"I'm not big into my feelings.  I don't believe you have to believe a woman because they said it."  So remarked South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham in regard to the furor over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court.
     Well, Senator, do you believe you have to believe a man?  Absent credible evidence to the contrary, are not we obligated, out of respect for our fellow human beings, all of whom, I presume you believe, are created in the image of God, to believe people for what they say?
     Conversely, if, for instance, you say you are a Christian (and you indeed claim to be one), must I believe you?

     Suffering Servant?  Buried in the prophesies of Isaiah are numerous descriptions of a Servant, a Servant whom Jews believe to be the nation of Israel and whom Christians believe to be, viewed through New Testament eyes, Jesus.  Although I favor the latter viewpoint, that is not my central point here.  It is rather that however we view a redeemer, that is, a person who liberates, for that is how the Servant is ultimately presented in the Hebrew text, we understand that he or she must be a person who suffers and, significantly, overcome and alleviate others' pain.

     
     And in a fallen and broken world, this, for better or worse, is the essence of that which enables freedom.  To overcome the pain of the world, we must endure the pain of the world.  Otherwise, we've glossed over and ignored the facts before us.
     
     We live, we suffer, we die.  Does this sound depressing?  Of course it does.  But there's another side to the picture.  It is rooted in the fact of transcendence.   Yes, out of transcendence the world came, and out of transcendence morality becomes real, and yes, in transcendence we see, because morality is real, the roots of our pain.  But also out of transcendence we see the meaning that guides us through it.

     The poet Anne Sexton, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer who died at a too early age in the last century, led an often melancholy existence, one of profound insight yet one tempered with deep angst.  In the end, she took her own life.

     Along the way, Sexton penned some richly constructed words about her relationship with God.  One of her most well known poems is this regard is "Rowing Toward God."  In this poem, which is actually a set of poems, Sexton writes of how she is constantly rowing toward God yet how this rowing is an "awful" rowing toward her goal.  For when she seems to reach God, he does not seem as friendly or welcoming as she thought he might be.  She realizes that however well she has lived or believed, God holds all the cards ("five aces," as she puts it).  Her ultimate destiny is completely in his hands.

     So hers is an awful rowing, an awful rowing toward a destination which, to her, deeply disappoints, a destination that is a picture of helplessness and, perhaps, hopelessness.  Who is she really, she wonders, perhaps as did the ancient Greeks who were acutely aware that however they lived the Fates made the final call on their end, that she lives and rows, seemingly to no avail?  What is the point?
     Indeed.  Apart from visible exchange with God, we might all wonder the same thing:  in a world which we did not make, a world in which a God seems to hold all the cards, world whose destiny we cannot possibly see, who and why are we?  Is there a reason beyond the moment?
     Only if, as the apostle John wrote, "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us."  Only if God has made himself known.

     Did you see the full moon last night?  If you live in the northern hemisphere, your skies were clear, and you happened to look out the window, you likely did.  Coming on the heels of the autumnal equinox that came to be over the weekend, this full moon is particularly significant:  it embodies the promise of what is to come.


     Some of us will of course reply, well, that just means snow and cold and darkness.  True enough, but it is in snow and cold and darkness, metaphorically speaking, that we see the essence of promise.  In a perfect world, promise would not exist.  Not that snow and cold and darkness are imperfect; they are not.  But for many of us, they pose significant hardship and challenge.  The point is, however, that the physical gyrations of the world mean more than our response to them.  They talk to us of what is to come next.
     As the psalmist frequently says, joy will come in the morning.  And it will.  But morning cannot come unless night precedes it.  And in the autumnal full moon, in the way it lights up the night, we see our path forward.  A path in the darkness.

     "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")

     Over the weekend, in the northern hemisphere, the first day of autumn happened:  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 resplendently; 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, and it's equally good to meditate on beginnings; it's good to remember the ceaselessness of the rhythms that ripple through the cosmos.  It's good to ponder the certitude still embedded in a mercurial and capricious world.
     In autumn's transforming predictability, we also catch a deeper vision of the creator God.  In a finite and often fractured world, change is inevitable.  Yet so is God.  Amidst all of our seasons of malleability and change, God's love, guidance, and presence remain firm.  Take heart in autumn's changes, and realize, once more, the fact and necessity of an eternal God.

