Last week, many of us celebrated Christmas.  For the last few days, however, many of us have been remembering Kwanza.  Although Kwanza is a relatively new holiday, its impetus, in light of the Advent season, speaks to us all:   a celebration of human diversity.  Yes, Jesus was born a Jew in a forgotten town in Palestine, but he made it clear that he had come for everyone on the planet.  Jesus reminded everyone who would listen that God loves every human being, that God loves every variety of human beingness and expression, every bit of it.  He leaves no one out.

      
     So it is with harvest.  The world is for everyone.  Kwanza lauds the beauty and meaningfulness of this world, its harvest, its bounty, its joy of a year rightly lived.  The happiness of living in a world whose wonder speaks constantly to us, the beauty of the rhythms of the plane:  a call to treasure the immensity of existence.
     Happy New Year!

     Christmas has come, and now it is gone.  People are taking their ornaments down, stores are offering their after Christmas sales, travelers are going home.  It's over for another year.

     Or is it?  If Christmas means anything, anything at all, it cannot possibly be contained in one day.  If, as the gospel accounts tell us, God has really come, if God has really visited his creation, how can anything--and any of us--ever be the same?  History, and everything in it, including you and me, has irrecoverably changed.
     One can choose to believe this, one can chose to not.  The choice is everyone's to make.  Either way, our corporate interest in and fascination with Christmas underscores the state of all of our hearts:  we long for the joy of the transcendent moment.

     As the Christmas lights fade, we realize that, belief aside, it is in our humanness that we see Christmas most fully.  We look for meaning, we look for the joyous point.  We look for existential authentication.  And, we ought to ask ourselves, why?  Who are we?
     Long after it's gone, Christmas will continue to remind us that we insist that we must live in a universe of meaning.  We could not live otherwise.  Christmas reminds us that this meaning's fullness can only be real if it appeals to the fact of eternity, the visible word of the ages, the spoken beginning of space and time.  It is only then that it can be.
     God has come.

     Most of us have heard the "Christmas story" countless times.  Across the world for thousands of years, people have read and pondered, over and over, Luke's account of Jesus' birth.  One might almost think that there is nothing new to find in it.
     But there always is.  As I was reading it this year, I found myself struck, and not for the first time, by the thought that the first people to hear about Messiah's birth were shepherds.  In the twenty-first century, most of us do not think much about shepherds.  In Jesus' day, however, shepherds were an integral part of the economy of the ancient world.
     Yet shepherds were despised, viewed as the lowest of the low. Few wished to associate with them.  They spent their days--and nights--largely apart from the rest of the people, living lonely lives in the fields and hillsides of the nations. 




  
     But the shepherds were the first to know.  They were the first to be told.  Before anyone else knew, the shepherds knew about the birth of Messiah.

     God remembered those whom the world had forgotten.

     Christmas calls for humility.  It calls us to look not at how we can spend our money on ourselves, our friends, or family, but rather what we can do for others, what we can do for the "shepherds" among us.  Christmas teaches us to reach out to those on the margins.
     And in the person of Jesus, we can.  In the humility of the baby born in a manger, in the announcement made to the forgotten shepherds, we can give.  We can see Christmas as an occasion for humbly recognizing what we can do, not for ourselves, but for the world.
     Merry Christmas!

     Yesterday marked the beginning of Hanukkah.  Although it is a minor holiday on the Jewish liturgical calendar, because Hanukkah usually occurs around Christmas, it has tended to generate a significant amount of attention in the Western world.  For some, it is considered the Jewish "equivalent" of Christmas.


     While this conclusion is far from the historical and theological truth, it does communicate an important point.  Although Hanukkah commemorates the rededication of the Temple after it had been profaned by the Seleucid emperor Antiochus Epiphanes (he sacrificed a pig on the inner altar) in the second century B.C.E. and not the birth of Jesus, it is nonetheless a time to rejoice, to rejoice in lights.  To rejoice in the light and faithfulness of God, to delight in God's continuing bestowal of life and illumination to human beings.  In this, Hanukkah speaks to all of us, all of us who, whether we know it or not, each day walk in the grace of a infinitely remarkable light, a light without which we would not be.
     Enjoy the light of life.

