If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that we do not always do the right thing. No one among us eludes our own fallenness.  We all, as many religions, put it, sin.  We all do not always do what pleases or sustains the divine fabric of the universe.
     Few religious groups understand this as well as the Jews.  Tonight, Jews around the world celebrate Yom Kippur, the "Day of Atonement."  On this day, Jews acknowledge their sinfulness before God.  They admit their wrongdoing, own up to their prevarications. And they repent.  They tell God they are sorry for disobeying and violating his commandments and laws.  Then they announce their intention to begin anew to live lives that please their creator.
     So the Jews have done for many centuries, and so they will do for many centuries more.  Their faith remains.
     Although we may not agree with the specifics of the Jewish approach, and though we may not see wrongdoing in quite the same way, we must all admit that, to repeat, we do not always do the right thing.  Every one of us is (or ought to be) aware that, at times, he or she upsets the delicate balance of freedom and order that governs the cosmos.
     If this balance is to be more than relative, there must be a God.  The Jews recognize this clearly.  So do Christians, and so do Muslims.  And so do adherents of countless other religions.  Absolute and therefore genuinely meaningful morality is impossible without God.  Otherwise, repentance is no more than shouting in a relativistic dark, the darkness of an accidental, and therefore, as scientist Steven Weinberg observes, pointless universe.

     Have you read Jane Austen's Emma?  Or perhaps you've seen the movie.  It's a curious little book, one that I'm reading for a class I'm teaching.  I've read Pride and Prejudice, know quite a bit about her Mansfield Park, but not as much about Emma.
     Given what we know about Austen's penchant for puns, at times it's difficult to know exactly what she is up to in her narrative.  But it definitely seems as if she is putting the mores of her time (early nineteenth century England) under a microscope.  A single woman who has lived with her father all her life, Emma delights in matching people with each other.  She insists, however, that marriage is not for her.  Even when a man falls in love with her, begging her hand, she declines.  She's content to live with her widowed father in the luxury of his estate.
     In all of Jane Austen's novels, the woman who seems least likely to be married ends up getting married.  Emma is no exception.  She eventually falls in love with a Mr. Knightley, a man in whom she never thought she would be interested.  This brings me to my point.  We humans wrestle so much with the notion of love and how we work it out in our lives.  We fall in love, we may fall out of love, we may never find true love at all.  Either way, we rarely know when we will encounter love; it's almost always a mystery.
     This is what is wonderful, and vexing, about love:  it is a mystery.  But it's a good mystery.  And it's a mystery that wouldn't exist were not the world itself a mystery.
     Even if God didn't exist, however, love, and the world, would be mysteries.  Yet if God didn't exist, they would be mysteries which we, mysteries to ourselves in an accidental world, would have no way of knowing how to love.

     Are we at the end?  Do these waves of hurricanes and earthquakes indicate the earth's death is imminent?  Many think so.  On the other hand, history is strewn with instances of people claiming that they, and they only, know when the world will end.  And unless all of us are living in a dream, they all were wrong.
     The larger question is this:  why do humans tend to embrace the thought that the world might be ending?  Why do so many of us long for the return of, variously speaking, the Creator, Jesus, or God?  Why do millions of people across the planet wish for the type of relief that they perceive the world's end will provide?


     We can think of many answers and possibilities.  Undergirding all of them, however, is a deep seated longing for something better than what we have now. As if the world as it is will not satisfy, as if the way history has been to this point is a dead end.

     I fear that this demeans what God has made.  Sure, the world is less than perfect, and disasters of course happen every day, disasters of nature, disasters and terrors perpetrated by human hatred and folly (I think of, for one, the horrific ethnic cleansing currently being carried out in Myanmar), and more.  We all know this.  But God gave us the world to cultivate and steward, to do the best with it we can.
     Though we long for relief, and are not inherently wrong to do so, if we focus only on the next life, we miss doing what we could and ought to do for the many people who are suffering, often terribly, in this life.  We ignore what is before us.  Looking to the end, and only to the end, is self-centered and myopic.
     After all, Jesus didn't dismiss the world; he embraced it.

