As we prepare for the descent into the nothingness of Good Friday, the day on which darkness overwhelmed even the creator himself, we cannot help but think about light:  when will it come?  So it is that we anticipate Easter, the day on which we see light as it was most meant to be:  the total and absolute witness of God's power over and love for what he made.

"Resurrection" by El Greco

     In the absolute darkness and nothingness of Jesus' death, the Son of God abandoned by his Father, all light is gone.  Yet out of this abject blackness, the greatest of all light arose.  A light that eclipses and encompasses all others, it is a light that changed history, bent space, and permanently altered all our notions of meaning and time.
     The resurrection is the greatest of light because it brought, from the fiercest and vilest nothingness of all deaths, a life that will never end.  It's nonsensical, its unbelievable, it's unfathomable, but it is entirely true.
The resurrection tells us that life has meaning, meaning that exceeds our greatest imagination.  It tells us that though we die, we will live again, forever.
     How can life ever be the same?
     By the way, I'll be traveling for the next week and will not be posting for a bit.  Enjoy your week, appreciate your Easter, and thanks for reading!

     Is the resurrection, the event toward which our season of Lent points, as some of my atheist friends have told me, parochial?  Is it really so small and insignificant that it affects only a very small corner of an infinitely large universe?  Is one itinerant Jewish preacher's return from death really that important?

     The resurrection is only important if it actually happened.  And the resurrection could only have happened if this vast universe is the creation, in some way, of a personal being.  Only personal beings rise from the dead; impersonal things were never alive to begin with.  If we look at the universe as the product of impersonal forces, well, we will indeed consider the resurrection to be irrelevant.  Why would life be expected to continue after it is over?  Deciding that the universe is the result of personal intelligence and creativity, however, changes the equation, profoundly.  A necessarily eternal creator inserts a potential into the fabric of the cosmos that would not be there otherwise, the potential to experience, somehow, some way, eternity.

     In this light, the resurrection becomes anything but parochial.  Indeed, it comprises the sum of existence.  The resurrection means that life is more than itself, that life as we know and love it is not all there is to experience.  There is more to life than meets the eye.  Or the ear.  Or the heart.  The resurrection means that this present is only the beginning of a far greater present still, a present that will never end.
     What did the apostles say on Easter morning?  "He is risen!"  In Jesus' rising, God communicated the heart of what it means to be alive:  to know that, now and always, life is the work and vision of God.  We're only along for the ride.
     But oh, what a ride!  We live our lives richly, for we live them as if they will never end.  And they won't.  As Jesus told Martha in John 11, "He who believes in me will live even if he dies.  And he who believes in me will never die."
     There is life again.

     Wrapped up as we are in the advent of the meteorological spring, we may forget the birthday of a very famous musician:  Johannes Sebastian Bach.  It's fitting that Bach's birthday should accompany spring.  His music is replete with the sounds of singing birds, greening forests, and deeper skies.  It fits the season.  Fresh, bright, and resonant with joy, Bach's music echoes the wonder of the newly born creation.
     And regardless of how one sees the universe's origins (though the frequent reader no doubt knows my loyalties in this regard), we can all, I think, enjoy the coming of spring.  We all rejoice in its freshness and promise, its wondrous transformation of what we see.
     We all can also see ourselves as creatures of the spring, creatures with potential, actors and thespians (as Shakespeare said in As You Like It, "All the world is a stage") in a grand drama of existence, people who create and enjoy every day.
    We thank Bach for what he has shown us about life, death, and spring.  We also thank Bach for giving us a glimpse of the greater mystery 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 from whence all things come.
     Enjoy the music!

     Spring.  Taking a walk this afternoon, this beginning of the fourth week of Lent, I marveled at the still naked forests, the still motionless lakes, the still somnolent land, and I thought:  the land is still fasting.  In in its own way, the land clings to the rythm of Lent, understanding that existence's ways dictate that privation is as important as abundance.