      "For the people who walk in darkness," wrote the prophet Isaiah, "will see a great light (Isaiah 9:1)."  Isaiah speaks of Messiah, the one who would come to illuminate and liberate an Israel darkened by disappointment, abandonment, and sin.
     Not all of us are Jewish, and not all of us long for a Messiah.  But we all long for light.  We all long for greater understanding, for greater insight into the mysteries of this existence.  It's almost instinctive.
     In this third week of Advent, we remember this fact of light.  We remember how, like the sun exploding over a frigid mountain ridge, Messiah--Jesus--has brought us light, the light of enlightenment, the light of hope and meaning that shines through the cold of an often puzzling, even Munchian existence.  It is a light that, if we embrace its rising, embrace it as fervently and without reservation, will change our lives forever.
     Though we may struggle with the idea of eternality, though we may question the presence of God, we do not struggle with realizing that we all long for hope, purpose, and meaning.  We all know.  We all know that we are always looking for a window into a richer existence.
     In an accidental universe, however, richness is impossible, for value and morality cannot be.  Only in the light of transcendence, only in the light of what has made us, can hope therefore be.
     The light of the world.

     Defining spirituality is difficult.  If we attribute it to a god, we miss that many unbelievers attest to having spiritual experiences.  If we assign it to a nebulous immaterial presence, we encounter the problem of making something amorphous into something that is physically real.  And if we say that spirituality is thoroughly human, we run into the perennial dilemma of understanding how consciousness can emerge from inert matter.

     Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian surrealist painter and whose birthday we remembered earlier this week, thought much about spirituality, spirituality in regard to art.  He did so as a way of explaining how art overwhelms what he considered to be the spiritual darkness of Marxism.  Whether or not one believes in God, Kandinsky observed, we all benefit from the spiritual benefits of art.  In art, we feel hints of transcendence, intimations of things we cannot easily fathom, emotional insights that we do not experience otherwise.  We look into another world, a world of purer light, real or imagined, a world that eclipses the rigid (and often meaningless) materialism of the Marxist worldview.
     Kandinsky's art reflects his words aptly.  It is highly abstract and difficult to grasp easily, but that's the point:  spirituality isn't supposed to be simple.  If it were, it would be no more than another product of our material human whims.

     What can we say about Ludwig van Beethoven?  This famous portrait of him captures how many of us see him:  a brooding, anguished, yet brilliant composer. When we think about Amadeus Wolfgang Mozart, we think of the Enlightenment and how it liberated the human mind and imagination from the constraints of a Church struggling with its response to impending modernity.  We see Mozart's music as poetry, lilting and dancing its way across our lives.
     Not so with Beethoven.  His music overwhelms us with its passion.  It comes to us as a force of nature, barreling and twisting its way into our hearts, breaking our souls apart, forcing us to grapple with and contemplate the deeper forces that drive human existence.  We swoon over the viscerality of Beethoven's melodies, we wonder about the power of the universe which his songs describe.  A Romantic in the purest sense, Beethoven reminds us of other worlds and things, of the presence and possibilities of transcendence.
     Beethoven shows us as we are, beings of mind as much as creatures of heart, living, personal, dynamic entities made to step bravely and meaningfully into the weighty contingencies of life, to take hold of everything that is before us.  Given the many stories and legends that surround his life, we may never know exactly what Beethoven thought about God.  Regardless, he makes us think of him.  Beethoven makes us think about our deeper meaning, our deeper experience.  He drives us to wonder about the mystery of life and the mind of its creator.

     I thank God for using Beethoven to open and unfold for us glimpses of what we, life, and God, can be.

     Many years ago, The Rolling Stones sang about painting the world black.  Everything, this song went, should be black:  it's all emptiness, it's all futile.  The world has collapsed, and nothing matters anymore.

     For some of us, this may well be true:  the future may look very bleak.  For others, however, darkness is an invitation to light, a harbinger of dawn.  The French painter Pierre Soulages, whose work is currently being celebrated at the Louvre in Paris, understands this well.  Noted for his long standing commitment (Soulages has been painting for over seventy years) to centering his painting on the color black, he states that the blackness of his paintings is not designed to repel, but rather to draw in, to encourage viewers to find themselves in it.  "It [this drawing in black] happens, between the surface of the painting and the person who is in front of it;" he says, "the reflection of light is what moves us."

