The poor Rohingya of Bangladesh.  Persecuted and driven out of supposedly peaceful Buddhist Myanmar, these Muslim people have been hit again.  Yesterday, a fierce cyclone swept through their fragile encampments on the shores of their adopted country and decimated them.  Many lost their lives; many more lost their homes and everything they had (which was not much).  It's a tragedy of unbearable proportion.
     In the face of such suffering and pain, we wonder about many things.  The first that comes to my mind is why the predominantly Buddhist population of Myanmar broke with everything Buddhist founder Guatama told them about living harmoniously with all things and brutally pushed the Rohingya out of the country.  The second is, of course, God. What is he doing?  What is God doing in the face of such disaster?
     I cannot answer this fully.  No one can.  Yet I ponder the contrast between a monotheistic Abrahamic religion and an a-theistic one like Buddhism.  If there is no God, we will be confused about our circumstances, yes, but we will have no way to understand them other than the circumstances themselves.  If there is a God, which I fervently believe to be true, we may still be confused, but we know that when all is said and done, purpose remains.  There is explanation, there is light.  Why?  Because God himself suffered this pain.  He knows it, he feels it.  And he can redeem it.

     A culture of fear?  Last night, I watched and participated in a round table discussion about the role of faith, here defined as trust in God, in what the event organizers called, in the inner cities of America, a "culture of fear."  Why?  As the African-American pastors participating in the discussion saw it, those who live in the inner cities of our nation live with a culture of fear.  Violence is rampant, respect for life nil.  No one cares.  These pastors have buried more young men than they would rather count; one saw a young man gunned down right in front of his church.  A Latina pastor noted that many of the children in her congregation live with a daily fear of hearing a knock on the door, a knock on the door by agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement who will seize their parents and deport them to Mexico (the children were born in the U.S., their parents were not). All of the pastors recalled how the Sunday after the elections in November last year most of their flock were weeping, fearful for what the future portended, fearful for what appeared to be a newly racist atmosphere being given voice in America.
     As a white male, I cannot identify with such fear.  I cannot identify with the pain of racism, cannot identify with the struggle to be known simply as who I am.  I cannot identify with the fear of being pulled over solely because my skin color is not white.  I do not need to; for the moment, mine is the dominant ethnicity in the West.  I'm not Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man."  I'm not James Baldwin's "Negro."  I'm a child of privilege.  It's a privilege into which I was born, a privilege for which I didn't ask, a privilege that, sadly, has been used by too many who share it to suppress the hopes, ambitions, and dreams of millions of people across the world.  It's a privilege, as the pastors pointed out, is one that has agency, an agency rooted in meaning.
     Though I took many things away from the discussion, I will mention two.  One, I was struck, once more, by the continued willingness of everyone in the room to believe in the goodness of God, to believe that he loves them and will get them through the travails of the present moment.  Two, I appreciated anew the connection between agency and meaning.  Because I've been raised and conditioned to believe in my meaningfulness as a human being, I also believe that I have agency.  I can do, I can act.  I can decide, I can choose.  I can live out my role as one made in the image of God.  Too many of us cannot.
     As we move into the Memorial Day weekend in the U.S., I trust that we--all of us around the planet--will make time to appreciate that unless we all can experience freedom, freedom from tyranny and freedom from fear, we will never realize the fullness of whom we, and the human community, are created to be.