    Another day, another climber gone.  Tom Frost, one of the original big wall climbers of Yosemite Valley, died last month at the age of 82.  The cause was pancreatic cancer.  Many decades ago, when I was beginning to backpack and climb mountains, I devoured accounts of climbs, particularly those in the Himalayas.  Frost figured prominently in almost every one of them.
     What intrigued me most about Frost was, according to the accounts, his steadfast joy in doing what he was doing.  He never wavered, he never complained.  And he did this because, he said, over and over again, he found God most deeply when he was scaling mountain peaks.
     Much has been written about how the natural landscapes of the world testify to the fact of God, about how they tend to invoke, in many people, thoughts of the supernatural and transcendent.  About how they stir up feelings people didn't know they had.
     Not everyone of course responds to natural beauty in this way; not everyone accepts that natural landscapes in themselves mean that God exists.  But Frost did.
     When next you're outdoors, think about Tom Frost.  Think about how difficult it is in a world replete with astonishing beauty, harmony, and order, to imagine that it is, ultimately, just an accident.
     Rest well, Tom Frost.

     Yesterday, I noted the death of climber Jeff Lowe.  I testified to the power of his life and the lessons we all can draw from living through challenge.  As I thought about his passing, I happened to read a review of a new book about German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.  Nietzsche is perhaps most famous for his remark, which he made at the peak of the rise of modernity in the late nineteenth century that, "God is dead.  And we have all killed him."
     When we dig into the background of Nietzsche's remark, we see that, in truth, he is entirely accurate.  God isn't dead because he no longer exists; he is dead because people no longer believed in him.  As a result, Nietzsche opined, we live in a world devoid of any love, meaning, or affection.

     But a world, Nietzsche insisted, open and amenable to pursuing the highest heights of adventure and challenge.  it is the world of many a mountain climber--and countless others, too.  With the evisceration of the supernatural, humanity has no boundaries, moral or otherwise:  it can be anything it wants to be.  Or not be.
     If we accept the idea of God, we accept the idea of transcendent moral boundary.  If we do not, we accept the idea of humanly engendered moral boundary.  With the former, we have external moral limits; the latter, the limits are all our own.  With the latter, we are remarkably free; with the former, we live under an often ambiguous constraint.
     Either way, however, we live in a fallen and unpredictable world.  Hence, our challenge becomes this:  how many challenges will we accept to achieve perfection in a world that will never know it?  And how will we know when we find it?

  
      If you hike or backpack, you may be familiar with the name Jeff Lowe.  Sadly, once one of the most renowned climbers on the planet and progenitor of a successful outdoor equipment and clothing company, Lowe passed away last week.  He was 67.  Tragically, and ironically, he succumbed to a neuromuscular disease similar to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis ("Lou Gehrig's" disease).  It was a singularly unexpected end for one who, earlier in his life, had dazzled his contemporaries with his endurance and ability on the loftiest peaks on earth.  Like Douglas Haston, a British climber who perished in an avalanche in the late Seventies and who was equally revered for his remarkable powers of agility and endurance, Lowe did his best to live to the fullest the life he had been given.  Reflecting on the frequent hardship of climbing high peaks, he noted, "Sometimes it doesn't have to be fun to be fun."
     More than most, Lowe understood that individual greatness and satisfaction come most powerfully through difficulty and challenge.  Granted, unlike a person born with a disability, Lowe created the situations of challenge that shaped him.  He entered into them by choice, and did not start life with a debilitating level of physical challenge.  Nonetheless, his observation remains seminal and true:  we grow more deeply when we grapple with situations that seem, initially anyway, bigger than we can handle.
     Last week, I wrote about how many in the West long for a return to the Garden, a sort of primordial longing for a seamlessness of moral and physical perfection.  Sounds good?  Perfection means the end of all forward movement, the close of all adventure and speculation.  Would we be happy with this?
     As I write this, I think, again, about how extraordinarily difficult it is to maintain belief in a perfect God in an imperfect world.  On the other hand, maybe that's why I believe it.
     Farewell, Jeff Lowe.  Thanks for the power of your existence.

     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.  Beginning tonight, Jews around the world celebrate Yom Kippur, the "Day of Atonement."  On this night, 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 subjective and relative, we must acknowledge the fact of 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 situational darkness, the darkness of an accidental, and therefore, as scientist Steven Weinberg observes, pointless universe.

     Leave it to Bill Gates to lay it out in an honest way.  In a review he did of Yuval Noah Harari's new book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, recently, he observes that, “So far, human history has been driven by a desire to live longer, healthier, happier lives.  If science is eventually able to give that dream to most people, and large numbers of people no longer need to work to feed and clothe everyone, what reason will we have to get up in the morning?”

     Gates is absolutely right.  In his Brave New World, Aldous Huxley paints a picture of a society in which everyone is happy.  Always.  Designed in test tubes and made to serve a particular function, each person in this society has no cause, really, to be unhappy.  Indeed, tragically, and this is Huxley's point, they cannot.  They do not know how.