     If black is the end of color, it is also the beginning:  color could not be without it.  As are our lives.  Had we not come out of the darkness of the womb, we would not be in this world of color, and had we not seen the darkness of existence, we would miss its light.  Apart from the dark emptiness of space, this world of color could not be.
     So did over a century ago Rudolph Otto observe that, when confronted with the fright of the unknown, transcendent, and divine, though we human beings cower, we are also in awe.  We know, know instinctively, that in the darkest and most mysterious darkness we will see the clearest and brightest light.
     In a therefore inherently meaningful universe, that is the only point.

     In talking about the history of perhaps the most famous of Scandinavian peoples, the Vikings, the other day, I mentioned that aside from their well deserved reputation for ferocity, the Vikings were explorers of global renown.  They sailed farther west than anyone before them, traveling as far as Greenland and, eventually, the shores of Newfoundland, establishing settlements which we can still see, albeit in considerably different form, today.  Well before Columbus "sailed the blue," the Vikings had gone to the New World and back.

     Some centuries after the Vikings' heyday, Genghis Khan and his Mongol armies, whose reputation for cruelty perhaps exceeded that of the Vikings, conquered most of the known world, establishing a kingdom that would last for several centuries.  Yet in so doing, the Mongols brought stability to the Silk Road, that ancient connection between East and West, enabling commerce and exchange between these very different expressions of human culture.  Much happened.  As the Vikings pioneered international exploration, so the Mongols opened the door to the European Renaissance.  Ironically, it took those considered lowest on the prevailing cultural totem pole to enlighten those "higher" to the real truth of the world.
     It's a funny sort of wisdom, really, not the wisdom most people would consider genuinely true.  Yet it changed the course of history, changed it, in large part, for the good.
     It almost makes one think the universe really does have a point.  And a God.
     

     "Ice," says artist Zaria Forman, "crackles and pops."  It's a visual image of "familiarity" amidst the remote.  "It's a really beautiful sound."  Forman's paintings, always done in pastels, mostly blues and whites, portray snow, glaciers, and ice.  They reimage some of the harshest and most isolated places on the planet, mixing frigid blue oceans with white calving icebergs in striking portraits of wonder, vulnerability, and terror.
     Wonder?  This is easy:  the sheer magnitude of our planet's sheets of ice rightly inspire awe.  But terror?  Absolutely:  the terror of loss, of distance, of vanished time.  The annals of polar explorers, North or South, speak eloquently and about the unspeakable isolation these lands engender, the way they swallow all sense of space and passage.

     Vulnerability, well, this seems obvious:  little can we do to make any sense of these massively powerful stories of snow and ice.  So does Forman's art remind us of our very human vulnerability before the places and patterns of the planet.  We are in awe of our world, yet helpless to explain it fully.
     When we overlook our vulnerability, when we forget our human humility, when we stop being honest about who we are, we step into another terror, the terror of confidence, the frightening confidence that we, and we alone, are the arbiters of the ways of the planet.
     How we delude ourselves in imagining that we know more than that from which we came.

     Have you seen The Matrix?  You may well have:  it's a perennially popular movie.  That's why I've used its famous scene with the blue and red pill hundreds of times in my teaching:  I know almost everyone will be familiar with it.  I thought about this scene when I recently came across an interview with FaZe a group of people who, unless you're a teenager, you may not know much about.  No matter:  FaZe is an internet sensation.  Why?  Though I could offer a number of sociological theories in response, I'll instead mention a remark one of its members made in the interview.
     "Eventually we will all live in the internet, and I want to exist in that world.  That's where I see us."
     As those who have seen The Matrix know, in the blue and red pill sequence, Morpheus offers Neo a choice.  Pick the blue and you'll live a life of peace and tranquility:  nothing in your world will change.  Pick the red, and you will enter into a life of great hardship, risk, and challenge.  And discovery.

     Like most of us, I appreciate the internet greatly.  I could not do this blog without it.  However, it's not the world; it's not reality.  It's merely a skein we lay on both.  If we wish to live in a skein, sliding and easing our way through existence, we can.  If we really wish to find existence, however, we need to dig into it.  We need to rejoice in its illuminations even while we may cower at its challenge.
     On the other hand, to quote some famous words of Jesus, we will know the truth, and the truth will make us free.
     Which pill will you choose?