     How timely it was for me, in the wake of the terrorist attack in Manchester, England, and the many accusations and inneuendos which have ensued, to yesterday attend an interfaith dialogue about sacred texts.  One by one, representatives from the three Abrahamic traditions--Judaism, Islam, and Christianity--as well as adherents of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikkhism, explained the basis and meaning of their respective sacred texts. What I found most moving was hearing how each person approached the texts that ground his/her faith tradition.  Listening to him or her explain what he/she found in his/her text and how he/she wove it into his/her life was highly illuminating.  Although many books have been written about the various sacred texts of the world, few of these have been penned in an attempt to understand why, precisely why, a particular text is so vital to its reader's well being.  Why does a person find this text and, sometimes, only this text, to be especially meaningful?
     For everyone except the Buddhist, this text was important because they believed it to be given to them by God.  They saw this text as God's words to them.  This text was a revelation of a living divine, a revelation that speaks to them in every corner of their lives.  To read the text was to experience it.
     So it is for us.  Texts avail us little if we do not experience them, if we do not weave them into our lives.  We therefore ask ourselves this:  what do I see in my "sacred" text that enables me to live a meaningful life?
     And to this I say that we can see only a text of revelation, a text that we did not make or create, as a legitimate path in this regard.  Otherwise, we're simply talking to ourselves.
     Find your sacred text.  Find a sacred text that exceeds anything you can in yourself imagine.  Find what moves you in a way that you cannot move yourself.
     

     "ISIS is not Islam!"  These words of a Muslim friend of mine, spoken to me in the shadow of the recent terrorist attack in Manchester, England, have never been more timely.  In the aftermath of such carnage, it's normal to lash out at a belief we perhaps do not fully understand.  Under the weight of pain, it's easy to lump everyone who holds to, our mind, a belief we do not understand, into the same category.  We are sorry, we are hurting, we are angry.  We do not know what else to do.
     I pray that as many in the West, and the rest of the planet as well, continue to mourn those who lost their lives in this act of violence, we do so in the light of Jesus' words to God as he hung on the cross, "Father, forgive them [those who crucified him], for they do not know what they do."  Clearly, the people of ISIS have terribly misinterpreted the essence of Islam.  Equally as clear, all things considered, they really do not understand the full extent of their actions.  They do not grasp the full measure of the pain caused by what they do.
     This isn't to excuse ISIS.  Not at all.  It is simply to remind us that in a fallen world, we all labor under the myopia and misperceptions of our sin.  We all see less than we should. We must therefore couch our desire for justice in something bigger than ourselves, something--someone--in whom justice finds its ultimate definition, the only one who sees all things:  God.

     What's the measure of a life?  Though this is surely difficult to determine, I wondered about it anew when I came across the obituary of Nicholas Sands.  Sands died last week at the age of 73.

     Who was Nicholas Sands, and why did he merit an obituary in the nation's leading newspapers?  Nicholas Sands was a chemist who manufactured, of all things, LSD.  And he did so in the most remarkable way.  A few years before he died, Sands observed in an interview that he made enough LSD in his lifetime for 140 million individual doses.  140 million doses, 140 million acid trips.  140 million opportunities, as Sands saw it, for enlightenment.  140 million possibilities, as he and his compatriots viewed it, for journeys into the infinite and eternal.
     Much research supports Sands's assertions about LSD's ability to create visions of insight and perception in its users.  Its chemicals, which Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman stumbled upon almost by accident many decades ago, appear to have a unique capacity to convince its users that they are indeed experiencing an alternative reality, a reality just as real to them as this reality is to you and me.
     Having come of age in the American Sixties, I'm not a stranger to LSD.  Yet if eternity is real--and I have every reason to believe it is--it seems that it is more logical to suppose that we can attain it through means centered in our "real" reality, not an alternate state. Would not the creator speak through that which he has directly created?  After all, he did, in Jesus, become flesh and blood in our world.
     Rest well, Nicholas Sands.
     

     Are you a narrative?  Indeed, you are.  Is not your life akin to a story?  Is not your life a tale of moments, days, months, and years, a flow of happening, event, and circumstance? Of course it is.  We are creatures of narrative, creatures of story and song who live in a world of story, a universe of meaning.
     Yet we would not even think about story unless we believed this universe is meaningful.  And if we believe it to be meaningful, we must ask ourselves why we believe this to be true.  If we call ourselves a meaningful story, what have we accomplished? We've simply affirmed ourselves, by ourselves.
     Unless we are stories in a story, a bigger story in which all stories find meaning, we are nothing but blips in a vast canvas of self-affirmation without any basis for doing so. Sure, we can laud our story, but how do we know?  Are we the sum of our reality?
     Maybe.  But how do we know?  Consider John 1:14, a verse to which I have referred many times before, "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us."  When Jesus, God, appeared, the larger story did, too.  Then, and only then, could we affirm that the universe--and all of us--are really with purpose.  Otherwise, we shouting at the proverbial wind.
    In the end, we can only be narratives in a metanarrative, the metanarrative of God.
    And that, in the long run, is what history, and all of its stories--our stories--is all about.

