Thirty eight years ago yesterday, musician John Lennon was gunned down outside the Dakota apartments in New York City.  Such a shock, such a tragedy.  As I think, again, about Lennon's life, I think about his song "God."  In it, he says, "I just believe in me; Yoko and me.  That's reality."

          Though I get that Lennon, along with countless others, wished to reduce what is real to what is immediately before him, and that on the face of it, this looks as the most viable way to look at the objects of our perception, I also wonder, given the possibility of the metaphysical and transcendent as well as the difficulty of reducing ourselves to a brain and attendant vat of chemicals, whether he is overlooking that reality is more than what he wants to perceive.  Otherwise, we are merely projections of ourselves—and who and where are we?!

       Granted, transcendence and religion do not lend themselves well to our perceptions.  And that’s the problem.  Ironically, it’s also the solution.  If we could explain everything with chemicals, if we never developed questions like Cohen and Young pose, if we subsumed all experience into a plastic (or computerized) box, then, yes, we would need nothing else.  But we can’t.  So we wonder.
     So does God.  And he's waiting for us, today, tomorrow, and beyond, to respond.