It's an odd contrast, really:  the first week of spring and the third week of Lent.  Joy reborn and darkness without relent.  This dichotomy is perhaps encapsulated in some words from Psalm 22, spoken by Jesus as he hung on the cross.
     "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" he said.  Betrayed by one of his disciples, condemned by a farcical trial, scourged until flesh hung like ribbons from his back, and nailed to a wooden cross, Jesus felt totally alone and abandoned, even by God.  Shorn of all spiritual connection, wallowing in unremitting depths of darkness and despair, Jesus was separated from life itself.
     As the psalm continues, however, we read, "But you [God] are holy and enthroned on the praises of Israel; in you our fathers trusted . . . and you delivered them."  Indeed. God understands that, in the biggest possible picture, Spring, rebirth and new life, will prevail.  If we believe, our Spring will be forever.  God is a God of Spring.

     If not, why would Jesus have chosen to die?
     By the way, because it is Spring, I will be traveling next week.  See you in April!

     Earlier this week, I talked about the wonder of people who can write and play music. In particular, I remembered the birthday of the classical composer Johannes Sebastain Bach and the passing of Chuck Berry, one of the earliest stars of rock 'n' roll. 
     Today, I share the wonder of another type of human achievement, one in the sphere of physical prowess.  Unless you are a runner or follow such things, you may not be aware of Ed Whitlock.  Ed Whitlock, who passed on last week, was a runner extraordinaire. Possessed with remarkable physical gifts, he continued to run, hard, into his eighties. Indeed, about a year before he died, he finished a marathon in under four hours.  Given that for most of us this is an accomplishment, to see a person in his eighties do such a thing causes us to marvel even more at the profound capacities of the human body.  In addition, when he was seventy-three, Whitlock ran a marathon in less than three hours. This means that, at this age, he averaged a sub-seven mile pace which, as any runner knows, is amazing.  Although champion marathoners today regularly run 4:30 and 4:35 minute miles in their bid to be the first to cross the finish line, most of us do well to crack eight minute miles.  Yet even in his seventies, Whitlock managed to go well beyond this.
     Why did Whitlock run?  Mostly, he said, for the attention and accolades.  He didn't employ a special trainer, did not pursue a special diet, did not engage in any particular type of training.  He just ran.  And he ran fast.
     What astonishing creations we are!  Equal parts intellect and physicality, emotion and imagination, visioning and purpose, we ought to often step back and wonder:  why?  Why are we the way we are?  Are we really, as one researcher put it, "plops" in a senseless universe?
     Unless there is something more than we, we are. 

     If you enjoy rock 'n' roll, you know that Chuck Berry died last week.  Dynamic and creative, Berry pioneered the sound that eventually grew into the plethora of rock music we hear today.  Dozens of musicians, all, ironically, white, owe their sounds to him.  His influence is immeasurable.

     Some of us love rock, some of us do not.  Some of us think rock is evil, most of us, I daresay, do not.  Many of us lament how rock's ethos of rebellion ensnared millions of young people in the Sixties and Seventies, and all of us should mourn the passing of many a musician before he or she turned thirty, felled, in most cases, by the patterns of the life he or she led.
     Regardless, if God is there, and I believe he is, we can view rock--and Chuck Berry--in a very wide lens.  Culture, however it is expressed, is the fruit of a humanity made with purpose, the outpouring of a creativity born in beings made in the image of God.  Though we may not like or appreciate all the culture we see, we can certainly agree that God can use it all.
     And he has.  As we ponder Chuck Berry's passing, we also consider the profound changes that rock wrought in so many millions of people, changes that, in many cases, helped them to see, in the compass of human creativity and imagination, that there is indeed a God.
     Solely chemical beings, it seems to me, will never create.

     

     Yesterday was the first day of Spring.  Today is an equally wonderful day:  the birthday of Johannes Sebastian Bach.  Wrapped in the rhythms of vernality and spring, Bach's birthday comes replete with the sounds of singing birds, greening forests, and deeper skies.  And his music fits the season.  Fresh, bright, and resonant with joy, Bach's music echoes the wonder of the newly born creation.
     We thank Bach for what he has shown us about life, wonder, and Spring.  We also thank Bach for giving us a glimpse of the unfolding mystery, and the mystery behind it, of this vast, vast--and loved--universe in which we revel.
     So did Bach write on every piece of music he composed, "Soli Deo Gloria" (All Glory to God Alone).  Bach knew very well from whence all things come.  Happy birthday, Bach!

