     In an era of intense political polarization, often driven by various religious loyalities, around the globe, we do well to note Lincoln's words.  Better that we use our energies seeking what God wants than pursuing what we, in our fallenness, think he wants.  Not that we cannot discern God's leading, but that we recognize that divining God's precise intentions is fiendishly difficult.  Far better that we focus on listening to God rather than speaking to ourselves.  As Lincoln further adds, "For God is always right."
 

     "The mind of a person plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps."  Don't we all wonder about what, at a given point in time, we should do?  Don't we all face having to make significant decisions?
     Of course.  In the passage from the sixteenth chapter of Proverbs, we see one piece of advice for responding to the dilemma of a difficult decision.  Yet does not this seem incredibly binding?  Regardless of what we purpose to do, God ultimately decides what will happen.  Aren't we sufficiently rational to make our own decisions?
     We certainly are.  That's how God made us:  rational beings.  True rationality, however, involves more than thinking in terms of materiality alone.  A full picture of rationality means understanding that we live our material lives in the umbra of a transcendent and spiritual experience and presence.  Though we are physical beings, we all experience things exceeding physicality.  Life is an open door.
     Do we need divine guidance?  It's not so much a question about what we need as it is an acknowledgement that we cannot live in full awareness of reality without it.
     Happy decision making.

     Buddhism?  Oddly enough, last night, at the monthly meeting of the atheist discussion group I attend, we heard a presentation on Buddhism.  Though having studied Buddhism at length in graduate school, I enjoyed hearing from a practitioner who, she told us, has been pursuing its ways for over thirty years.

A     Assessing Buddhism's appeal is not difficult.  Buddhism offers a way to find personal wholeness, even holiness without requiring adherence or loyalty to a particular doctrinal perspective, much less God.  For this reason, many Westerners find it tremendously inviting.  Moreover, meditation, the core of what it means to be Buddhist, has been found, through reams of research and study, to indeed reduce tension, mitigate stress, and lower blood pressure. From a physiological standpoint, it really does work.  Even a militant atheist like Sam Harris, author of numerous books castigating Christianity and religion, meditates.  
     So what's the problem?  Without stepping on anyone's toes, I suggest that for all of its benefits--and from a mechanical standpoint they are many--Buddhism may miss a crucial point:  we're not alone in this universe.  Although we can insist there is no God, we must then agree that the cosmos is meaningless:  why is it really here?  Why are we really here.
That said, I will add that, yes, meditation is wonderful, but if we want to think that we, and the world, have meaning in and of itself, we must also acknowledge that there is a God.
     And everything changes.

     If you've been in a store lately, you probably know that today is Valentine's Day. Although in many ways it has become (or, I might say, degenerated into) a Hallmark holiday, it actually has a measure of legitimate historical origin.  Its name comes from St. Valentine, a Christian who was martyred during the onerous reign of Claudius, a Roman emperor in the third century A.D.  Over the years, as Rome and its splendor faded into history and the Middle Ages began, it morphed into a day associated with love and romance.  
     Commercialism aside, Valentine's Day is still a good day.  What harm can come from thinking about love?
     Valentine's Day is a good day for us to think, again, about how and why we love.  So many of us struggle to be loved, so many of us look for love, as the saying goes, in all the wrong places, and so many wonder, as perhaps singer Linda Ronstadt did decades ago, when we will be loved.  Not one of us does not appreciate, in some way, the love of another human being.
     Tom Vincent was a hermit who lived on the side of California’s San Gabriel Mountains’s 9,000 foot Mt. Baden-Powell for over 50 years.  A recluse, he made every effort to keep people away, sometimes firing his rifle at anyone who dared approach his habitation.  One day, however, Tom became very sick, so much so that he could no longer live on his own.  As it turned out, he was dying.
     Fortunately for Tom, the local postmaster, the only person with whom he ever talked, learned of his illness and took him down the mountain to a hospital.  After a few weeks, Tom died, the postmaster still at his side.  He didn’t die alone.  For some brief moments, Tom knew love.
     As you remember Valentine's Day, think about Tom.  Think about love.  And think about from where, in a world of impersonal chemical and material origin, love could possibly come.
     Think about the essential and transcending love of God.

