We who live in the twentieth-first century, enamored as we are of the seeming infinitude of human achievement and possibility, largely bent on maximizing our existence, on living life to the absolute fullest, yet oftentimes rejecting any notion that a personal God could have any genuine connection to our lives, may forget that, at one point in history, one glorious moment, human possibility and divine order came very close to reconciling and coinciding, to wondrous effect.












     I speak of the Renaissance, the grand "rebirth" of civilization that surfaced at the close of the Middle Ages in the West.  The Renaissance was marked by a powerful belief in human possibility and destiny, that humanity was a special and anointed creation of God and therefore fully capable of doing anything it wanted.  Its future was limitless.  Simultaneously, however, the people of the Renaissance (for the most part) never stopped believing in God and his guiding light and presence in the world.  As Nicholas of Cusa put it, "The center of the universe, namely God, whose name is blessed . . . the infinite circumference of all things."  In so doing, the people of the Renaissance confirmed that if we properly manage and understand our boundaries and possibilities, we really can have it all.
     God has made humanity infinitely special, and so we are:  infinitely capable of astonishing and amazing things, yet infinitely bound to acknowledge from whom we have come.
     Would that we always strive for both.

     As Thanksgiving ends and most of us, at least in the West, proceed, ready or not, into the Christmas season (although many retailers, regrettably, opened for shopping on Thanksgiving Day), we do well to remember the essence of the moment before us.  It is not about shopping, it's not about supplying our loved ones with as many material goods as we can afford, it's not about draining out bank accounts to throw a lavish party, it's not about diverting every thought into an experience that in most households lasts barely an hour, if that, but rather it is to remember that, as Jesus put it in Mark 1:15, "The kingdom of God is at hand."
     Though we may cringe at the idea of a kingdom in the largely democratic West, we miss the point if we summarily dismiss Jesus' words.  He is not talking about a kingdom in the sense of knights and castles and physical hegemony but a kingdom of the heart, a kingdom that calls us to love, to care, to move ourselves toward inner transformation of mind, body, and soul, and be better citizens of the planet and the greater realities in which it sits.  Jesus' kingdom is not one of arrogance and might, not a kingdom of dogma and exclusivity, but a kingdom of welcome and grace, a kingdom of community, a kingdom of community rooted in a profound truth:  God became one of us.
     How can we ever be the same?

     Now that in the wake of a massive snowstorm that swept through the American Midwest recently, my home internet connection has been restored, I offer a post.
     Amidst the cacophony of Thanksgiving and the onset of the Christmas shopping season, I wonder whether any of you paused on November 22.  Why?  On November 22, 1963, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was killed, gunned down by an assassin in Dallas, Texas.  For those of us who lived through this day, we will never forget it.  Although a number of presidents had been assassinated previously, JFK's occurred in our lifetime, in our time, in our day.  We didn't read about it in history books; we experienced it, experienced it directly and personally, experienced it in a profoundly visceral way.  Our world would never be the same.
     Setting aside the seemingly endless debates about assassination conspiracies, the relative value of JFK's presidency, particularly his decision to involve America more deeply in Vietnam, or intimations that JFK might be the "AntiChrist," and looking at the bigger picture, we see one simple truth:  we live in a frighteningly capricious and unpredictable world.  Though we build our lives on concrete particulars, we construct our life meaning on universals, on hopes and dreams we cannot always see.  We are finite creatures living in a bottomless world.
     Only in transcendence will we see what is really true.

     "God opens his hands," writes the psalmist, "and satisfies the desire of every living thing" (Psalm 104).  Although we all have much for which to give thanks, perhaps the most important thing for which we can be thankful is that we can give thanks.  We can rejoice that we can be aware of who we are, that we can experience the gracious bounty of the universe, that we can know, really know, that we are beings who can create life, culture, and moral sensibility.  We can be grateful that we are here.

     Many a theologian has observed that all truth is God's truth.  If so, we can also give thanks for that which enables us to know everything else:  truth. Even more important, we can give thanks that truth is embodied in a living being and that, in the providence of God, we can find it.

      Give thanks that despite the fractured state of modern spirituality, God is nonetheless able to disclose to us truth, the truth of life, the truth of death, the truth of existence.
     Happy Thanksgiving!

