Ah, the virtue of weakness.  Rabi 'a was a Sufi mystic who lived in the first century CE. According to tradition, her birth in Basra, Iraq, was accompanied by a vision of the Mohammad to her father.  Rabi'a would be, the Prophet told her, a remarkable woman, a wonder, a miracle.  She would be a leader in the faith.

     Heady words for a woman of her time.  Yet as Rabi'a grew up and devoted more and more of her time to seeking solitude with Allah, finding insight in giving herself up to God, Mohammad's prophecy came true.  Rabi'a died a highly respected woman.

     One thing that we can learn from mystics, be they Muslim or Christian, is their ability to step into and learn from weakness. When a prominent sheik asked Rabi'a how she had achieved what he considered to be a state of "self-realization," she responded by saying, "You know of the how, but I know of the how-less."
     Rabi'a understood that we will not find wholeness unless we are willing to admit that, apart from divine movement, we cannot.  A broken pot cannot fix itself. Today, those of us in the West and, increasingly, those in the Global South, tend to think that, given sufficient technology, we can solve any problem.  We are loathe to admit we are weak. Yet if we wish to find meaningful wholeness, that is, spiritual oneness with ourselves and God, we must.
     As God told the apostle Paul, "My power is perfected in weakness."  Sometimes, we just don't know "how."
     By the way, I'll be traveling for the next couple of weeks, taking, with much gratitude, a foray into the mountains of the West.  Thanks for reading.  See you in August!

     We all like looking at waterfalls.  We like their effortlessness, we like their lilting, we like their seeming eternality.  Waterfalls capture our imaginations, conjuring images of all kinds, usually (unless we've had a traumatic experience with one) images of soothing, comfort, and peace.  When water flows freely, tumbling off a cliff, hurtling toward a lake, pool, or stream below, gravity its only master, we marvel.  We marvel at the mystery, we marvel at the sight.
     Waterfalls make their own music.  A few days ago, July 17th, marked the two hundredth anniversary of the first performance of George Frederick Handel's "Water Music."  A lovely, carefree piece, it evokes water's delight, the joy of a waterfall, the happiness of a flowing stream.  It sings of hope, it sings of promise, the hope and promise of meaningful presence in the world.
     Jesus once said that those who believe in him will experience "rivers of living water" flowing through them.  They will always find, he promised, a river of life, a life now, and a life beyond it.
     We all wrestle with the puzzles of existence, the conundrums of living in a broken world.  Sometimes it's difficult to see the river.  Sometimes it's hard to find the stream.
     But it's there.  As one who made no secret of his Christian commitments, Handel was well aware of this.  When next you listen to the "Water Music," consider its bigger point. Consider how water evokes eternality, consider how waterfalls speak of larger mystery. Then realize how much you have left, in this life, to know.
     Apart from an eternity, all the waterfalls in the world cannot really speak.

     What, in this increasingly scattered age, an age in which all events seem to flow into and out of one another with very little, overall, to say, an age that reduces all human activity to actions and reactions of genetic constitution, bereft of any larger point beyond simple pleasure, does history mean?  In his Force and Freedom, nineteenth century historian Jacob Burkhardt argued that history means nothing, that it is no more than a series of events and happenstances of will.  Karl Marx, whose name needs no introduction, also writing in the nineteenth century, believed history was the story of class conflict, and that the human being was simply made to live, produce, and die.
     We could go on.  Yes, life is grand, and yes, life is wonderful, and yes, life can be highly meaningful, but when we step back and look at the span of our days--and those of every everyone else--what do they, in the big picture, really mean?



     Ilya Glazunov, a Russian artist who died a few weeks ago, thought otherwise.  In one of his most memorable paintings, he depicted the sundry and diverse events of history in an intriguing web of form and connection.  He crowned these with an image of Jesus, hovering above, the ultimate integrating point, the fount of meaning.  Take away the image and the painting becomes just another effort to come to grips with the interminality of human endeavor.  Retain it, and history becomes something entirely different.
     Life becomes more than mere life.  It becomes eternal.  Eternally purposeful, eternally existing, eternally present.