     Interregnum?  It's a term used mostly in scholarly circles, a word drawn from the Latin for king, "rex."  It means "between kings."  In a recently published book of the same name, author Carlo Bordoni makes the point that although the West has largely abandoned the notion of a grand narrative for understanding itself, it nonetheless is on the verge of adopting this notion all over again.
     What exactly does this mean?  Simply, even though we in the West have decided we no longer need a "master" ("meta," from the Greek word, "mega," meaning "large") narrative, that is, some sort of broad and encompassing narrative to explain our existence, we in fact cannot do without one.
     Decades ago, this master narrative was religion, principally Christianity.  That is no longer true:  Christianity is not the dominant narrative of the West.  So the West stumbled into postmodernity, which is basically a worldview that rejects the notion of a grand narrative.
     However, as Bordoni points out (and many others have, too), the people of the West (indeed, all peoples) cannot live this way indefinitely.  They need a bigger picture to make sense of their finitude.  They need a larger framework to understand themselves. And what does this say about us, we human beings who find ourselves on this remarkable and bewildering planet?
     Just this:  we cannot be who we are without believing in something bigger than ourselves.  This could be a philosophy, set of beliefs, worldview, or something else.  It could even be, gasp, God.  Whatever it is, we should admit that we cannot live without it.
     Maybe that's why God is always calling us.  He knows us better than we know ourselves.

     "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination--what the imagination seizes as beauty and truth--whether it existed before or not."
     So said the British Romantic poet John Keats, who died in 1821 in Rome at the too tender age of 25.  When I reflect on his poetry of which, considering his short life, he wrote a great deal, I confront, once again, the mystery of the human imagination.  Many poets describe poetry as the grand window of humanity, that through which people may obtain a glimpse of what life really is about, the creative expression in which we see the 
heart of the meaning of existence.  For these poets, poetry is something akin to God.

     From where does our imagination come?  Why do we possess the capacity to imagine? Why are we, seemingly alone among all the animals, able to dream and fantasize of things invisible, unknown, and unseen?  How is it that, if all things were once material and impersonal, we are now spiritual and personal--and capable of lifting ourselves beyond them?
     Although the ready theological answer is that we are created in the image of an imaginative God--a fact I do not deny--I also like to look at the presence of imagination in the light of what it tells us about the universe.  Without imagination, the universe is hollow, painfully hollow, an amalgam of materiality incapable of rising above itself, bereft of the ability to think about what it is.
     We really can't have it both ways.  If imagination is, as Keats insists, a truth, we will not find it in an impersonal and solely material universe.

     A couple of weeks ago, on a frigid winter afternoon, I went hiking through a forest preserve near my home.  Although very little snow was present, all of the lakes were locked in ice, trapped, it seemed, by the weight of the season.  Nothing moved in them, nothing spoke from them.  The silence was total.
     Aponia, I thought, aphonia.  Stillness and silence.  How good, I thought, how good that in a crowded and noisy world I can experience silence, that I can touch stillness and vapidity.  That I can know the absence of sound.  It's a personal world, yes, but it's good to step aside from its immediate cacaphony and consider why that is.  To ponder the looming and essential loquaciousness of the beyond.  To confront the person of God.
     It's easy to talk, it's easy to speak.  It's not as simple to do neither one.  Yet this is the only way we will know what to say.
     Listen to the universe, hear its God:  the Word became flesh, full of grace and truth.

     What if you firmly believed in the truth of one religion, but had opportunity to advise another person, a person who had been raised apart from his family's religion, yet was seeking deeply to find his life's way, which way to choose?
     This is precisely the question a Catholic priest faced in Saul Friedlander's powerful memoir, When Memory Comes.  Not raised as an observant Jew and having participated heavily in the Catholic Church (to the point of entertaining the notion of becoming a priest), Friedlander had now begun to reconsider his Jewish heritage.
     What is a priest, a person thoroughly committed to Christianity, to do?
     Saul, the aging cleric told him, consider where you feel most comfortable.  Consider what spiritual experience resonates with you most profoundly.  Meditate on the real person of God.  And consider that from which you have come. 
     What did Friedlander do?  He left the Catholic Church.  He rediscovered his Judaism. He moved to Israel and advocated much for the cause of the nation (the eretz, the land). As he saw it, he came home.
     Did the priest do the right thing?  As many a person has observed, all truth is God's truth. God is everywhere, and his truth is, too.  And this truth meets people where they are at. It speaks to them in the day, it talks to them in the night. And it satisfies all their longings.
     I do not know Friedlander's heart.  But I do know that if a person is genuinely seeking God, in Jesus Christ, God will not let him down.  He's always listening.  And he always speaks.
     And hope ever remains.