    "Now is the wind-time, the scattering clattering song-on-the-lawn time early eves and 
     gray days clouds shrouding the traveled ways trees spare and cracked bare slim       
     fingers in the air dry grass in the wind-lash waving waving as the birds pass the sky 
turns, the wind gusts winter sweeps in it must it must."  (Debra Reinstra, "Autumn")

     Today, in the northern hemisphere, is the first day of autumn:  the autumnal equinox. It's a good day, a fun time.  Turning leaves and brilliant colors; cool, crisp nights and rich blue skies; the rising of Orion, his three star belt shining in the night; and light and dark woven with liminality and change:  life displays itself once more.

     In the ancient near east, the land of Egypt, Assyria, Sumer, and Babylon, autumn was a significant moment.  It marked the time of harvest and thanksgiving, a season of expectation--the life giving autumn rains were imminent--and days of ingathering and contemplation.

     So it can be for us.  Amidst our technology and worldly disenchantment, we can learn from our long ago brethren, our many ancestors who placed such tremendous faith in the certainty of the seasons, ordained, as they saw it, by the gods.  It's good to reach ends, it's good to meditate on beginnings, and it's good to remember the ubiquity of the rhythms that ripple through the cosmos.  It's good to ponder the security of an orderly world.
     And it's good to note that even though this security can at times be unnerving, even frightening, it is at the same time beautiful, a living picture of the endless grace of our creator God.  We change, the world changes, but God does not.  In autumn's changes, we see even more the necessity of his presence.

     Think about our Jewish brothers and sisters today.  At sundown last night, Jews around the world entered into the most sacred time of their year:  the high holy days, the Days of Awe.  Beginning with Rosh Hashana (the New Year) and culminating in Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), these days give every Jew opportunity to reflect on the past and prepare for the future.  They're marked by repentance, discipline, singing, gathering, reading, and meditation, moments of intense inwardness--always in community--regarding one's relationship with his/her fellow human beings and God.


     All of us can learn from the Days of Awe.  All of us can profit from taking time to think, to really think about what and how we are doing with our life, about where we have been, spiritually, vocationally, and personally, and where we want to go, come tomorrow.  In this often shallow, media driven age, we all can benefit from setting ourselves apart to ponder deeper things, to contemplating the greater meaning and realities in which we move.



     Although we may not believe we move in a bigger picture, we fool ourselves if we think we can live meaningfully without accepting the fact of its presence.  We are born for transcendence, we are made to look beyond the immediate and present.  In these Days of Awe, our Jewish brethren remind us that we are more than material concoctions, more than nexuses of chemical exchange.  They tell us that we are creatures of this earth, yes, but simultaneously, to borrow the name of an REM song, creatures of the "Great Beyond."
     Enjoy your pondering.

     "A new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success grown up to find all gods dead and all wars fought, all faith in man shaken." 
     So did F. Scott Fitzgerald describe what has come to be known as the Lost Generation in his iconic This Side of Paradise.  Ironically, though Fitzgerald's words are almost one hundred years old, they still ring true today.  More than ever, elections are won and lost on the basis of voter aspirations of economic and vocational success.  When asked at the height of the materialistic Eighties what elections are really all about, former House Speaker "Tip" O'Neil famously remarked, "It's the economy, stupid."  All too true.  People, religious or not, tend to vote on the basis of their individual wants and needs.
     This was certainly true in the Twenties.  In the aftermath of the destruction and carnage of World War I, millions of people in the West, deeply scarred by their newfound realization that perhaps the world would not get progressively better after all, retreated. They retreated into the comfort of their individual hopes and dreams.  They sought refuge in things they thought they could control, their livelihood and possessions, and not military decisions made by governments with which they had no personal contact.
     And like people do today, they woke daily to a stark reality:  all the gods are dead. We're all that's left.  We all want to believe in the goodness of the world and that of our fellow human beings, and we should.  Yet every moment we realize that this entire frame of reference is caught, caught in the grip of mortality.  We can rely on it, but we cannot count on it.
     Unless, and only unless, there's something more.