     By now, what was left of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo's earthly body is ashes.  Only his writing remains.  And it is remarkable.  It's also poignant.  In a collection of letters which his wife, Liu Xia, hopes to publish in the West, Liu writes of his love for her.  My love, he writes, is a "love as intense as ice, love as remote as blackness."
     In no way can I hope to step into Liu's world, to fully understand why he wrote these words.  His was a life of challenges which I doubt very much I will ever experience.  Yet in his words I see the unbridled power of human love, a profound love that shone through all else he endured.  Consider ice. Translucent even while it is, when sufficiently thick, virtually unbreakable, ice is intense: clear, firm, unyielding in its grip on a snow covered lake.  Blackness towers over us, a sort of interminability, an opaque clarity without visible end.  We see it, but we rarely see through it.
     Liu's love was a love so intense that the only way to grasp it is to step into with one's eyes closed, to taste its fervor even while one cannot see or comprehend the fullness of its depths.  It can feel as present as the morning sun, it can feel as remote as the most distant sea.  But it is more real than we can imagine.
     Like, I suppose, the love of God.  Thank you, God, for the power of love.  And thank you, Jesus, for giving such love to every human being.
     Rest well, Liu.

     "Humans follow the earth, the earth follows heaven, heaven follows Taoism, Taoism follows nature."  So say the followers of Lao-tzu, founder of ancient Chinese religion of Taoism.  In addition to being a call to the Chinese to invest more time and energy protecting the natural environment of the Chinese landscape, these words, and the growing popularity of Taoism's theses in an increasingly consumerist China, underscore the dilemma that China, and West, increasingly face:  in a world of affluence, how do we find spiritual wholeness?


     Although creature comfort is not in itself evil, using it to understand everything about our lives is foolish.  How can material things explain immaterial longings?  Rightly did Lao-tzu grasp that when we set aside our connection to that from which our earthly home and goods come, we miss the point of existence.  While not everyone will agree with Taoism's solution to meaning, no one can dispute its central thought:  do not abandon harmony, harmony between people and people, people and the planet, and people and the Tao.
     Or to frame it in a theistic perspective, do not let go of God.

     As I looked at the clouds during my reading and contemplations this morning, I marveled at the way they studded together across the sky, tucking and wrapping themselves like giant white pillows, lilting gracefully into the morning sun.  It was an image of serenity, a vast, gentle serenity of space and time.



     And an image came into my mind:  Georgia O'Keeffe's "Clouds."  Long one of my favorite paintings (and Georgia O'Keeffe being one of my mother's favorite artists), "Clouds" captures us with its vision of expanse and eternity.  It speaks of endlessness and duration, a picture of existence without end.  A foreverness.  All said, it is a magnificent human creation.
     But how, I then asked myself, can we create, how can we, frail and fragile and once inert plasma and rock, be creators if we had not been created in turn?
     It's hard to create if a creation doesn't exist.

     Have you read Yuval Noah Harari's Homo Deus?  Perhaps you've read his Sapiens, in which he recounts the history of humanity to the present moment.  In Homo Deus, he offers his thoughts on humanity's future.  Although he makes many intriguing points, I focus on his idea that in the coming years, we will separate what we term consciousness from what we consider to be intelligence.
     What does this mean?  For Harari, it is that, over time, humanity will grow to prize the simple fact of intelligence, that is, the ability to envision and manage an orderly society, over the fact of physical awareness and sentience.  In other words, as he sees it, what humanity will in the future value most highly is obtaining social order and, if doing so no longer requires organic beings to effect it, non-organic entities or algorithms will do just fine.  Whether these objects have consciousness will not matter.  Whether they are aware of who they are outside of themselves will not count.
     I suppose we could think here of the world of the movie Matrix.  And we'd probably be on target.  Yet the issue goes deeper than a world controlled by cyborgs.  If we decide that consciousness is no longer critical to creating a society, why do we need to exist at all?  Why do we even need to be human?
     And what is human?
     Although I applaud what technology can do for us, I also agree wth Harari that if we do not temper our affections for technology with a firm understanding of what it means to be human, we will no longer be the humans we are today.  Maybe this is for the best, maybe it is not.  If you value your consciousness and awareness at all, however, it is a decided step backwards.
     Ultimately, this way of thinking underscores the danger of a subscribing, without thought of a spiritual reality, to a naturalistic Darwinian worldview in which humanity is nothing more than just another plop on the evolutionary screen:  we're worthless.
     And why not?  No God, no divine image:  did we ever really matter?