     "Not all who wander," observed Lord of the Rings author J. R. R. Tolkien, "are lost."  Isn't this like the human being?  When we wander, we let go.  We let go of our plans and intentions, set aside our immediate ambitions.  We step away from the past, cast aside the future.  We don't plan, we don't frame.  We don't set a time.

     But are we lost?  Over twenty years ago, I read an interview with a person I'll call James, a prisoner on death row in the state of Texas.  Earlier in his life, many years before, in fact, James murdered another human being.  In a week, he was to be executed for his crime.  All his life, James had, by his own account, wandered.  He never thought about what his life meant, never thought about where it began or where it was going.  He only did what was immediately before him.


     By his own account, James was lost.

     At some point in his imprisonment, however, James embraced Christianity.  He gave his heart to Jesus.  Everything changed.  Though he continued to wander, to wander through the permutations of the appeals processes of death row, to wander through the many doors he found in his new life with Jesus, he no longer felt lost.  He knew, ultimately, where he was going.  As he put it in the interview, "All my life, I never had a home.  Now I'm going to have one."

     Sometimes we wander, sometimes we make plans.  Still other times, we have no clue about either one.  Perhaps it is when we are the most lost that we are the most found.

     Perhaps you've heard the phrase, "There is nothing new under the sun."  Believe it or not, this line comes from the book of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible.  It was written by a person who, like many a philosopher and thinker, had had a good deal of leisure time to reflect on the meaning of existence.
     And that was his conclusion:  although every successive generation of human beings develops new art, literature, and technology, all of these are, at best, reiterations of those that have proceeded them.  This is not to discount the creative force between each iteration, for it is singularly magnificent.  Yet it is to underscore the futility, the hidden futility of these endeavors, that in the biggest possible picture they are merely clones, parallels, and duplicates of something else.  And what's the point?
     So, the writer observes, it is this:  we will only find genuine newness when we look for more than that of which we think newness consists.

     The recently deceased artist Gillian Jagger (no relation to MIck) once said, "I felt that nature held the truth I wanted."  Jagger understand the human being very well.  Rarely do we find the truth in ourselves:  we need another perspective, one outside of ourselves, to discern what might be ultimately true.  For Jagger, it was nature; for others, it is science; for some, it is spirituality and religion; for still others, it is God.

     "What's truth?" Pontius Pilate asked Jesus.  Jesus didn't answer.  When we look at Jagger's art, we might see why.  As one critic said of her work, "Sometimes it felt like it was shattering.  It's not work that lies and sleeps.  It's work that kind of shakes one."
     If truth doesn't shatter us, it's not worth knowing.

      I was camped in the Canadian Rockies, my tent perched on the edge of the Athabasca River, "Old Man" Mountain to my north, Mt. Edith Cavell to my south.  I had been there for several weeks, hanging out with a number of other itinerant youths in search of the lost meaning of the now vanished Sixties.

     One of the group was a guitarist.  As we sat around the campfire one night, he played Bob Dylan's "Heaven's Door."  It fit:  though we were not expecting to see our earthly end any time soon, we were all looking for what this earthly existence meant, what being alive was all about, what we should think when, decades later, we took our last breath.
     We didn't want to still be knocking on heaven's door.  If there was to be darkness, we wouldn't want to see.

     Don't we all?  You may believe in heaven, you may reject the afterlife altogether.  You may be looking, you may think you have found your life meaning.  We all want hope, we all want meaning.  We all want to find what it means to live, to grasp the essence of beingness.

     And that's the point.  Absent our hope, we would not be human.  And absent a hope of more than what we now see, we would not be--really "be"--at all.

     As you may know, today, November 11, is Veterans Day in the U.S.  As most students of World War I are aware, 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).
     
     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, as well.  War's tragedy is immense.  Veterans Day is therefore a mixed bag, a remembrance of a heart aching nexus of duty, honor, suffering, and pain.  When I think about Veterans Day, I therefore think about such things; I think about heartfelt conviction, I think about the subtle character of sin.  I think about the beauty of peace and and the joy of human compassion.  And I wonder how God, in Jesus Christ, one day intends to set all these ambiguities right.  And I try to put all of these together.

     It's not easy.  It's not easy to know what, amid the forest, God thinks.  It's not easy to know what eternity, the lens by which all things will be assessed, envisioned, and judged, means.  We live in a riddle.  Yet 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.