     What to do about Kim Jong-un?  Despite all the threats the West has lobbed at him, Kim continues to do exactly what he wants to do.  He continues to taunt, he continues to laugh at the forces arrayed against him.  Nothing seems to faze him.
     While I do not pretend to have a solution to the dilemma of the North Korean dictator, I do know a little, a very little, indeed, about the ways of God in the human experience. Now God will probably not suddenly rise up and strike Kim down, nor is he likely to bring him to the negotiating table anytime soon.  Like any human being, Kim is a free agent.  A free agent in God's world, yes, but a free agent nonetheless.  He can, and will, do whatever he wants to do.
    So can we.  And therein is the problem.  If both parties can, as free agents, do as they wish, we lapse into utilitarianism: whose happiness is more important?  In this, virtue, virtue as adherence to some sort of universal or transcendent standard, has no place.
     What should we then do?  Again, I do not have a ready answer.  If we remain in our utilitarianism, however, if we remain thinking that we of the West are the most important people on the planet, we will not get to square one.  God is a very big God, and we are a very small people.  Let us let go of who we are and let God be who he can be.

     Do you read Outside Magazine?  If you enjoy outdoor adventure, you might. Celebrating its fortieth year of publication this year, Outside has made a name for its coverage and lauding of all things done in the wild, be it climbing, cycling, surfing, paddleboarding, sky diving, and more.  I mention Outside because its latest issue (I am a long time subscriber) is titled, "The Meaning of Life."  As editor Christopher Keyes acknowledges, perhaps this is too grandoise a title, but his intention, he adds, is to present life as the magazine supposes it to be, one grand stream of flourishing and adventure.  After all, as so many readers believe, there's nothing else beyond this present existence.
     When once asked about the meaning life, well known atheist Richard Dawkins replied, "That's not a valid question."  Yes, life is here, Dawkins is suggesting, but because we have no reason to suppose it ought to be here, why should we believe that it should have any meaning?  Though unlike Dawkins Outside believes life to be meaningful, it also believes that this life is terminal:  we are born, we live, and we die.  And that, as Albert Camus famously observed, is absurd:  what's the point?
     Well, the magazine's editors will reply, as long as we are here, here in this magnificent world, why should we not maximize our enjoyment of it?  Why should we not pursue everything this existence has to offer?
     Fair enough.  Even Ecclesiastes says, in chapter nine, "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might."  Yet Ecclesiastes also reminds in its final chapter that, "Whatever else you do, remember God."  I love adventure as much as anyone.  I've devoted a good deal of my life to pursuing it.  Forty years living on the other side of faith, however, has made me put adventure in a much different light.  Adventure and a zest for life are like candles.  They burn brightly and wonderfully, but eventually they go the way of all candles:  they burn out.
     Remembering God is like a candle, too.  It burns brightly and wonderfully, illuminating and framing all we do.
     Unlike adventure, however, God will always be there to remember.

     Clearly, the recent winner of the Powerball Lottery never need to worry about money again.  She will never need to work again, either.  Yet the timeless adage really is true: money can't buy happiness.
     In itself, money is not the root of all evil.  It is rather the love of money that is the root of all evil (see 1 Timothy 6).  Yet what does it mean to love money?  Is it to worship it?  To become dependent on it?  To make earning it the most important thing?  To allow it to make us different people?  Perhaps all of these things, perhaps even more.  In a financially driven age, it's very difficult to view money with a clear-eyed perspective.
     Think of money as a gift.  You would not be able to have it unless you had been born in a certain home, found certain opportunities, lived in a place in which you could make a living.  Yes, we earn it, but yes, we only earn it as a gift of how and where we and our lives began and proceed.  It's maybe too facile to say that money is a gift of God, for then we start asking why does he "give" some people money than others?  Nonetheless, the fact remains:  money is the gift of a God in a world infused with love and purpose.  As to what that purpose is, we cannot always say.  But we know it is present.
     And that, in the lens of eternity, makes all the difference.

