As Halloween, the night that, in ancient tradition, the spirits and goblins of the inner earth escape, for one bone chilling evening, their chthonic imprisonment and roam about the planet, weaving magic, confusion, and mystery into the lives of those still living, approaches, we might think of it in another way.  We might think of Halloween as a night not of goblins, but as a night of God, a night in which God is newly afoot, on the loose, tearing open reality, overturning assumptions, undermining the obvious, and unfolding an otherness, a beyondedness, a somethingness which we might not otherwise see.  On this night, we might imagine not deceased spirits wailing about their ignominy, but God, a living God who is presenting himself and making himself known, making himself known as a presence of the more, a herald of the future, a proclamation of a new life, a richer hope, a new dawn.


     Think about God as one who eclipses and overcomes the tangible and apparent, who overwhelms present form and long ago imagination to promulgate and usher in a new day, a new day of insight, wisdom, and truth, a day in which he appeared as we are to show us who we could most be.
     As the psalmist writes in Psalm 36, "In your light [Lord], we see light."
     And light always overcomes the darkness.

     In addition to October 31st being Halloween, it is also what many people call "Reformation Day."  Five hundred years ago, on the door of a church in Wittenburg, Germany, a Catholic monk named Martin Luther posted ninety-five theses describing what he believed to be serious problems with the way the Catholic church (the only Christian tradition of the time) conducted its affairs.

     Undergirding all of these theses was Luther's conclusion that, indulgences, rites of penance, sermons, and church attendance aside, what is most important about people and God is that people find God through faith.  In this material world, we cannot see God visibly.  Yes, Jesus came, died, and rose again, but he's no longer openly present on the planet.  If we wish to know God, we must therefore believe that, on the basis of the historical veracity of the Bible and the rumblings of our inner heart, he is there.
     If people wish to know God, they must set aside what they see for what they cannot, and believe, by faith, that, not only is God there, but that he longs to love and communicate with human beings.
     If, and this is a big "if," they wish for him to.
     Luther's crucial insight was that despite everything people think they need to do, be it rituals, church attendance, asceticism, and the like, to find God, they really only need to do one thing:  believe.
     From this, all else will follow.

     Have you even been to Kosovo?  One of the world's newest nations, Kosovo is a wisp of country tucked between the east flank of Albania and the western border of Bulgaria.  A curious mix of Albanian and Serbian Muslims, and victim of much ethnic and religious dispute in the Nineties, Kosovo nonetheless offers many fascinating pictures of culture and society. 
     Moreover, like people all over the world, Kosovoians wish to be educated.  A former student of mine has been teaching in Kosovo since August.  She enjoys it immensely.  She appreciates the warm of the people and the ease with which she, a non-native speaker, has been able to integrate herself into the populace.  Her students' thirst for knowledge at times overwhelms her.

     I found the same thing when I taught at a theological conference in Malawai a number of years ago.  My audience consisted of pastors, male and female, who had traveled, often from many miles away, for the conference.  Because most of them had no money for the one hotel in town, they slept in groups outside the church that hosted the conference.  Not one regretted doing so, however:  they wanted to learn.  They listened to all the speakers with rapt attention.  No one slept, no one looked glassy eyed; everyone was focused. 

     As I think about little Kosovo and tiny Malawai and the hundreds of forgotten students, youth and adult, who live in them, I wonder anew at the incredible drive of the human being.  Centuries ago, Aristotle remarked that people have a natural desire to know, to learn, to grow.  And so they do.
     The people of Kosovo and Malawai underscore aptly one of the richest truths about humanity:  we were not born to atropy and shrivel.  We were born to become.

     To become what?  Simply, to become what becoming demands, that is, creatures more fully aware of why we must "become" at all, creatures who realize that, all things considered, we are born to become far more than who we are in ourselves.  Rather, we are born to become who we are in God
     

     As I have thought more about my blog post yesterday, I have pondered the meaning of the opening verse of Psalm 24.  "The earth is the Lord's," it reads, "and all that is in it."
     None of us asked to be here, none of us made the planet to be here, and none of us thought, in advance, about why we ought to be here.
     So why are we here?