     Does it matter how a generous person makes his or her money?  What if this person made his/her money by exploiting others?  By behaving unethically in the marketplace? By illegal means?

     Although very few generous people are totally innocent in this regard, I'm thinking today of one person in particular:  Ray Kroc, founder of the McDonald's corporation.  I first read of Kroc's rather unethical behavior in Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, and was appalled.  In watching the movie "The Founder" recently, however, I became even more so.  As the film drew to a close, the screen flashed a photo of Kroc and his second wife Joan, stating that upon the latter's passing (she outlived him by about twenty years), most of their 1.5 billion dollar fortune was donated to the Salvation Army and National Public Radio.

     By all standards, the Krocs were incredibly generous to what I consider to be worthy causes.  Yet does their generosity outweigh the rapacious and unethical way in which Kroc acquired the McDonald's name and fast food concept (for details, read Fast Food Nation or see "The Founder")?  Does it tip the scale in their favor?
     Perhaps you love McDonald's, perhaps you hate it.  Either way, these are questions worth thinking very hard about.  What do you think?

     Power is a tenuous thing.  Although many people believe they have it, I wonder whether they ever realize that they have it not necessarily because of who they are or what they can do, but because the world is such that the quest for power is inevitable.  In this fallen and compromised world, power becomes, oddly enough, that for which all of us in some way strive.  Power is how we survive.

     So were we made to seek power, as Friedrich Nietzsche once insisted?  I do not believe we are.  We're made to give up power, to seek the greater good of the world and not merely our own welfare.  We're made to use what we have to better the human community.
     In the twelfth chapter of his second letter to the church at Corinth, Paul describes how he prayed and prayed that Jesus would remove what he called "a thorn in the flesh" (we're not told precisely what this "thorn" is).
     "My power," Jesus responds, "is made complete/perfected in weakness."  It is when we are at our weakest that God's power shines in us most fully.  But what's God's power?  For the last week or so I've been dealing with a running injury.  It's been tough.  Yet when I think about God's power in my situation, I do not think about it solely in terms of physical strength.  I think about it in regard to the extent to which it has forced me to step back and think about life in a way that I had not before.  Yes, I want to recover, and yes, I want to run again--and I believe I will.  But had I not had to give up, for a season, my physical power, I would not have experienced the deeper perspective that comes from the weakness that doing so brings.
     And it is this deeper perspective, this broader and richer purview of an existence purposed and occasioned by a wise and loving God, that, in the long run, becomes the greatest power of all.  

     Part of being human, it seems, is learning who we are.  It is to learn what it means to be a human being, what it means to be a creature with our capacities, what it means to be an entity who is equipped to live as we are.  We will spend our lives unraveling what it means to be a human being.
     As we should.  We're not here to wander around without thinking about who we are. We're here to find truth, to find meaning, to find the wholeness that is inherent in the creation.
     But why?  Why, I wonder, as I listen to Jay-Z's newest album, his deeply personal and confessional writing about his life, does the human being choose to grapple with these things?  Simply, it is part of who Jay-Z--and we are; it is part of who we are as human beings.  We live on a tenuous edge, a tenuous edge between meaning and nothingness. Yet we only do so because we live in a meaningful world; in a meaningless world, we would not, indeed, could not make such distinctions.
     Hence, regardless of how you feel about Jay-Z and his music, take time to appreciate that his work--and yours--underscores that we live in a meaningful world.  And we only do so because this world has been created by a meaningful God.
     Otherwise, how would we know that, in ourselves, our fragile selves living in a mindboggling world, this life means anything?