     How do we reconcile divine sovereignty and free will?  The short answer is that we cannot.  The much longer answer is that although both are true, we will never know how they come together.
     But how desperately we want to.  "Many plans are in a person's heart," but the counsel of the Lord stands."  Because we are made in the image of a choice making God, we have the capacity to make choices.  We ponder, we question, we decide.  Yet we do so in the umbra of a purposeful God, a purposeful God who brought us into existence.  Two truths, yes, but whose precise balance eludes us.
     What do we do?  We continue to make choices, realizing that we can only do so because we live in a purposeful world, a purposeful world that has been, necessarily, created by a purposeful God.  Yet it is the nature of this dichotomy that we will never find resolution.
     So we trust.
     Yet trust, as we all know, is not always easy.  In a world whose purposefulness we did not make, however, it is all we can--and should--do.  

     Does evil exist?  A friend of mine does not think so.  People do bad things, yes, but they are not evil.  Moreover, she says, a cognitive and active "evil" is not roaming through the world.
     Millennia ago, Augustine observed that evil is the privation of good.  That is, when good diminishes, evil is born.  But, the prelate added, evil does not exist in palpable form.  It is simply the result of a decrease in good.
     On this, I draw your attention to the case of Ian Brady, a forthrightly unrepentant torturer and killer of several young children in Great Britain in the 1960s. 
     Brady died a couple of days ago at the age of 79.  (His love, Myra Hindley, who assisted in some of his deeds, lives on.) Some would say that Brady was evil, through and through, that there was no good in him. Furthermore, the acts he committed, many people feel, were entirely evil as well; there was absolutely nothing good about them.
     If people are made in the image of God, though a highly tarnished image at that, however, we cannot say that Brady was entirely evil.  Above and beyond all else, he is a human in the image of his creator.  Nonetheless, he did what most of us consider to be bad and evil things.
     And that's the point.  If we determine evil on the basis of our situation--and we definitely do--how do we ultimately know what really is evil?
     The short answer is that we don't.
     Is my friend right?  Only if we are all alone in the universe.  Only if there is no God. If there is no God, however, we'll never really know, absolutely, what is evil.
     Or even that it exists at all.

     What's moral?  In a classic example of what the author George Orwell might call "doublespeak," the long dead French politician Robespierre, most (in)famous for his role in the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, opined that, "The springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror:  virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless."
     According to Robespierre, without virtue, that is, moral excellence, terror, that is, actions intended to intimidate or frighten, is inutile.  It means nothing.  But wait:  how can we equate moral excellence with actions intended to frighten and harm?  On the other hand, how can we make, as Robespierre does in the next phrase, terror the upholder of moral excellence?  Again, we're conflating something that most of us would applaud (moral excellence) with actions that most of us would condemn (terror).
     Nonetheless, Robespierre has identified a problem that arises whenever anyone insists that her version of virtue, that is, moral excellence, deserves anything she does to implement and express it.  Repeatedly throughout history, people, religious or not, have used terror to achieve what they considered to be good and laudable goals.  So convinced are they of the righteousness of their perspective that they are ready and willing to do whatever they can, including terror, to implement and promote it.
     Underlying this problem is an even bigger one:  how do we decide what is truly "moral"?  For many of us, morality is relative.  Yet this leaves us with more questions than answers:  how do we balance competing moral claims?  For others, morality is defined by an absolute standard, something that is always binding and true.  But this can lead to the issue we posed earlier:  who decides what is binding and true?
     If we say that religion, transcendent religion, decides, we come to another problem:  every religion cannot be right at the same time.  So who is right?
     Well, one might say, God.  But who knows what God is really saying?
     Perhaps it is those who do not try to define God in their own image.  Perhaps it is those who do not try to make God the product of their baggage and imaginations.  Perhaps it is those who allow God to speak to them when they least want him to, when they have no idea what he will say, indeed, when they do not want God to say anything, when they are willing to admit to themselves that they are the products of mysteries beyond their comprehension.
     Perhaps it is those who are ready to be human beings, and only human beings, in an unfathomable yet, and this is the conundrum, clearly personal universe.
     There's always more to knowing than we can know.