     It's Spring!  Although in many parts of the world, notably the Arctic, it seems as though Spring is far, far away, from an astronomical standpoint, Spring is here.  I hope you find time to rejoice, perhaps listen to "Spring" in Vivaldi's "Four Seasons," maybe take time to reflect on the winter that is drawing to a close, maybe even consider what you will do with the new season that sits before you.

     In his Anna Karenin, Leo Tolstoy beautifully describes this spring as a time when, “the ice on the river began to crack and slide away, and the turbid, frothing torrents flowed more swiftly . . . the sun rose brilliant . . . and the warm air all around vibrated with the vapor given off by the awakening earth.”

     And in the "Song of Songs" in the Hebrew Bible, we read the words of the writer to his "beloved," "For behold, the winter is past, the rain over and gone.  The flowers have already appeared in the land; the time has arrived for pruning the vines, and the voice of the turtledove has been heard in our land."

     Need we say anything more?  Spring is a time to feel loved, loved by the earth, loved by the cosmos and, most important, loved by God.

     

     If you're Irish or have some Irish in you, you may well know what today means:  St. Patrick's Day.  Patron saint of and missionary to the Irish nation, St. Patrick came into a early medieval land dominated by various strands of Celtic religious thought and proceeded to preach and explain the Christian gospel.

     It seems that he did so rather successfully. Despite what has historically been often very deep cultural rifts among the Irish populace, Christianity is still admired and celebrated throughout the land.  God and Jesus remain important.
     One of the beauties of St. Patrick's Day is that although it is a commemoration of the saint's supposed day of death, it is on the other hand a day of tremendous celebration. St. Patrick's Day tells us that life is good, life is fun, life is joyous.  Sure, some people celebrate to excess, but it is in general done with every good intention:  life is beautiful!
     And so is, St. Patrick would no doubt add, God. Why?  As this wonderful Irish patron would say, he loves us as we are and, more important, as he knows we can, by the love and grace of Jesus, one day be.

     In a broken world, a world in which things do not always go as we wish them to, a world marked by tremendous joy as well as profound tragedy, we humans seem to cultivate an innate longing for control.  Why can we not control the affairs of our lives? Why can we not ensure that we are not surprised by darkness?

     In this week, the week of the second Sunday of Lent, we have opportunity to rethink our longing for control.  Lent is all about giving up.  We give up our time, we give up our pursuits, we give up our lives, we give up control.  We recognize that we live in a world beyond our control.  We acknowledge that if we try to control everything, we will inevitably end up creating a world of us and us alone, a world without any real point except poor little us.  We reduce ourselves to a collection of atoms spinning madly in a nexus of space and time, avoiding everything but ourselves.

     Lent is one of God's way of telling us that though we are remarkable creatures, entirely capable of directing the course of our lives, we will never understand and control it all.  Lent reminds us that we are finite, that we have limits, that our marvelous attributes can only take us so far.  Sooner or later, we encounter a bump:  we realize that we are not so remarkable that we in ourselves can decide what we are existence mean. How could we?  We are only us.

     We in Lent are like the "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog," standing before the world, watching, planning, waiting, bereft, however, of ultimate control over that which we see.

     And that's precisely God's point:  in order to gain control, we must give it up.  We must give up who we are now to find who we are destined to be.

     March 15:  the Ides of March.  On this day in 44 B.C., Julius Caesar, a general and would-be dictator of the Roman republic was assassinated, set upon by a group of nearly sixty people, including his supposedly best friend and associate Brutus, and stabbed to death on the floor of the Roman Senate.  It was an ugly demise.
     As the historian Plutarch tells it, some time prior to that day, Caesar was warned by a seer that he would die before the day, March 15, ended.  In a movie made about Caesar a decade ago, he was pictured seeing a crow fly overhead as he traveled to the Senate that day.  In much ancient lore, including that of Rome, a crow was considered to be a bad omen.
     In his piece "Crossroads" (popularized by the long gone band Cream), the legendary blues singer Robert Johnson paints a picture of a decision to be made, a barrier to be bridged and, to borrow from Caesar once again, a Rubicon to be crossed.  Though the story is that the song describes a pact that Johnson supposedly made with the Devil, we cannot be sure.
     The point is this:  we all have our Ides of March, we all have our crossroads.  We all face, whether we sense it beforehand or not, potentially transforming moments.  How these moments will transform us we usually do not know.  But we understand that each of our moments lingers on the cusp of change.
     But why?  We do so because we believe that the world speaks.  We believe that we are creatures of sense living in a sensory world.  Yet we only experience our Ides of March, and we only face our crossroads because we and the world are personal.  We think, we feel, we love.
     In a solely material world, a world absent of transcendent presence, however, such experiences cannot exist.  From where would they come?
     Chemicals alone will not give us an Ides of March.