     Soon, very soon, the land will awaken.  But for now, it waits.  As do we.  Like the land fasting as it waits for spring, we find our richest insight not in running madly, but rather in submitting to the rhythms of the land, the land and landscape of our mortality, our mortality in the hands of God.
     Morality and privation make spring that much sweeter.

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

     It seems that he did so rather successfully, too.  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 very 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.  Sure, some people celebrate to excess, but usually even this is done with every good intention:  life is beautiful!
     If we stop here, however, we overlook one of Patrick's fundamental observations.  It is summed up in the following quote:

     "Be still and know that I am God.
      Be still and know that I am.
      Be still and know.
      Be still.
      Be."

     Amidst the "beingness" and celebration, remember from whom it all comes.

     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 or, 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 has meaning.  We believe that what we do matters.  believe that we are creatures of sense living in a sensory world.      In a solely material world, a world absent of transcendent presence, however, we cannot legitimately claim that what we do matters.  From what would meaning come? 
     Unless this world is personal, unless this world has an ultimate origin in what is not chemical, we cannot have an ides of March.  Caesar--and all the rest of us--would not matter one whit.

     Have you seen Tartuffe?  A play by the French playwright Moliere, Tartuffe is a study in the dangers of religious hypocrisy.  Although Moliere was directing it at the Catholic Church (the dominant religion of sixteenth century France), his observations are relevant to any religious tradition today.  Besides the problem of evil (briefly, if God is omnipotent and good, why do evil and suffering exist:  cannot God do something?), nothing pushes people from religion, of any sort, more than hypocrisy.  Why can't people of faith live in a way that is consistent with what they preach?
     It's a worthy accusation and, unfortunately, all too true.  There is not a person of faith anywhere on the planet whose behavior always aligns perfectly with what she believes.  And it doesn't do to say, well, this person is forgiven by God.  While this may well be, it does not resolve the pain that poor behavior causes for those who experience it. 
     What is a person of faith to do?  The psalmist had a useful observation in this regard.  He wrote, "Relax, let go, and know that I am God" (Psalm 46:10).  Indeed.  We all stumble, yes, religious and faith-based or not.  We're only human.  What matters, however, is how we stumble. Do we stumble in an accidental world, a world in which we have no real way to define what is true, no good way to determine right and wrong; or do we stumble in a purposeful creation, a creation of a vision which undergirds all things?  In the former, remedy is difficult.  In the latter, though remedy is equally difficult, it is a remedy that, as Tartuffe's accusers found, lasts.  It is rooted in the presence of God.

     Although she has been gone for nearly eight years, I could not help but think of my mother on Friday of last week.  It's her birthday.  I recently heard John Lennon's "Mother." For those who have not heard the song, Lennon sings of the mother and father whom he always wanted but, as he puts it in the song, were never there for him.  They didn't "have" him.
     Would we all wish for parents who are there for us, who "have" us, who love us as we wish them to love us.  In contrast to Lennon, I experienced this love in full, and more, in the love of my parents, my mother and father.  I really needed nothing more from them, for in their love they gave me everything I could possibly want and need.  I left home believing that the world was a good place, that people were decent beings, that love reigned in the universe.
     I hope that you find this kind of love, too.  Whether it's from your parents or others, I hope that, through it, you come to see the fullness and presence of love in the cosmos, and enjoy and appreciate its every expression on our behalf.  That you see love as something that always wants you.
     Like the love of God.  Thank goodness for a loving God.

     Calling all men and women:  today is International Women's Day!  Why should set aside a day to celebrate women?  Do we not celebrate women every day of the year?  Absolutely.  Historically, however, women have faced oppression on scales to which most men simply cannot relate.  A complex web of tradition, sexism, condescension, and patriarchy has created a world in which, even today, many women are considered to be second-class citizens, in some cases, tragically, less than human.