     A book that is currently making the rounds of the mainline book reviews is a new biography of the social critic Susan Sontag.  Although Sontag died of cancer some years ago, she remains a presence in many discussions about culture and society.  In her essays and novels, she offered some profound insights into the nature of how we think about things like art, photography, and disease.
     A number of years after her death, her son, David Rieff, published a book about her final months and days.  Titled Swimming in a Sea of Death, it was a moving portrait of a person who loved life dearly and was therefore deeply anguished that she had to let go of it so soon.  She died at the age of seventy-one.

     At one point in this new biography, the author quotes an exchange between Sontag and a nurse after the latter informed her that her remaining time was waning rapidly.  "You might want to take this time," the nurse suggested, "to concentrate on your spiritual values."
     "I have no spiritual values," Sontag replied.
     It's a striking statement.  Whether we believe in God and, sometimes by extension, an afterlife, or not, we all tangle constantly with the notion that we think and dream in terms other than raw materiality.
     Particularly if we deny that we do so.  

     Although he died in an asylum at the end of the nineteenth century, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche continues to speak to us today.  I recently came across a rarely published addendum to his work, Will to Power, and share it here.  
     
     So does Nietzsche write, "All these bold birds who fly out into the wide, widest open--it is true!  At some point the will not be able to fly any farther and . . . But who would want to conclude from this that there was no longer a vast and prodigious trajectory ahead of them.  All our great mentors and precursors have finally come to a stop  . . . and it will also happen to you and me!  Of what concern, however, is that to you and me!  Other birds will fly farther!"

     Although divining the precise intentions of Nietzsche's mind is difficult, it seems that what he is saying here is that even though we one day will "fly" no longer, others will.  The human adventure will continue.  It's a reassuring thought.  By the time he penned these words, Nietzsche, though he was the son of a Lutheran pastor, had come to reject everything about Christianity and its promise of eternal life.  It was a religion for weaklings, he averred.  Better to live bravely and die!
     Maybe so.  Our humanity is indeed wondrous and grand and, to this point, seemingly capable of sustaining progeny, seemingly capable of birthing even more "birds" to extend its experience of existence beyond the present.
     And then what?  Absent an eternal, when humanity is over, it will be as if it had never existed at all.

     It's an ancient story.  After he fled from his brother Esau, the one from whom he had stolen his father's birthright blessing, Jacob, as the Genesis account tells us, spent the night at the Jabbok River.  There he wrestled with a man until daybreak.  As morning dawned, the man, who was in fact an angel, perhaps even God himself, left Jacob.  Before he did, however, he gave him a new name:  Israel.  That is, "the one who struggles with God."

Eugene Delacroix, "Jacob wrestling with the Angel"

     It's an apt portrait of the human experience.  Though not all of us may struggle with God directly, we all struggle with understanding ourselves and our lives.  We all wrestle with life's meaning and the puzzles of existence.  We all feel as if we do not always know why the world goes the way it does, why things happen as they do.  After all, we are only human.
     
     But that's the angel's point:  to be human is to struggle.  It is to struggle with capacity, it is to struggle with choice.  It is to struggle with the emptiness of contingency and the darkness of finitude.  And to realize that, over and above it all, contingency's emptiness and finitude's frustrations only exist because infinitude surrounds and defines them.
     
     Otherwise, there would be no point to anything.

     Yesterday, we thought about Halloween, the night of the hidden, the dead and gone.  In contrast, today we think about All Souls Day.  In Halloween or, to use the Celtic term, Samhain, we remember what we never knew, the dark, the mysterious, the frightening and awe-ful.  All Souls Day takes us into the other side, the bright, the future, the promise, the life beyond life before which we may be amazed, but rarely cower:  it is part of who we are.
  
     Earthly memory tells us who we were.  Eternal memory tells us where we will one day be.  Remember those who have preceded you in passing; think about the many memories you and they share, the sundry times and encounters you have had.  Then consider the full weight, the total import of what they mean, mean to you, mean to the world:  the darkness of Samhain cannot be without the light of what it follows it.  Apart from light, darkness cannot be.

"Yet each mystery explained, as the science-loving Pope Francis would say, builds the case for God.  It's a case I came to understand, to feel it and see it, only after I'd allowed myself to be amazed."

