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.  

   

     As the psalmist writes in Psalm 36, "In your light [Lord], we see light."

     And light always overcomes the darkness.

     Once again, a mass shooting has hit the U.S.  This time, it was a synagogue in Pittsburgh.  One shooter, eleven dead, gunned down as they worshipped on their Sabbath.  It's awful, its horrifying.  As many who were there have said, "I can't be a Jew in the same way again."
     
     Nor can, I suggest, the rest of us be who we were last week.  It's not difficult to argue that it is the current fracturing and polarizing of the American society that has created the climate in which this type of tragedy happens.  Buying more guns or installing armed guards at every house of worship will not stop it, nor will using the death penalty or building more prisons.  The real problem is the darkness of the national heart.  It's under siege, under a siege of unrelenting vituperative political rhetoric, openly expressed and undisguised racism, an obsession with getting rich, and a pervasive cultural alienation and loneliness.

     Thousands of years ago, God, as the Hebrew writings record it, asks Job, the Job whose name has become synonymous with inexplicable suffering, "Who [meaning Job] is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?"  Indeed:  how do you really know, Job, what is going on with life?
     And that, in a nutshell, is the problem:  so rarely do we admit to the fallibility of whom we, our finite selves, are.
     
     I hope that America learns from its Jewish brethren and listens to a God, not the transient god of a finite planet, but a God whom it cannot possibly create.

     Ask any sociologist, historian, or psychologist whether speaking about violence tends to engender violence in turn, and all of them, every last one, will reply that, yes, it does.  The lengthy and sordid history of human brokenness and disfigurement testifies to this amply.
     When the president of the United States encourages violence against those who oppose him, when he labels mainstream media the enemy of the people, when he lauds people who beat up people with whom they disagree, well, it should come as no surprise that a rash of mail bombs have been sent to those who have spoken openly about their disagreements with the president.  As a ruler goes, for better or worse, so goes the country.
     For a few minutes, the president called for unity.  Immediately afterward, he resumed his attacks on the news media and anyone else (read Democrats) who dared take issue with him or his policies.  Is not this the definition of hypocrisy?  Does the president not see what his heated and vitriolic rhetoric is doing to the country?
     "But they lie in wait for their own blood, they ambush their own lives [souls].  So are the ways of everyone who gains by violence, it takes away the life [soul] of its possessors" (Proverbs 1:18-19).  And, "If a ruler pays attention to falsehood, all his ministers become wicked" (Proverbs 29:12).
     It's positively frightening.

     International Stuttering Awareness Day, 2018.  I'm willing to say that this is a day with which you are not familiar.  It happened on October 22, earlier this week.
     Although stuttering affects only about one percent of the global population, for those who endure it, it is pivotal.  Stuttering, that is, the inability to verbalize fluently, can be debilitating.  While a stutterer knows she wants to say, she cannot say it easily.  She will "block," that is, she will not be able to voice her words without running into physical difficulty in saying them.  She cannot just say what she wants to say when and how she wants to say it.  Stuttering can be very frustrating.

     Many famous people have stuttered.  One of the earliest recorded instances is that of Moses, the Moses who, many centuries ago, led the Hebrews out of captivity in Egypt into the land of Canaan.  Another is Demosthenes, the ancient Greek orator.  More recent examples include the actress Marilyn Monroe and former U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden.

     What's my point?  I've stuttered for many, many years.  Overall, it's been quite a ride, and I could probably talk about it at length.  For now, however, I will only encourage you to cultivate a greater 

awareness of the phenomenon.  Broadly speaking, stuttering is a very little blip on a very big screen of human adventure.  Yet like any physical difficulty, it underscores the riddle of our humanness, capturing at once our grandeur as well as our fragility.  It reminds us of how challenging and complicated it is to be live as the image of God in a finite world.

    "I'm worried that I'm not going to be known and if I die no one would know who I am."
     These words of a young woman named Victory who lives in Nigeria, strike to the core of what it is to be human.  We all wish to be loved; we all wish to be known.  We all wish to know that we made a difference.
     And in an empty universe, an unintentional twist of quantum energy and virtual particles, these desires become all the more precious. Even if we are known, even if we feel as if we have made a difference, and even if someone remembers us, we will, as many writers remind us, including Barbara Ehrenreich, whose latest book I mentioned yesterday, one day vanish into nothingness once more.
     And life will go on without us.  It's poignant, it's real, it's tragic.  Although an intentional universe does not guarantee that we will be remembered by our fellow human beings, it does mandate and guarantee that, all things considered, knowing, and all that it comprises, definitively counteracts the fact of eternal nothingness.
     Always, always, love your fellow human beings.