     Sure, we'd all like to have easy lives; we'd all like to see everyone on the planet enjoy sufficient amounts of food and shelter.  Who would not?  And I heartily endorse any and all efforts to ensure that this comes about.  But when all this is accomplished, what then will be our vision for ourselves?

     It's a good question.  But we will not be able to answer it in and of ourselves.  For in and of ourselves, that's exactly what we are:  in and of ourselves.
     
     Yet we are far more than physical presence; we are moral, believing, and transcendentally inclined beings.  And we need to acknowledge the truth and reality of such things to know who we really are.
    
     And all that we can be.

     "The fool has said in his heart, 'there is no God.'"  If you know anything about the Bible, you know that this phrase turns up in at least three psalms from the Hebrew writings and is echoed, in part, in the some of the writings of Paul which appear in the New Testament canon.
     But what does it really mean?  I know many atheists; I would not consider them to be fools or even foolish.  They're intelligent and wise.  The psalmist wrote these words many centuries ago, in a world in which everyone, from the greatest king to the lowliest farmer, believed in a divine presence.  Indeed, they believed it implicitly; belief in God was as normal and regular as the spring and autumn rains.  Hence, anyone who did not believe in God was, well, as the psalmist said, someone who was woefully out of touch with his/her culture and the facts of the world as everyone understand them.
     In the aftermath of the eighteenth century European Enlightenment, however, this all changed.  Today, many segments of Western society do not consider disbelief in God to be foolish at all.  In fact, disbelief is considered the most rational thing to do.
     Fair enough.  What people believed many centuries ago does not need to be necessarily valid for us today.  That's obvious.  On the other hand, given that the world continues to hum along on its merry way, malfunctioning of course at times, but, generally speaking, reasonably consonant with the fundamental rhythms of life and being which have been present since its beginning, we wonder:  has anything really changed about who we are?
     "Fool" is surely a harsh term.  No argument there.  If humanity has not definitively changed, however, I have to think that the deeper lesson of the Enlightenment is that we do not need to abandon everything about our past to engage more fully with whom we most are.

     A few months ago, an old friend, a college friend, of mine posted a clip of Joni Mitchell singing her anthem "Woodstock."  In posting it, my friend stated that, in this dark age (politically, culturally, and otherwise) listening to this song gave her hope.
     Maybe not all of us believe we are living in dark times.  But all of us can connect to the thrust of Mitchell's song, that we are "stardust and golden," and that we've got to "get back to the garden."
     Quite.  Are we golden?  Absolutely.  We shine with wonder and marvel.  Are we stardust?  A literal six day creation account notwithstanding, yes, we are stardust, our origins buried deeply in the primordial plasma out of which the cosmos came.  Although we are made in the image of a creator, we are, as countless religious traditions attest, ultimately dust, be it from the earth, the stars, or both.

     Why do we long for the garden?  Amidst the technology and globalization and cultural and social isolation of our age, we long for a larger experience, an experience of something pristine, something untouched, something beyond the machinations of our day.  We long for restoration, we long for greater meaning.  And somehow, for many of us, we sense that this is to be found in a garden, a paradise (the Persian word from which the English word comes) of floral verdancy, of equanimity and abundance, of harmony, and rest.
     We long to be united with that out of which we have come.  And why not?  Though we always look for the next and greater things, we cannot really understand them without grasping why we can.

     As I sat down to read and pray earlier this week, I realized that on this day, sixty-eight years ago, my parents got married.  Wow.  I have posted on a wall of my study a photo of Mom and Dad on the day of their wedding, smiling at each other at the reception in my grandparents' backyard of apricot and peach trees in the Los Angeles of long ago.  I marvel at how out of that day, a day that for most other people was just another day in many, many days, an entire family, two boys and two girls, came.  And how out of these two boys and two girls came more children in turn and, we hope, one day more children from them.
     It's a remarkable statement to the wonder of human existence.  We live and we die, yes, but while we live, we testify, each and every day, to the fact of the universe's progenitive and creative impulses without which nothing could be.
     And, I hope, we will always wonder why.  What did we do to deserve such meaning, such transcendent and enduring meaning?
     And love.  Without a creator's love, without a personal originating presence, what could possibly be?

     Before September 11, 2001, before international terrorism made itself known with such striking effect in the U.S., America felt, in some ways, like it felt prior to the attack of Pearl Harbor:  apart.  Set astride a vast continent, separated from the world by two wide oceans, the nation sat, comforted by its industry and wealth, soothed by its ability to remain aloof from the troubles of the rest of the world.
     No more.  In a few chilling moments, the world exploded in America's face.  There were no more barriers, no more obstacles:  Americans had met the world.