     So said columnist and writer Timothy Egan in his newest book,  A Pilgrimage to Eternity:  From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith.  Have you ever been amazed?  To be amazed is to experience that which you did not expect, to bump into something you did not think you would see.  It is to be pushed outside the boundaries of what you thought possible:  to be thrust into a new way of thinking about the possibilities of existence.
     Although we strive mightily in this modern age to forswear any possibility of miracles or the supernatural, we nevertheless live as if we do:  we love being amazed.  We love being startled, enlightened, or overwhelmed with a new insight or experience.  And I wonder what this says about us.  Are we, as Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant might say, creatures of the noumenal daily grappling with the phenomenal, beings of materiality wrestling with presences immaterial?  Or we, as twentieth century philosopher A. J. Ayers averred, people who should ipso facto reject anything that we cannot with language understand?
     To be amazed, it seems, is necessarily to assent to the possibility, perhaps the reality, of a mystifying but comprehensible unseen.  It is to agree that life is more than what it, materially speaking, appears to be.
     And to embrace the wonder of what this holds.

     Recently, I read an article by a person who had just undergone a gender transition, stepping into the fullness of the woman they had always thought they (to use this person preferred pronoun) were.  They were very happy with their decision.  No regrets.

     Except for the reaction of their father.  Their father could not adjust to the prospect of no longer having a male heir.  He could not imagine life without a son.  Though he loved them, he nonetheless experienced a profound grief.


          Unless we have been in this person or their father's shoes, we cannot easily begin to relate.  Be it theology, politics, or culture, all of these tend to falter and crumble when faced with the vicissitudes of human longing.  It often has no earthly categories.
     Maybe that's the point.  Although I cannot fully divine the mind of God, I can say that, regardless of what a person does with his or her life, God continues to love him/her.  He does not easily let go of those who are made in his image, those who are, in a very distant yet very real way, like him.
     That's the wonder, yes, but it is also the challenge, the challenge of being a finite person in an infinitely designed world.
     Our humanness is often beyond our knowing, yet it is, in a world in which natural and supernatural intersect constantly, the lens through which God, in a signal point in time, has made himself definitively known. 

     One of the most famous portraits of Hungarian pianists and composer Franz Liszt pictures him rhapsodically playing the piano to a group of adoring women and male admirers, a bust of Ludwig Van Beethoven sitting before him.  It is an apt window into who Liszt was.  Consummately Romantic, possessed with extraordinary musical acumen, a person who perhaps more than any other captured the Zeitgeist of his time, Liszt, whose birthday we remembered yesterday should, whatever else we think of him, inspire us to gasp at the power of the human imagination.

     An imagination, I add, powered in turn by humanity's creation in the image of God.  We may frown upon Liszt's personal transgressions, we may wonder what he really wanted, but we cannot dismiss the immensely present vision of God that his work represents to us.  While Liszt may not have always been aware of his connection with God, there is no doubt that in his remarkable ability to create melody and song, he tells us about him.
     Yes, we may not see God visibly, and yes, we may at times have no empirical evidence of him, but in the weight of the world's power and mystery we cannot dismiss the possibility of his factuality.
     Play on, Franz Liszt.

     Last week, I talked about the year 1492.  The year I cite today, 1619, is equally pivotal--and flowed out of 1492.  1619 is the year that the first African slaves arrived in the "New" World.  It was the year that marked the beginning of the lengthy and singularly horrendous white American practice of enslaving their fellow human beings, beings who, like they, were made in the image of God, for, and only for, economic gain.  Some historians have noted that the Americans who enslaved Africans did so because they were "lazy."  They didn't want to toil in the cotton fields, they didn't want to labor in the humidity and heat.  They didn't want to work.


     Oddly enough, however, they at the same time passed laws mandating jail terms for people who failed to attend church twice on Sunday!  One wonders at the theological disconnect:  what were they thinking?  How can one insist that a person must attend church twice on Sunday while at the same time forcing millions of people into lives of slavery?

     Such hypocrisy makes one quiver; it makes one weep.  Imagine,however, what it does to the heart of God.

     Buried in Celtic mythology is the story of a young man named Cuhulain.  Why Cuhulain?    He is a youth of great insight, courage, and vigor.  He leads, he conquers, he inspires.  He overcomes obstacles, he wins battles.  What's not to like?
     