     I've always wondered about the penchant of those who ascribe a totally material origin to the universe and who consequently believe it to be without meaning to nonetheless insist that purpose is to be found in it.  Somehow, it doesn't add up.
     Making some of the same arguments that atheist philospher Thomas Nagel made in his 2012 Mind and Cosmos:  Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, physiologist and biologist J. Scott Turner, in a book he just published, Purpose and Desire, once again, wonders why.  Why do we believe we have purpose in what Darwinian evolution decrees to be a meaningless world?
     It's tough.  Clearly, every living thing behaves as if it has purpose, be it a purpose to survive, to eat, to seek safety, to live, or even to consider the nature of existence.  Yet why would wholly material beings come to think of such things?  Can chemicals desire?  Can chemicals think?
     A thoroughgoing Darwinian evolutionist, Turner does not see how.  He does not see how mentally inert matter can exercise purpose.  Yet he believes in the Darwinian picture of existence.  And while, yes, he believes in God, he is careful in the course of the book not to use such belief as the way to answer his question.
     And maybe that's his point.  Unless a bigger purpose is afoot, unless a larger vision is working through the cosmos, we strive in vain to prove it has purpose.  How can we?  We are essentially inert matter.  We have no reason to wonder.
     But we do.  Everyday.  We can therefore choose to live with the puzzle of God or we can choose to live without ever being able to explain why we really want to live in the first place.
     It's the choice of a lifetime.

     Holiness?  I thought about holiness the other day as I listened to Australian born singer Megan Washington do her song "Holy Moses."  She is afraid of Moses, she says, afraid of his aura, his aura of holiness, fearful of what it might mean.
    Washington's song underscores our innate human propensity to wonder about what moral perfection really looks like.  Because unless we are delusional, we are aware that we will never achieve moral perfection, we tend to regard those whom we believe have it with a measure of respect and trepidation, even dread and fear.  Early in the last century, Rudolph Otto, in an influential book, The Idea of the Holy, argued that although we may cower before what we consider to be absolute holiness, we at the same time are drawn to it.  It is a dread of fascination, a dread of compulsion and interest that engenders a quest to know even more.  Like watching a horror movie.
     For this reason, Otto contended, although we may reject the idea of a holy God, when push comes to shove, we cannot escape it.  Like it or not, it circumscribes who we are:  beings who seek holiness, in some form, yet beings who know that, all things being equal, we will never find it unless we acknowledge the fact of a God.  We know that we cannot have it both ways.
     As I put it in a chapter on holiness in a book (Thinking about God) I wrote a number of years ago, "Forget about holiness, and you'll be running the rest of your life."

     Though yesterday I remembered my father, I was also thinking about a holiday.  It is a holiday sacred to over a billion people around the world:  the Hindu festival of Diwali.  A joyous occasion, Diwali is known as the festival of lights, full of decoration, celebration, and rejoicing over the fact of life and the gods who give it.
     And what could be wrong with this?  Life, however we might like to think about it, can be nothing more--and nothing less--than a gift from God.  Otherwise, it is a random occasion, a capricious occurrence, something into which we have found ourselves,  unknown, raw, and unprepared, and told we must live it.  Unless life is a gift of God, unless life is more than our good fortune--and what, in a random existence, is good?--to be born on this planet, we have no way to explain it, no way to really live it with realism and hope.  As the late evolutionary biologist William Provine acknowledged, if life is not a gift of God, we are no more than plops, born only to die.  Sure, we may enjoy life, but we are enjoying something that, in its deepest essence, has no meaning.
     Enjoy life, enjoy its lights.  Be happy for your gift.  Only, as Ecclesiastes 12 exhorts us, "Remember your creator," the one from whom, as the old hymn goes, "All things come."
     Including you.

     Today, as my siblings and I will remind each other, marks another year, another year since the passing of our father over thirty years ago.  Despite the span of those decades, we still miss him, and our mother as well.  Time may heal some, yes, but time will never fully overcome the scars its events imprint on our lives.  There are  losses that, try as we might, we cannot completely assuage.  Although we learn to live with them, though we may even come to develop a measure of acceptance about them, we will never totally erase them from our hearts.  For always and forevermore, they are embedded in the innermost patterns of our soul.