     Well, it's over:  Super Bowl 51.  Although I didn't watch it all the way through (except for Lady Gaga's spectacular halftime show), I must say that it certainly provided some excitment for those watching it (unless he or she is an Atlanta Falcons' fan!).
     Evidence continues to grow, of course, for the prevalence of CTE in professional football players.  To the avid football fan, however, this doesn't matter too much.  The game exceeds all of its shortcomings and flaws.





     Although I'm happy for those who enjoyed watching the game and the entertainment it brings, I always stop and think:  here we are, fat and happy, focusing our time and money watching a spectacle about which too many of our brethren in the developing world could care less.  They are more concerned with where they will find their next meal.  Or where they will spend the night.
     In his second letter to the church at Corinth,, Paul observes that, God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that having all sufficiency in all things at all times, you may abound in every good work."
     While we can certainly enjoy, appreciate, and be thankful for what we have, we must also realize that, when we give generously from it, God will ensure that we will always have enough.  We will meet our needs.
     And maybe we will have what we want.

     It's been a big week for musician birthdays.  Friday of last week was Mozart's; Tuesday of this week was Schubert's; and today, February 3, is Felix Mendelssohn.  Though born in Germany into a ostensibly Jewish family, he eventually was baptized as a Christian. Sadly, like Mozart and Schubert, Mendelssohn died before he was forty.  A musician of Romanticism--like Schubert--he wrote music that, when we listen to it today, sounds like poetry, its melodies lithely carrying us along, transporting us to new levels of emotional experience, pushing us into thoughts of the ethereal and divine.  We walk away enraptured, enraptured with time, space, and destiny:  life seems newly wonderful, wonderful beyond belief.

     What more is there to say?  We rejoice in such music; we delight that it speaks to us; we love that it lets us soar beyond the immediate and touch the eternal that encompasses us all.
     Thanks, Felix Mendelssohn.  Thanks for reminding us that if we open our eyes, if we really open our eyes, we see that life exceeds our wildest imaginations.
     As one writer put it, it's an adventure with God.

     As I have continued to reflect on the inevitability of transcendence in our experience, yesterday mentioning it in relation to the Cult of the Supreme Being in the French Revolution, I thought of an experience my brother had many years ago.
     At one point during his time attending university in Santa Barbara, California, my brother learned of a group of people who believed in what I will call "triangular" energy. They believed that by attaching a sort of a triangle onto their heads they could access special energy from the universe.  Being an engineering student and ever the skeptic, Bob one afternoon dropped in on one of the group's gatherings.
     The fervor of the group's adherents was no joke.  There they were, standing around and chatting with various polygon shapes on the top of the heads.  He couldn't believe what he was seeing. 

     Looking back on this and thinking also of the Western culture's more recent obsession with using crystals as a means to communicate with or receive input from the transcendent/divine/universe, I realize once more how much people wish to believe that a truth bigger than them exists.  And that they should and can know it.
     Whatever our epistemological starting point, we rarely wish to stop there.  We almost always want to think there's something more.  For some of us, it's more of the same; for most of us, however, it's something qualitatively different, something that somehow gives a larger meaning to the present, regular, and mundane.
     And it's difficult to believe that this something is found in polygons or crystals.  If God is there--and I believe he is--we ought to be able to find him with rationality and reason. After all, we're reasonable people.  And he's a reasonable God.
     Just ask Jesus.

     It changed the world in remarkable ways.  I speak of the French Revolution, that epochal late eighteenth century upheaval of, literally the very foundations of the French culture.  When it was over, France no longer had a king, nor did it any longer have religion.  Although I am aware that many nuances attend the latter, the Revolution did in fact eviscerate the existing religious order.  French religion would never be the same. Going forward, liberty, liberty from intellectual and spiritual boundary, would be prime.
     Ironically, as the Revolution burrowed its way more deeply into the French imagination, its leaders came to create religion anew.  They called it the Cult of the Supreme Being.  Although their intentions were thoroughly secular, the face of what they established affirmed the ineradicability of the human quest for meaning, for some type of transcendent meaning.  Despite the contentions of many a materialist to the contrary, we can never completely step away from the necessity of transcendence.

     We observe this in the Russian Revolution, too.  Although the Soviet government did everything it could to suppress and eliminate religious belief, its actions only served to further center it in the hearts of a countless number of Russians.  Transcendence remained.
     As it does today.  Looming everywhere yet often seemingly nowhere, transcendence nonetheless is more than present.  It is woven into the very fabric of creation.
     Revolt, yes, stand up for what is right and true, but remember the inescapability of transcendence.
     We cannot ignore God.