     As I was discussing Cuhulain's story with a group of students last week, a number of them pointed to the numerous parallels between his acts and those of countless other heroes through the ages.  Quite true.  And that's the point.  Despite our many cultural differences, we human beings generally cluster around the same motifs of existence.  To use Friedrich Nietzsche's memorable words, "Ecce Homo":  behold the human!


     Sure, we can amass much evidence for the evolutionary development of the human race, and sure, we can proffer copious accounts of how humans have engendered, through various forms of emergent complexity and properties, personality, eccentricities, and the like.  Moreover, yes, we can affirm that we are as much creatures of divine activity as we are creatures of materiality, history, and being.
     
What we still experience difficulty understanding is something author Julia Kristeva pointed out many years ago:  humans have an insatiable desire to believe.  We may know who we are, but we still cannot decide why we are.

     Perhaps you've read Julia Lovell's new book on Maoism.  It's quite an impressive study.  Its central point, however, is clear:  decades after his death, Mao continues to influence people around the world.
     And we might want to ask why.  Why is a man who deliberately caused the death of tens of millions through warfare, famine, and "cultural" revolution still revered by thousands of other people?
     Yesterday, I talked about freedom and responsibility.  Mao preached freedom.  He engendered hope, hope that oppression could be quashed, that the burdens of tyranny could be arrogated for all time. It is a hope to which those of us who live in the "free" West cannot necessarily relate:  in many ways, it's not in our categories.  It's not part of our worldview.
     Not that I excuse Mao's excesses.  Not at all.  My point is that we who do not know a condition intimately ought not to condemn, immediately, those who do.  We ought not reject those who pursue something with which we are so familiar we cannot begin to grasp life without it.
     After all, did not the Sanhedrin, the council of first century Jewish leaders who, largely, opposed Jesus and his teachings, condemn him because they were unwilling to picture life without the traditions with which they were so familiar?
     Almost always, there's a delicate balance in how we interpret the activity of God.

     While traveling in the West recently, I came upon, in a thrift shop, a book about Glenn Exum.  Who was he?  Exum was one of the early climbers in Wyoming's Grand Teton mountain range and made a number of first route ascents on its peaks.  He also founded, with Paul Petzoldt (who in turn founded a company that manufactures headlamps and rock climbing equipment), the leading climbing school in the Tetons.

     The book's introduction was written by Yvon Chouinard who, some readers may know, founded the iconic and hugely successful outdoor clothing company Patagonia.  In the introduction, Chouinard identifies Exum with a quote of famous French adventurer Antoine de Saint-Exupery.  Saint Exupery's observation is that, "With freedom comes an acceptance of responsibility."

     Not that any number of other people haven't made similar observations, but reading it in a book about Exum made me think about the idea of freedom in today's world.  We love being free, don't we?  We love being able to make decisions and choices, we love the opportunity to plan our future unhindered by any outside force.  Unfortunately, as we all know, too many people in this vast planet do not experience this degree of freedom.  Day after day, and year after year, they labor under oppressive economic and political systems, toiling their entire lives in the darkness of bondage.  It's tragic--and not what God wants for his human creation.

     For those of us who enjoy being "free" (and this is a loaded and ambiguous term), however, we have the greater responsibility.  We are called to use our freedom with wisdom and care, to use it not to seek our own aggrandizement, but to pursue the greater good of all.  Ours is the far more weighty calling, the far heavier onus.

     But what better way to live our lives?

     
     1492.  It's one of the most pivotal years in human history.  Humans of two hemispheres, neither of whom had been aware of the other, suddenly were, almost overnight, finding themselves confronting worlds that literally blew their collective minds.  No one would ever be the same.


     Sadly, however, although 1492 may have been a momentuous and lucrative year for many Europeans, it was a terrible one for the natives of the Americas.  Hence, even though earlier this week, we remembered Columbus Day, it is perhaps more appropriate to term it, as many are doing, "Indigenous Peoples Day."  After all, it is the natives of the Americas who, far more than the Europeans who slaughtered them, deserve to be remembered.  It is they who have suffered most.

     The worst of it is that in too many instances this slaughter was justified in the name of Christianity.  It was an awful stain on the love of God.

     Historian Erna Paris once observed that, "Attaching God to history is the most powerful nationalism of all."  Whenever we try to juxtapose God and the history we are trying to create, we blur a line we cannot possibly cross:  the boundary between what is here and what is not, the difference between the visible speculations of finitude and the hidden certitudes of infinity.  We falsely think we can speak for God.