     As my siblings and I prepared to leave our mother to return to our lives after saying our final good-byes to Dad, one of our uncles remarked, "Everyone is going back to their things." True enough.  But we'd never look at them in the same way again.  Nor should we.  We're personal beings who respond to our lives in personal ways.  And our lives continue.
     Yet the universe remains, an inscrutable mystery, heading to its final denouement, its ultimate destiny.  As are we.  And what then?  Almost inevitably, death makes us wonder: what lies on the other side?
     Thanks, God, for my father, who he was, and who he was to me, and thanks, God, that there is more than finite destiny.

     Many of us thought it would never happen.  But it did.  A few weeks ago, in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the government finally granted the women of the country the right to drive.  Heretofore, women could only use a motor vehicle as passengers.  In no way could they use it to transport themselves.
     Now they can.  It's a tremendous victory for the innate wonder and magnificence of the female sex.  It signifies a new respect for women and, from a biblical standpoint, it affirms that God made male and female in his image.  Both genders are capable of living freely.
     And God knows this well.   While I do not wish to speak for God, I would like to think that he is pleased with this development.  Not only does it uphold women, it upholds the presence of a creator.
     After all, unless we have been created, why should we bother to respect anyone?

     Reason?  For most of us, reason is the way that we make sense of just about everything.  When we experience problems with our appliances, motor vehicles, mathematical calculations, relationships, and everything else we use to make our lives safe and meaningful, we use our reason to solve them.  We think, we ponder, we consider; we cogitate, we use sense and logic.  We believe that we can resolve almost any issue with our reason.
     We weren't always this way.  Before the Greeks appeared along the Aegean Sea, people used mythology to grapple with the world.  They told themselves stories to explain how and why the world was.  Yet it was during the eighteenth century European Enlightenment that humans came to elevate reason above all other methods for understanding life and, most important, truth.  Reason became humanity's new "god."
     As it remains today.  If an applicance breaks down, most of us to not pray to the "god" of that appliance for repair.  We use our logic to fix it (or we summon someone who possesses such logic).  Though this has enabled humankind to make tremendous strides toward improving general social welfare, it has also pushed human beings away from transcendence and mystery.  We have reduced our world to ourselves.
     What's wrong with this?  Sure, we are finite beings in a finite world.  We should not need supernatural assistance to understand it.  Ah, but we do.  We still seek meaning.  We still seek understanding of things we cannot grasp.  Reason cannot help us with this.  Besides, we cannot deify reason apart from using reason.  No, we need something bigger than we to make sense of ourselves.  Otherwise, we're just congratulating ourselves for ourselves.
     And we still cannot explain why we are here.

     At least in the Western Hemisphere, today is Friday the 13th.  If you are of a superstitious bent, you may sense an omen.  Or a portent.  Isn't it curious that, even in this so-called scientific age, the age of rationality and reason, many of us persist in entertaining these types of mythologies?  While we may have rejected notions of the supernatural or have perhaps redefined them to our liking, we still cling to our myths.


     Why?  Many reasons, but it seems that the major one is this:  we cannot do without a bigger picture.  We cannot live without acknowledging that, despite everything we know, we need something more, something within which to understand and it all meaning.  It could be superstition, it could be omen, it could be mythology, it could even be (gasp!), God.

    "Was he planning only for believers or for those who just have faith?  Did he envision all the wars that were fought in his name?  Did he say there was only one way to be close to him? . . . when God made me."
     It's a poignant expression of questioning and wonder, and capture what many of us think about God.  Penned by singer Neil Young, these words seem to be asking God why, if you've made us, you also decided that only those whom you choose will really experience you?  Is this fair?
     Copious amounts of ink and thousands of reams of paper have been expended in an effort to address these questions.  None have resolved them.  I do not pretend to know, either.  Why, God?  But I can say this.  If God did indeed create the world, and if God did indeed enable every human being to have life, then he surely knew that everyone will live and, sadly, die.  Yet the vastness of God's vision for the universe is beyond our ken.  We'll never grasp it fully.  We only know that it is present, working, purposing, guiding.
     We also know that we have choice.  The fact of human choice is a frightfully difficult thing to understand.  Yet without it, we are robots, bereft of any point, captives of an unremitting nothingness of destny.  Frustratingly, we cannot live with choosing.  God can't, either.
     In this is the greatest puzzle of all.