     Reading a review of a book about owls published recently, I was reminded, again, of the lingering human feeling that owls, for a variety of reasons, are paragons of wisdom, inscrutable, incisive, more perceptive than all others.  Silent denizens of the night, owls, many people believe, their wings moving aphonically through the darkened skies, harbor an intelligence and insight we all need.

     We all of course need wisdom.  We all need the ability to see more deeply, to look between the lines, to perceive and grasp things we do not readily understand:  to make rational and informed decisions.
     The ancient Greeks viewed their goddess Athena (Minerva to the Romans) as a fount of wisdom,  So did the Hebrews write of wisdom as a woman in Proverbs 8.  For the Greeks as well as the Hebrews, wisdom was vital to good living, the creation of God.  Wisdom, they both believed, is for this reason embedded in the fabric of the universe.
     And this is the point.  Wisdom is calling, multiple Hebrew proverbs say, calling to you, calling to me, calling us to follow her, to follow her as a way of life.  It is everywhere.
     As Greek and Hebrew alike understood, however, such wisdom would not be unless there is God.  Wisdom can only be in a personal universe, and a personal universe can only be if there is a personal God.

     Sure, it's a Hallmark holiday, and sure, it's an opportunity for the retailers of the world to lure people, particularly men, into their stores and showrooms, and sure, it's exploited by clergy and politician alike, but Mother's Day remains a good day.  Whether we have good or bad memories of our mothers (or perhaps a mix), we must admit that without our mothers, we would not be here, would not have found life, would not have tasted the marvels of existence.  If our mother genuinely loved us, so much the better, for we learned early on that the world is indeed a good place, and that life is indeed an adventure worth pursuing.  For those for whom the opposite was true, I'm sorry, deeply sorry.  Life was likely not as pretty.  In fact, it may have been inordinately cruel.  And I hope and trust that as you have spun out your life, you have found healing and remedy, that you have found that even if your mother did not seem to love you, other people do. And I hope that you have learned that God loves you, too.
     The sacrifices a mother makes for her children mirror the sacrifices that God makes for us every day, the endless effort he makes to ensure that despite the brokenness of the world, we, humanity, endure.  Good or evil, sinner or saint, God loves us all, blessing us with everything we need to flourish on this remarkable planet.  Like a mother, God never forgets those whom he made.
     I loved my mother (she died in 2010), and miss her much.  I'm so thankful God gave her to me, and me to her.  And my memories of her love makes me realize, over and over, every day, the enduring reality of God.
     Thanks, God, for my mother.

     "I have seen that every labor and every skill which is done," opines the writer of Ecclesiastes, " is the result of rivalry between a man and his neighbor.  This too is vanity and striving after wind."
     Leave it to Ecclesiastes to remind us of the limits of our certainties.  Beginning with Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations, numerous apologists for capitalism have stressed its ability to generate jobs, income, and social well being for the people and nations who participate in it.  Generally speaking, they are correct:  done fairly and wisely, capitalism can produce innumerable economic and social benefits for humanity.