     In Natural Causes, her newest book, author Barbara Ehrenreich writes, somewhat sarcastically, about the Western obsession with living as long as one possibly can.  Over and over, she emphasizes that as much as we might want to live hundreds of years, truth be told, we will not.  Yet, she goes on to say, very wealthy people are spending millions and millions of dollars to do exactly that:  live, if not forever, virtually indefinitely.

     A cellular biologist, Ehrenreich notes that mortality is built into the human system.  Fragility and breakdown are inevitable.  Not so, say the dissenters, most of whom live in the so-called "Silicon Valley," bastion of the international computer industry.  These dissenters, to quote Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, want to "cure death."
      And what if we do?  Then what?  We'd still be wrestling with a far bigger question:  who are we?
     Good thing there is a God.

     Over the weekend, I mowed my lawn for the last time this year.  As autumn deepens, as air temperatures steadily drop, as evenings approach the freezing mark or lower, grass, as any botanist will tell us, does not grow.  Once vibrant and strong, come autumn's demarcation of weather and time, grass loses its steam, its growth patterns stifled, its vigor tamed and subsumed by the circadian rhythms of the planet.  I will not see it again until spring.     
     Many years ago, I wrote a poem about autumn.  I wrote about how the land fades, how the birds depart, how life seems at a standstill, how the world appears to slip away.  In a way, it's sad, in a way, it's poignant.  In another way, however, it's glorious.  In autumn's coming and the grasses of the world's demise, we catch a glimpse, a very tiny glimpse of the fact of loss that pervades all of existence.  But we also see, happily, the equally weighty fact of gain.  We see the beginning as much as we see the end.  And as much as we may mourn the passing of warmer weather, we also realize that, as medieval writers propounded in their notion of the Great Chain of Being, what we may think is perfection necessarily bristles with what we deem to be imperfection.  Absent an eternal earth, it must.
     I'm thankful that, in the ubiquitous wisdom of a divine creation, loss always heralds gain.
     

     "At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded," observed Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Any reasonable person behaves like this."  Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century.  His insights always strike to core of who we are.
     And this quote is no exception.  All of us, every last one of us, relies ultimately on beliefs which have no foundation.  Can we prove that we are here?  Can we prove that two plus two is four?  No:  we simply accept it.
     Hence, if ever we question someone's belief as being ungrounded, let us always examine our own starting points and ask ourselves:  how do we know this?
     You may be surprised at your honest answer.  Granted, although we all tend to construct our own reality, we rarely know what reality really is.
     After all, we're only human.
     And where did we come from?

     Cat Power, the singer whose real name is Chan Marshall, has long been a influential presence in the annals of indie rock.  People find her music enticing, and her lyrics profoundly rich.  Her newest album, "Wanderer," has much to say about the pain and weight of abandoning, abandoning relationship, abandoning belief.  In this, she speaks to us all:  rarely do we let go of a treasure without suffering and pain.

     Someone once asked me what it would take for me to abandon my belief in God.  After thinking about it a minute, I said that my belief, like most beliefs, does not necessarily rest on dogma or creed.  Rather, it rests on experience and relationship.  We may believe with intellectual assent, but we experience belief with our heart.  And as Cat Power makes clear in her new album, when we wander away from what we know, we hurt, not in our mind but in our heart.

     Disbelieving in God might comfort my mind, but it will break my heart.  As Cat puts it, "For your gold is ages old before the end of your story; give my hand to Jesus before it went away with you . . . "

     One day, Jonathan, my dear Jewish friend, and I were talking about Psalm 27.  We agreed that it was a powerful psalm, particularly its thirteenth verse.  This verse presents a simple truth.  Whatever else happens, it asserts, "We will see the goodness of God in the land of the living."

     Jonathan went on to say that what really gives this verse its force is not so much the final verse of psalm 27 ("hope in the Lord") but the entirely of the final psalm in the canon, Psalm 150.  "Praise the Lord," this psalm says over and over, "Praise the Lord."
     We of course cannot praise if we do not believe.  Yet we cannot believe unless we acknowledge, and praise, the fact of a loving God.
     And in this is our ultimate human challenge.