     And could no longer escape it.  On the other hand, perhaps America was, in a peculiar way, at that point redeemed.  Perhaps America was set free (the essential meaning of the word) from the complacency it had nurtured over the decades, its blindness to the way that it is perceived in other parts of the world.  Perhaps 9/11 set America free to realize that it, and the watching world, could be more than the sum of its parts.  Maybe like biblical redemption, a redemption rooted in an unspeakable darkness that set humanity's hearts free, so did the darkness of that summer morning liberate Americans, and the world, to see that, yes, there really is something more to life and existence than simply conquering them.
     Perhaps those black moments will help the planet to grasp anew what it is really here for.

     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 Hashanah (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 and reflection, singing and gathering, and reading and mediation.  These are days 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 fractured, 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.

     In doing this, we affirm that we are born for transcendence, that 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, creatures of something far greater than we can imagine.
     Enjoy your pondering.

     Who will remember you?  All of us, I think, like to suppose that after we are gone from the planet, someone will remember us.  Particularly if we are, to use a loaded term, famous.  If that is the case, we may well be remembered as long as humanity walks the earth.  For good or ill.
     "I am Taushiro.  I have something that no one else in the world has.  One day when I am gone from the world, I hope the world remembers."  So said the last member of this forgotten tribe living in the jungles of South America.'
     It's a poignant observation.  And frightfully accurate.  If not for the article from which this quote is taken, this person is absolutely right:  when he is gone, no one will know that the tribe had even existed.

     It's easy to say that this is simply the way of sentient existence.  It's easy to say that it doesn't matter.  It's easy to say that once we are gone, we will not care that no one remembers us.
     Then why do we long so much for it to not be true?  We may say that we have come from nothingness and that we will eventually return to nothingness, but can we really square this with our fundamental longing to be loved and remembered?
    It seems that there is something we are missing here, something that, however we define it, brings this together.
     Dare I say God?

     Another day, another movie, I guess.  Not only did I see "Revenant" recently, but a movie called "Operation Finale" as well.  "Finale" presents the account of how a group of Israeli secret agents captured Nazi Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Final Solution, then living quietly in Argentina, and returned him to Israel for trial and justice.

     Philosopher Hannah Arendt covered Eichmann's trial and later wrote a book about it her observations (Eichmann in Jerusalem).  In it, she coins a phrase which was to make her internationally famous.  What Eichmann has done, she said, was to establish the "banality of evil."  So blithely did Eichmann talk about his actions, so casually did he view what he was doing to an entire race of people, and so easily did he compartmentalize his doings at work from his life as loving father at home that, to Arendt, he had made evil irretrievably unimportant and trivial:  totally banal.  Eichmann had banished evil.
    While we can disagree on what constitutes the truly evil, most of us acknowledges that it exists.  Once we eliminate even the idea of evil, however, morality becomes a moot point.
     And the world crumbles completely.

     Perhaps you've seen "Revenant," the 2017 movie, starring Leonard DiCaprio?  Loosely based on the life of Hugh Glass, a Western "mountain man" of the early nineteenth century, "Revenant" is a study in earthly and transcendent morality.

     Briefly, the plot is how, after he is badly mauled in a grizzly bear attack, Glass is left for dead by his companions who, after reaching the safety of an American fort, lie about how they left Glass in order to obtain a larger share of the money due them.  In the months following his abandonment, Glass, through sheer perseverance of will, along with a fortunate encounter with a friendly Indian, manages to "resurrect" himself and make his way to the fort.
     When once he as at the fort and learns that the one who left him for dead has recently fled the justice due him, Glass sets in pursuit.  As the movie draws to a close, Glass and the unscrupulous trader are locked in a fight to the death.  However, when Glass finally gains the upper hand and prepares to end the trader's life, he remembers something his Indian benefactor told him.  "It is for the Creator to seek revenge."
     So he lets his opponent go.  However, as his antagonist drifts into the stream by which they were fighting, he lands in the hands of a group of Indians traveling on the opposite bank.  He is summarily scalped and killed.  Glass, because one of the women in the group recognizes him as the man who earlier rescued her from a rape attack, is spared.
     If we were to frame this scenario in earthly terms, most of us would respond that, yes, Glass should kill his enemy.  If we were to set it in a transcendent framework, one invested in the presence of a Creator, however, we could not.  Satisfying though revenge may be, it will never satisfy the variegated moral contusions of our human heart.  We exact justice only imperfectly.
     When Martin Luther King, Jr., a person deeply committed to God, observed that, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," he expressed this same thought:  we cannot do morality without a just God.