     If we look more closely at Ecclesiastes, however, we see words that, as we consider them today, point to a fundamental flaw in capitalism.  Foremost in capitalism is the idea that people are to pursue their own interests in the marketplace.  To be successful, people must develop their skills and self-interest in a way that, for better or worse, mitigates and even eliminates the skills and self-interest of others, others who are, to use Ecclesiastes' words, rivals.  Not everybody can win, and many people lose very badly.  And many people on the sidelines often fall between the cracks, forgotten by everyone.
     So yes, while capitalism has benefited humanity greatly, we should understand that at its heart it is pandering to and enabling one of the most tragic of human traits:  greed.  If we manage ourselves, that is, if we look out for each other along the way, we--as a human community--will survive.  If we do not, however, we fall apart, as Karl Marx pointed out, under the weight of our pursuits.
     Ecclesiastes reminds us that however certain we are of our certainties, we must understand that there are greater certainties still.  Finitude cannot see everything, and truth is always richer than we think.
     After all, there is God.

     Free speech?  We all appreciate it; we all, in principle, endorse it.  As one who spent time in Berkeley during its Sixties days, I know the parameters of its discussions intimately.  That's why I was troubled to read about the protests mounted to prevent author Anne Coulter from speaking on the Berkeley campus a few weeks ago.
     While I do not in any way applaud Coulter's attitudes toward those with whom she disagrees, and I certainly do not condone her incendiary rhetoric, I believe that she, like all of us, is a creature made in the image of God.  Despite what I consider to be her aberrant perspectives on many individuals and their ideas, Coulter is, like you and me, a being loved by the one who created her.  She is as deeply flawed--and as magnificently designed--as all of us.
     Therein is our dilemma.  We appreciate what God has made, yet we recoil at how it often seems to be so wrong.  That's life in a fallen world.  We cannot judge Coulter nor, outside a legitimate court of law weighing legitimat laws, can we judge anyone else.  Let her speak, let everyone speak.  Just as Psalm 19 states that the heavens "are telling the glory of God," so let the earth on which we live speak with the confusing cacophony of the human creation.
     After all, it's only us--and God.

     Last week, I heard a presentation about Buddhism.  It was delivered by a person who has been a Buddhist monk for forty years.  Originally from Sri Lanka, he entered the monastery at the age of ten (largely on the encouragement of his parents, who thought that once he experienced the monk life, he would reject it) and never left.  Coming eventually to North America, he learned English and is now a part of a Buddhist community in the U.S.

     When I talked with other attendees about their response, they uniformly remarked at how happy and serene the monk was.  He was, many people noted, the "happiest" person they had ever met.  Indeed he was:  nothing seemed to faze him.
     Research supports this:  those who meditate regularly, as Buddhists do, experience a definitive lowering of heart rate and blood pressure.  Even some atheists practice it.
     On one point, however, Buddhism leaves me wondering.  Why am I here?  Sure, I love and appreciate peace and serenity (who would not?), but I also wish to know why, in this bewildering world, I invest in them.  What is it about me--and all of us--that drives us to elevate them?  We like them, yes, but that doesn't tell us why we do.
     We cannot assert the values of personality without being personal.  And we cannot be personal unless we live in a personal universe.
     And only a personal God can create a personal universe.
     Thank you, Buddhism, for reminding us of the essential elements of our earthly reality.

     Omphalos?  What is an omphalos?  A Latin term that appeared often in the annals of ancient Rome, omphalos is best translated as "the center of the world" or the "navel of the universe."  As the proud Romans saw it, their empire was an omphalos, the center, hub, and overseeer of the known world.  For them, Rome was the zenith, the highest, the beginning and end of civilization.  Nothing could match Rome, nothing dared challenge it. Why would anyone question the center of the universe?
     Let's now look at omphalos as a center, yes, but center as a home, home as the beginning of our life journey, home, in some way, the end of our existence.  A home as that which runs through the entirety of our lives, shaping, influencing, building and, sometimes, tearing apart.  A home that is always there, home that though it may at times not seem present at all, steadfastly ripples across the currents of our days.  Home as the center of our world.
     Long ago, poet William Yeats asked, "Will the center hold?"  One day, our home, our center, will be gone, as will we.  Shorn of its cohering life force, the center itself will vanish, too. Our omphalos will be no more.  
     Yet omphalos cannot be the center unless centering is possible.  And in an ordered yet allegedly meaningless world (an oxymoron for sure), how can centering, a centering of thought, meaning, and belief, be?
     Only if there is a God.