     (P.S.:  See you next week.)

     Recently, I was asked to moderate a debate about the sovereignty of God.  Does God really control everything?  For if he does, he controls and, tellingly, allows evil.  But if he does not, what kind of a God might he really be?
     As I discussed the terms of the debate with the two protagonists, it became apparent that neither of them would be able to resolve the issue satisfactorily.  In the end, they both would need to turn to the same word:  trust.
     Proverbs 19:21 observes that, "Many plans are in a person's heart, but the counsel of the Lord stands."  I struggle with this.  I struggle with my inability to grasp the  sovereignty of God.  I struggle not because God's sovereignty is illogical, but because it is more logical than anything else on the planet.  Remove the sovereignty of God and purpose vanishes; retain the sovereignty of God and faith reigns.
     And faith, though it be the essential and logical underpinning of a finite existence, will always question the faith required to believe it.

     In our family, November is a big month for birthdays.  I had mine a couple of weeks ago, and we celebrated my wife's last Friday.  How funny it is, that despite the seemingly endless points over which people disagree, the vast disparities and differences in income, vocation, and station in the human family, and the marvelously diverse political, cultural, and religious loyalties that mark human beings, all of us, every single one of us, has a birthday.  At some point in history, at some unique singularity in space and time, we all were born.  We all have a date of birth.

     It's really rather extraordinary:  for untold millennia we were not here, and then, one day, in the proverbial flash of a moment, we were.  We began.  As did everything else.  Once upon a time, actually, once upon a time before time even began (another rather perplexing notion which, although it is the only way to make sense of the fact of beginning, is equally difficult to grasp), "being" began.
     And how we all treasure it.  How we all love and value our lives.  And how much most of us try to hang on to them for as long as we can.  For this reason, even if we are indifferent to them, we appreciate our birthdays. They mean that we are still here.  They remind us that we still "are."

     Yet as we all know, what begins eventually ends.  And what will we do then?  I ask because if there was once a time beyond time out of which time came, there will be a time beyond time into which time will one day end.  We do not live in a vacuum, and neither does existence.
     It's difficult to picture life without death, yes, but it's even more difficult to picture life without a life from which it comes.

     Do you like haystacks?  I say this somewhat tongue in cheek to make a larger point:  today is the birthday of French painter Claude Monet.  One of the most famous of the nineteenth century impressionists who transformed the nature of art, Monet achieved perhaps his greatest fame for his series of haystack paintings.  He depicted haystacks in the spring, summer, autumn, and winter, using subtle shifts of color to portray the fact of permanence in the face of change.


     Consider one of Monet's most well known theses:  "I wish to render what is."  In Monet's work we see an effort to take what "is" and make it as we feel it might otherwise be.  Not what we think it should be, but what we feel it should be.  We turn rationality on its head; we elevate emotion over all.
     In so doing, we capture the heart of who, and the world, most are.  Like our creator, we are deeply personal beings, beings whom although we like to think we are rational (which we indubitably are), we are, in our deepest essence, creatures of passion.  Beings of viscerality and pathos.  So do we embrace the world, so do we embrace the transcendence out of which it comes.
     We thank Monet for his insight, that amidst our dogged attempts to understand life rationally, perhaps we do better to grasp it as it most fully is:  the work and expression of a profoundly passionate creator. 

    

     As the Western world continues to remember the one hundredth anniversary of the armistice that ended the first World War, we hear much talk about nationalism.  Some argue that it was nationalism that provoked the War, while others argue that nationalism is a natural and necessary element of how a nation sees and comports itself on the global stage.
     Be it nationalism, patriotism, jingoism, or something else, it seems that when we elevate the welfare of our country above the welfare of all other countries, we are implicitly claiming that we are inherently better than anyone else in the world.
     And if I read the New Testament correctly, that decidedly does not align with the love of God for all people.
     Have a good day.

      Yesterday, November 11, you may know, was Veterans Day in the U.S.  As most history students know, November 11, 1918, marks the day that the armistice of World War I took effect (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month).
     I am not a warmonger.  All things considered, I would rather the nations of the world never fight again.  I do not live to engage in war and combat, and I do not favor using war to resolve international differences.  Broadly speaking, I do not believe that God does, either.