     Innocence, hope, and redemption.  That were the words comprising the title of a symphonic piece I heard this morning.  The announcer played it because he thought that, on the anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001, such words would be appropriate.
     I agree.  Before that September 11, before international terrorism made itself known in the nation with such striking effect, America was, in some ways, ways akin to how it felt prior to the attack of Pearl Harbor:  innocent.  Set astride a vast continent, separated from the world by two wide oceans, the nation sat, comforted by its wealth, soothed by its ability to remain aloof from the troubles of the rest of the world.
     No more.  Yet in the aftermath of those horrifying events, Americans, and the world, found new reason to hope.  Sometimes, however, darkness harbors the deepest hope. Sometimes the coldest and bleakest night creates the brightest of dawns.  Life renews.
     And redemption.  To redeem is to set free.  Perhaps America was, in a peculiar way, redeemed by the events of that fateful September day.  Perhaps America was set free from the complacency it had nurtured over the decades, its blindness to the way that some of its foreign policies had contributed to the attack, its penchant to focus only on itself.  Perhaps 9/11 set America free to realize that it, and the watching world, could be more than the sum of its parts.  Perhaps the terror of the day planted the seeds of a better world.  Like biblical redemption, a redemption of unspeakable darkness that set humanity's hearts free, so did the darkness of that summer morning liberate us to see that yes, there really is something more to life and existence than simply living them.
     Pain endures, but hope conquers still.

     Memory.  In one section of my latest book, I share some thoughts from an article I had read some years before in the New York Times Magazine.  It featured photographs of the childhood bedrooms of men and woman who had been killed in Iraq, bedrooms to which, tragically, they now would never return.  Stuffed animals competed with video players, brightly patterned spreads with military paraphernailia. Notes from Mom and Dad appeared along with high school textbooks.  Some bedrooms had a Peter Pan feel, those of a person who never wanted to grow up, but who did, in the most poignant and final of ways.  Memories flood every photograph.  It's so moving.

     The parents of these fallen soldiers will of course never forget their children.  They hope that their sons and daughters did not die in vain; they hope that they died happy to be doing what they were doing; they hope they have a better life than this earthly one. They manage with hope.  It's a hope driven by love, a love driven, for many of them, in a belief in a loving God.  It's a hope that acknowledges that quite apart from the active presence of God, suffusing the cosmos with potential and meaning, hope in what is earthbound, has no real basis. It doesn't last.  Yet if a loving God is there, even the most distant and invisible and hopeless of earthbound hopes has reality, thoroughgoing tangible form and working presence.

     Apart from God, though memory be powerful and strong, it remains what it will always be:  an ending.  With God, although death will come, the memory it leaves becomes a beginning, the most wonderful beginning of all.

     As I continue to reflect on my brief time in the Tetons, I think often of the way the sun set behind the range.  Every evening we were there, my wife and I drove along the road to Jenny Lake, admiring the range in the setting sun.  I always focused on one part of the range in particular, the opening of Cascade Valley.  Countless times in years past, I have stepped out of the ferry that travels across Jenny Lake and into the trails that line this valley.  They are gateways to the high country, the land of treeless lakes, flower dappled meadow, and jagged peak.  So many mornings I have trekked up this valley to find mountain adventure.

     Now, with injured leg, I could not.  But I could remember, and I could dream. Watching the sun sink ever lower behind the range, looking at the valley as it lapsed ever deeper into dusk and shadow, I remembered another time of watching the sun slip below mountain slope.  It was in the Canadian Rockies, as I hiked over the glaciers that sprawl along the Icefield Parkway between Banff and Jasper, Alberta.  The sunset beckoned, the glaciers shone, the day drew to a close.  I was so content, content to be exactly where I was, atop a stretch of untramelled wilderness.
     We all need wilderness, of some kind, and we all need, in some way, to dream.  That's who we are, that's what we are to be.  We need to explore and risk, we need to vision and set forth.  So does Ecclesiastes say that, "God has set eternity in the human heart." We are born to wander.  In the best of all possible worlds, however, we are ultimately born to wander in the wilderness of God.  It is a wilderness that will never end.