     Now that I've resolved some technical issues with my blogging, I blog once more. this time to think about, again, the place of women in the world.  Last week, I mentioned that March 8th is International Women's Day.  Today I add that the next day, March 9th, is my mother's birthday.  She would have been 95 years old.  When I think of women, I invariably think of, along with my wife, my mother.  A housewife her entire married life, Mom steadfastly pursued and supported, particularly in her later years, the women around the world who were advocating for increased attention to the needs of her fellow females.  Though she was a comfortable white suburbanite--a fact of which she was acutely aware--Mom devoted much time, resources, and energy to looking after her kin who had not been so fortunate.  Her daughters, my two sisters, did so--and continue to--as well.
     What, beyond lauding my mother, is my point?  All of us have mothers, all of us came from a woman, somewhere in the world.  Perhaps your mother loved you dearly, perhaps she failed to show her affection for you.  Perhaps you never knew your mother.  Whatever the case may be, we all came from a mother.  We all came from a woman who, as I shared a few days ago, had been uniquely gifted by God to gestate and give birth.  And although the sin and brokenness of this planet has often fractured the bond of mother and child, its essential truth remains:  the enduring truth of a personal God.

     Amidst my travels last week, I noticed that March 8th, two days ago, was International Women's Day.  It's definitely an occasion to celebrate.  After all, it's no secret that, historically, women have frequently been relegated to second place status in almost every area of human existence and that, moreover, this continues to happen, too much, today.
     It's time, indeed, way past time to remedy this malady.

     And God would agree.  If we examine the verbs the writer of Genesis uses to describe the creation of man and woman, we see why.
     The verb used to describe God's creation of Adam is a fairly common one.  It connotes a general act of making or creating.  It presents the creative act as a rather casual one, as if God put together Adam from various parts he found as he wandered to and fro through the universe (although he really did not).
     The verb used to describe the creation of Eve is very different.  Used far less frequently, it is a verb that presents creation as a very systematic, thoughtful, and carefully constructed act, as if the creator--God--is working from a blueprint, a very complex activity.     
     What does this tell us?  That although God created man and woman, he did so in different ways.  While the man is infinitely important, the woman is the most complex creature in all of creation.  Why?  Out of the two beings that comprise the human species, only she is able to give birth to human offspring, living, viable beings made in the image of God.  Only woman can sustain the human race.
     And this is more than enough reason to laud and celebrate women.  Clearly, if not for our mothers, none of us would be here today.  If not for women, not one person would be able to enjoy this existence.
     Most importantly, if not for women, none of us would have opportunity to find God.
     

H     In addition to marking the solemnity of Ash Wednesday yesterday, March 1 is also the birthday of another famous composer: Frederic Chopin.  One of the most dazzling musicians of the Romantic Era, Chopin in his too short life (he died at the age of 39) composed a host of memorable pieces for the piano.  His works are full of life yet resonate with the sound of memory and contemplation.  We listen to them today and think about how his Polish origins blended with his relatively cosmopolitan lifestyle (he was well acquainted with Hungarian composer Franz Liszt and the novelist George Sand) to produce melodies that dig into our soul.
     And in the wake of Ash Wednesday, a day on which we take time to meditate on our fragility and mortality, a day also on which we find space to ponder the meaning of our curious conglomeration of physicality and spirit, we remember Chopin.  We remember his creativity, we remember his vision.  We remember his angst.  And we realize, again, that we live in a beautiful yet tragic world, that we dance on a very narrow line between being here and not, and that we, human beings, we magnificent creators, find our humanness most profoundly when we submit to the mystery of whom we may not believe we really are.

     By the way, I'll be traveling for about a week, so will not be posting.  Thanks for reading.  Talk to you next week!

     Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent.  Ash Wednesday reminds us that, whether we believe in an afterlife or not, we are ultimately no more than dust.  When we die and pass out of this life, what remains of us will soon be no more, too, returned to the earth from which it has come.  Before my siblings and I scattered my mother's ashes atop her favorite mountain in the San Gabriel Mountains of California in October of 2011, we opened the box that contained "her."  All that Mom ever was had been reduced to a small pile of ashes.  All her years, all her love, all her joy, all her meaning, all her hopes and dreams now no more than a bag of ashes.  It was sobering.
     Even more sobering is that one day, every one of us will be exactly the same.  Happily, however, even as it reminds us of our mortality, Ash Wednesday also reminds us to realize that we are not dust and ashes only.  We are spiritual beings, physical creatures with spiritual form and vision, created by a transcendent God.
     Our death is not the end.