     Politics and culture aside, however, I believe we do well to consider why the human race is composed of men and women.  The reason is far more than mere procreation.  The most profound reason for two human genders is that, bottom line, men and women need each other, need each other in more ways than they can individually or corporately imagine.  Humanity cannot be fully human unless male and female are flourishing, unless both genders are able to be all that they can, before God, be.  As Genesis makes clear, humanness is male and female, and we are duty bound to achieve its fullness.
     Do we have a long way to go?  Sure.  But we are mere dollops of masculinity and femininity tossed into an accidental cosmos, nor are we male and female, complementary in gender, without reason.  We are as we are because of God.
     And God wants nothing more than our human completeness.

     Mortality strikes us all, doesn't it?  For many of us, however, it takes some time for this knowledge to sink in.  Examples of this are legion, but I think here of the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, a nearly 4,000 year old document that tells a curious tale of adventure, kingship, and the end of life.

     The story turns upon two characters, Enkidu and Gilgamesh.  Enkidu is a wild man, a man of untamed desire and virlity.  Gilgamesh is a man of royalty.  Nonetheless, they bond and set out to pursue adventure together.  They encounter many things, regaling each other with their prowess.  Unfortunately, they also end up offending the gods.  As punishment, Enkidu dies.
     Distraught and confused--he had never seen death before--Gilgamesh proceeds to wander across the earth seeking the secret to eternal life.  He never finds it.  "You," the gods continually tell Gilgamesh, "will never live forever."  It is not, they add, "yours to know."
     We are no different.  But we chafe before it.  Mortality is the greatest puzzle and vexation we face.
     That's the bad news.  We are human.  It's also, however, the good news.  If there is a human being, there is a God.  

     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.

     As most of the world knows, last night the Oscars came to Hollywood.  For those who follow and enjoy such things, the parade of "celebrities" on the red carpet adorning the entrance to the auditorium prior to the ceremony was a veritable feast for the eyes.  One after another, the most famous stars of film passed by, smiling, waving, preening, displaying themselves for the adoring crowds.  All of them expect it, all of them know it is good for the movie business, and all of them know that this night is, for them and their successors, one of the most important evenings of the year.  They literally cannot afford to miss it.


     I'm happy for them, happy that they found their vocational niche, and happy for them that they've been able to make a good, indeed a very good living from it.
     This notwithstanding, what I find interesting, even intriguing about the adulation some people heap upon these "celebrities" is the extent to which it represents, to me, a longing for heroes, for people to look up to, for people who have risen above the fray and who seemed to have found a happiness others do not have.
     But happiness, as so many of us know, is not something we find.  Happiness is what happens to us.  Happiness is what we experience when we have resolved not our vocational angst or material paucity but our innermost longings, our deep seated longings for meaning.  Our greatest heroes need not be those who are materially successful, but rather those who have been successful in matters of the heart, those who have found what the Hebrew Bible calls shalom and what Jesus calls "perfect," a completeness of body, spirit, and soul.  Happiness is grounded in the present necessity of God.

     This past Sunday marked the first Sunday of Lent.  Repentance and circumspection now dominate the religious imagination, as those so inclined spend ever more time pondering the exigencies within their lives, the fleeting puffs of materiality in which we have life and breath.  Life looks more remarkable than ever:  a befuddling experience, yes, but the only experience, at this point, we have.

     Given the wonder of the world, it's easy to rejoice in life without also wondering why life is, why we have it, why this existence has been given to us.  To what end do we live?
     In its call to slow down, to meditate and consider, to let go of the immediate, Lent carves multiple inroads into this question, dissembling the perfunctory and expected and normal.  It calls us to not blast life apart without knowing what we are blasting it into, to stop striving for what will not last, and to relax, as the Psalmist says, in the reality of God (Psalm 46:10).  Lent invites us to look at what matters most.  Who will we really be when we leave this world:  ashes or creatures of eternity?
     Need we acknowledge larger realities in our earthly existence?  Only you can decide that.  One truth, however, will remain.  We will never escape the fact of our mortality.  Lent reminds us of our contingency.  It also reminds us that if the world is contingency only, the universe would never have had a reason to be.  And neither would we.
     Enjoy the journey.