     "Endless glaciers under my feet make my heart throb.  I feel like I should discover every corner of the Himalayas."  So said South Korean climber Kim Chang-ho who, along with seven other climbers, perished in a fierce storm in the Himalayas a few days ago.  Kim belonged to the rarefied group of mountain climbers who not only had ascended the fourteen highest peaks on the planet, they had done so without the aid of artificial oxygen.  He was amazing.

    Sadly, however, Kim will never see any more of the Himalayas.  His earthly life has ended and he has gone to his eternal home.  And, as the twelve chapter of Ecclesiastes notes, "Mourners go about in the streets."  Only life and the mountains remain.

     Some of my atheist friends suggest that we don't really need to know why things are, only that they are.  Maybe.  Yet when I confront death and dying, particularly in someone pursuing something which I, though in much lesser form, once did, I cannot help but wonder:  what is the point?
     The answer is pretty clear:  the point is that there is a point.  And we wouldn't be able to deny this unless there was.  Nothing "just is."
     Rest well, Kim.

     Although I have written recently about the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in the West Indies, I write today about the series of earthquakes and tsunamis that have been battering the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia.  One wonders why such destruction visits people who are least prepared to deal with it.  Jared Diamond's thesis in his magisterial Guns, Germs, and Steel aside, I struggle constantly with wondering how one race of 

people, that is, whites of European descent, has managed to end up with the best land and most money, often to the detriment of everyone else on the planet.  Although I have my beliefs about God, history, and purpose, I'm not sure if I will ever fully put them together.  All I can do is weep over the pain, do what I can to ameliorate it, and pray.

     So do I invite you to do the same.  We will never unravel the fullness of divine purpose in this life.  We are finite beings.  But we can pray to the person from all meaning comes and without whom the world would have no point.
     Which would we prefer:  meaningless havoc in a meaningless universe or meaningless havoc in a meaningful universe?  Although the latter seems paradoxical and contradictory, it is not:  we cannot insist we can make any sense of anything unless we first agree that we live in a meaningful medium in which to do so.

     No doubt you've heard of Billy Graham.  Before he passed away last year at the age of 99, Billy Graham had, by most counts, preached the gospel to more than anyone on the planet, living or dead.  Most estimates ranged in the hundreds of millions.  For over forty years, he traveled the globe, sharing what he considered to be good news, the gospel of Jesus Christ, with whomever would listen.
     I believed strongly in Graham's mission, and I believed strongly in his work.  I applauded his efforts to tell people about the love of God in Jesus Christ.  After over close to three decades of supporting his organization, however, my wife and I, sadly, have stopped.  Why?  Primarily because of the words and actions of his son, Franklin Graham, who took charge of the organization when his father "retired" in his eighties.  

     Franklin's seemingly blind and unwavering support of American president Donald Trump, regardless of what the president says or does, all in the service, for the most part, of ensuring a conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, is, to me, an extraordinarily pragmatic approach to morality.  Although as his father did, Franklin preaches the gospel in very black and white terms (one either believes in Jesus or one does not), he seems to set this aside when he enters the realm of politics.
     Among other things, I find Franklin's assertions that all progressives are "godless" and America is a "moral cesspool," highly offensive and, moreover, extremely demeaning to all who hold political and moral viewpoints different from his.  Such remarks are entirely inconsistent with the gospel of God's love that he preaches.  I occasionally wonder whether Franklin and I read the same Bible.
     Thanks, Billy Graham, for your tireless efforts to tell the world about the meaningfulness of Jesus.
  

     Despite what the U.S. president claims about the nation's rescue efforts in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria, most observers will agree that, over a year after this frightening storm swept across the island, much, much more remains to be done.  It's heartbreaking, really, absolutely heartbreaking.

     A couple of months ago, I was sitting next to a young woman, a native of Puerto Rico, as we flew from Madison, Wisconsin, to Chicago.  She told that she had just completed a year of study in the States and was now on her way home.  She couldn't wait to see her family again.

     "Has your family been without electricity?" I asked.  "For three months," she said.  "It was hard."  This young woman's family is among the fortunate ones.  Too many other people still lack electricity, not to mention access to clean drinking water.  For a country that is part of one of the most powerful nations on earth, this is particularly tragic.  What happened?
     Continue to pray for the people of Puerto Rico.  Although I refrain, in this instance, from treading into questions of "why, God?" I nonetheless invite all of us to embrace the fractured mystery of living in a broken world and pray for those who have felt, with too intense a force, its horrific malfunctions.