     Is a fact a value?  That's the question we discussed at my atheist discussion group last night.  In a book he published a few years ago, Sam Harris, well known for the several books and countless speeches he's disseminated about the foolishness of religion and the virtue of atheism, insists that a fact is a value.  Why does he do so?  In regard to morality, he says, if a fact, for instance, the fact, as he sees it, that all humans should experience well being, is a value, then we do not need an external source to construct our sense of morality.  If a fact is not a value, however, his argument collapses.
     But is a fact really a value?  A fact is only a value if we deem it so.  Yet to do this is to make a judgment of value!  It becomes very circular.  Moreover, if, as Harris insists, human well being is the highest fact/value, how do we determine what that is?  What if people around the world have different ideas about what constitutes well being?  How do we decide who's right?  Although Harris claims he has developed an objective way to determine morality apart from a transcendent measure, he really has not.  In the end, his solution lapses into subjectivism.
     Bottom line, there are really only two ways to approach this.  One, it is to admit that we need a transcendent source of moral value to adjudicate issues of value.  Two, it is to acknowledge that we are permanently consigned to resolve issues of value on the basis of our own subjectivity.  To adopt the first alternative is to of course invoke the idea of God; yet to adopt the second is to admit that we really have no way to determine what is universally true.
     And is this the world we want?

     There it was, right on schedule, just as it has always appeared October 9 of every year since 1981.  In honor of her late husband John Lennon's birthday, Yoko Ono Lennon had placed a full page ad in The New York Times, saying, simply, "Imagine Peace."
     It's a lovely sentiment, really, one with which all of us, I think, would agree.  We all want peace, peace in our homes, peace in our nation, peace in the world, peace in our inner being.  We all would like a planet permanently free of strife, conflict, and war.

     At the same time, we all recognize that we will probably never experience such a thing.  But our human inclination, that thoroughly human inclination to always want more than what we have at the moment, spurs us on, spurs us on to try.  As a Hebrew psalm (Psalm34) puts it, encouragingly, "Seek peace, and pursue it."
     Lennon's desire was for global peace, and he did what he thought he should do to ensure that it happened.  Apart from supernatural intervention, however, genuine peace will always elude us.  We cannot tame ourselves totally, we cannot order the world to perfection.  We live imperfect lives in an imperfect world, seeing, as the apostle Paul put it, "in a mirror darkly."  We see it, but we don't; taste it, but not really.  It's the inevitable outcome of human fragility.
     So, over thirty years since Lennon's passing, what can we do?  Many things, but perhaps the most seminal and important, from my standpoint, is to acknowledge who we are:  creatures in need of a creator.
     We'll never have peace, genuine peace, until we understand we can't create outselves.

     1492.  It's one of the most pivotal years in human history.  Humans of two hemispheres, neither of whom had been aware of the other, suddenly were, almost overnight, finding themselves confronting worlds that literally blew their collective minds.  No one would ever be the same.
     Sadly, however, although 1492 may have been a momentuous and lucrative year for many Europeans, it was a terrible one for the natives of the Americas. 1492 marked the beginning of a lengthy European oppression and exploitation of the peoples of the Americas, a run of centuries of difficulty and pain, pain which, in some cases, continues, in multiple forms, to this day.
     The worst of it is that in too many instances this exploitation was justified in the name of Christianity.  It was an awful stain on the love of God.
     Historian Erna Paris once observed that, "Attaching God to history is the most powerful nationalism of all."  Whenever we try to juxtapose God and the history we are trying to create, we blur a line we cannot possibly cross:  the boundary between what is here and what is not, the difference between the visible speculations of finitude and the hidden certitudes of infinity.  We think we can speak for God.
     But God, whether he is talking about politics, economics, religion, or inculturation, does not need us to speak for him.  He doesn't need us to give the planet purpose or meaning.  Because he created it, our world already has such things.  We therefore need to talk less and listen more.  It's difficult to hear someone talk when we're busy spouting off.
     Love him, hate him; either way, use this Columbus Day to remind yourself of your so very limited view of what is real and true.