     Regrettably, I did not have opportunity to post last Friday.  But I will do so now because Friday, May 5, is an important day for Mexicans all around the world.  It's Cinco de Mayo.  Cinco de Mayo is a celebration of freedom, the freedom of liberation, the freedom of knowing that one's oppressors are no longer standing over one's lives, dictating one's every move.  It upholds human dignity.

    
     Although freedom is a slippery term, subject to all manner of interpretation, we can at least agree that in its most fundamental form, freedom is essential to being fully human.  And while many of us hold many varying attitudes, some positive, some otherwise, toward Mexicans, if we insist that we care about humanity, we cannot help but rejoice on Cinco de Mayo. Moreover, if we go further and contend that we are people of faith, people who believe in a loving God, we deman that God when we parody or criticize, in any way, this day.
     We cannot laud freedom when we despise those who legitimately exercise it. 

     "Vanity of vanity," says the author of Ecclesiastes, "all is vanity!"  Is everything really futile?  Of course not.  We generally enjoy our lives, we generally appreciate the opportunity to live on planet Earth for a season, we are usually grateful for the chance to experience the wonders of the universe.
     And when we die, unless we believe in an afterlife, we, as an unbelieving friend of mine remarked to me the other day, are gone.  We hope we are remembered, he said, for what will last, in his view, are relationships.  Yet even relationships do not last indefinitely.  Once our loved ones are gone, we are, too.  It is almost as if we had never lived.
     But we have.  So what do we do?  Do we draw a page from Albert Camus and embrace life's absurdity?  Or do we follow Jean Paul Satre and conclude, as did he, in a world without God, life is meaningless--but we should live anyway?  Whatever we do, we will wrestle with our finitude.  We will struggle with the certainty of our demise.  We will squirm about our human fate.
     It's almost too easy, too facile to say that there is an afterlife and that we will experience another life after this one.  Outside of accepting the fact of Jesus' resurrection, how do we know?
     Yet maybe, just maybe that is the point.  Though we cannot will our lives to be meaningful if life is futile and absurd, we can appreciate the insight of Sartre who, although he was a life long atheist, realized that apart from the presence of divinity, ultimately very little about existence will seem real.

     Many years ago, I climbed mountains actively.  I scaled peaks from California to Canada to Alaska, tracking a number of routes, always being awed at the challenge and splendor of it all.  So much to experience, so much to see.  And so much to know, to have opportunity, shorn of all creature comforts, to stare more deeply into the meaning and contingency of existence.  At one point, I believed I saw God.


     Most people climbing today do not see the adventure in such metaphysical terms. They climb to accomplish a goal, to reach the top, the touch the summit.  Unlike many a dedicated backpacker, caught up in the constant euphoria of the alpine moment, these climbers approach the mountain as a problem to be solved, an obstacle to be surmounted. It's just another day in the heights.
     When I read recently that the Swiss climber Ueli Steck, one of the most accomplished mountaineers in the world today, had fallen over three thousand feet to his death while climbing in the Himalayas, I stopped to think.  Like American Alex Lowe, one of the best climbers of his day, who perished in an avalanche while climbing in, yes, the Himalayas, in 1999, Steck died when he least expected to.  For him, it was simply another afternoon in the mountains.
     And now, like Alex Lowe, Ueli Steck is gone forever.  It's tragic, yet it's sublimle; he died doing what he loved most.
     Yet we wonder:  is this all there is?
     Farewell, Ueli Steck.  I hope one day, in the profoundly mysterious yet intimately real grip of the resurrection, I see you again.