     Yet wars happen, and many people feel called to or are conscripted to fight in them. Unfortunately, while some survive, far too many do not.  And this doesn't count the untold numbers of civilians who perish, too.  War's tragedy is immense.  So when I think about Veterans Day, I think most about the horror of war.  I also think about the sense of duty many people feel to their country. In addition, I think about the sin of the world, the fact of human compassion, and the beauty of peace.  And I think about God's willingness, in Jesus Christ, to die for us--and the world--so as to set all things right.  And I try to put all of these together.
     It's not easy.  It's not easy to know what, amid the thicket of competing loyalties, God thinks.  It's not easy to know what eternity, the lens by which all things will be assessed, envisioned, and judged, means.  But it's easy to know that God is present, in peace as well as war, his love for us ever unchanged.
     And maybe, in all of our human stumblings and beautiful yet flawed rationality, that's what we most need to know.

     Today is a big day.  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 little more than a random occasion, a capricious occurrence, something in which we have found ourselves, raw and unknown, and told we must live it.  As the late evolutionary biologist William Provine acknowledged, if life is random, we are no more than plops, born only to die.  There is no meaning.
     Enjoy life, enjoy its lights.  Be happy for your gift.  Along the way, as Ecclesiastes 12 exhorts us, "Remember your creator," the one from whom, as the old hymn goes, "All things come."
     Including you.

     I've written before about rock climber Alex Honnold.  As you may remember, Honnold specializes in climbing the most massive rock faces in the world, without using any ropes.  He enjoys risks, he says, and he loves climbing.  And he's still alive.

     A few weeks ago, I took in a movie made about Honnold.  It's called "Free Solo," so named because it is built around Honnold's recent free solo scaling of Yosemite's El Capitan, a three thousand foot high glacially sculpted slab of granite.  He is the first person to climb El Capitan solo and without ropes.

     El Capitan is probably the most famous rock face on the planet.  Thousands of climbers come from every corner of the globe to scale it.  And they all use ropes to do it.  Most live to tell the story, a few die.  Most require several days to climb it.  Honnold free soloed the face in slightly under four hours.  His climbing powers are unfathomable.  And he seems to have conquered any sense of fear while he climbs.
     
     Although Honnold has made clear elsewhere that he does not believe in God, and that he therefore, by logical extension, does not believe in life after death, that's not the point.  The point is that if life is that precious, our individual wishes and whims seem inadequate in the face of the greater good.  If there is no God, and if there is no afterlife, we really are in this adventure together.  We can't leave anyone out.  Even those in whom we may not believe.
     Climb on, Alex.  But be careful.

     We all have a birthday, and yesterday was mine.  When I think about my earliest years, years when I wondered why I was here, why I was doing what I was doing, why I was being told to believe the things I was told to believe, I often wonder: how did I get to where I am today?  I have no idea. Yes, I planned, and yes, I tried to execute intentions, and yes, I went here and there, and yes, things happened, but in the end I have no clear idea of how I landed on today.  Who does?  We're all living in a universe over which we ultimately have very little control.
     All we know is that life is a promise and expectation, an inkling and anticipation, a river and ocean coming constantly together in a creation we cannot make, a creation that, whether we know it or not, is made meaningful, yes, by us, but ultimately only by God.  We are poems with lingering and permanent point, poems with a destiny, poems with a conclusion.  We are poems of eternity. 
     Otherwise, it's futility.

     We err when we suppose that, "Science is not just omnicomptetent but unchallenged, the sole form of rational thinking."  Mary Midgley, a British moral philosopher who died a couple of weeks ago, appreciated science.  As should we all.  But Midgley understood science's limitations very well.  She knew that when a society elevates science, a discipline that does not seek to know what is moral or what the world means, but simply how the world works, to a position of unquestioned rational and moral authority, it loses its sense of what is possible.  It loses its sense of what is possible for beings like us who are moral and believing animals to learn in a vast and and often bewildering world.  It misses the larger point, the point that unless the world is regarded as something more than "what is," we have no basis to know what it means.
     There is rationality, and there is morality.  And neither can be understood without the other.