     But God, whether he is talking about politics, economics, religion, or inculturation, does not need us to speak for him.  He doesn't need us to give the planet purpose or meaning.  We rather need to talk less and listen more.  It's difficult to hear someone talk when we're busy spouting off.

     Use this just passed Indigenous Peoples Day to remind yourself of your so very limited view of what is real and true.

     Recently, I did a podcast about the Hebrew book of Ecclesiastes.  It had to do with how  this book represents a "new" kind of wisdom in ancient Israel.  Before Ecclesiastes appeared, most Hebrews believed this about wisdom:  if one was wise, that is, if one adhered to the dictums of the divinely instituted backbone of the creation, one would always experience success, material as well as spiritual.  Disappointment could not be.
     
     Do you believe this?  I hope not.  In response, the writer of Ecclesiastes says that life is futile, that a life well lived can amount to nothing, and that all people suffer have the same end:  death.  Moreover, the wisest person may well suffer the worst of material fates.  Wisdom is no guarantee of anything.

     Except one thing:  the value of the presence of God.  Take away God, and yes, life can nonetheless be joyful, yet as Thomas Hobbes put it, also brutish and short.  Leave God in, and yes, life is equally so:  joyous as well as brutal.
     
     But, and this is a big "but," life has a point.  Why else would so-called "New Atheist" Richard Dawkins reply, in answer to a question about the meaning of life, "That's not a valid question"?
          
     By the way, I'll be traveling for a few days, so will not be posting until later next week.  Thanks for reading!

     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 Hashana (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, discipline, singing, gathering, reading, and meditation, moments 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 often shallow, 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.



     Although we may not believe we move in a bigger picture, we fool ourselves if we think we can live meaningfully without accepting the fact of its presence.  We are born for transcendence, 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, to borrow the name of an REM song, creatures of the "Great Beyond."
     Enjoy your pondering.

     In the course of my teaching I have lately had occasion to reread Boethius's medieval classic, Consolation of Philosophy.  All in all, it's a fascinating book.  At the same time, I've been re-reading twentieth century historian Arthur Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being.  While Boethius explores and celebrates, using the figure of Philosophy (a woman), the intricacies of divine providence and human choice and eternal time, Lovejoy ponders how, in a world driven by principles of plentitude and continuity, such things can even exist.  That is, how can providence overcome the plentitude which it itself brought into being?  How can we affirm divine sovereignty while also upholding earthly inexhaustibility?
     Although I do not have any ready answers, I offer that neither position can work without the other.  If there is no God, there is no discernible future.  Yet if there is a God, the future is inexhaustible.
     Which do you prefer?

     Do you like the rain?  In the writings of the ancient near east, people certainly did.  In fact, they expected it:  once in the spring, again in the autumn.  They used the spring rains to plant their crops, and the autumn rains to prepare the soil for planting in the coming spring.  It was a rhythm woven deeply into their lives.


     Today, many Indians expect the monsoons to come with startling regularity, and are often able to predict the precise day they will begin.  Far, far above India's teeming cities, Himalayan mountaineers work within a carefully calibrated window of opportunity framed by the monsoon season:  they know that they must seize the time to climb.

     Although climate change has altered the rhythms of weather patterns all over the world, in some cases overturning them completely, it has not yet succeeded in jettisoning them altogether.  Maybe one day it will; maybe not.  Will the earth survive the human species?  I cannot say.  What I can say, however, is that, despite how human machinations and folly have undercut the predictability of earthly pattern, they will probably not end the life of the planet.

     Life, like the God who established it, is more than who we are.

     Have you heard of the punk rock group Green Day?  If you do, you know that Green Day has been rocking the music world for over twenty years, turning out one hit album after another, doing wildly successful concert tours around the planet, and stirring up substantial media notice with some of its members' issues with drugs.

     It has produced several DVDs about its concerts, too.  A number of years ago, I had occasion to watch one:  "Bullet in a Bible."  I've watched it many times since, and never tire of how it presents one of the band's most famous songs, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams."  Why?  Even as the camera shows a perspiring Billie Joe Armstrong belting out the lyrics, it pans the audience, mostly millennials, mostly people who know the words by heart, and mostly people who, for any number of reasons, seem to connect, in an almost visceral way, with them.


     Armstrong sings of wandering amidst broken dreams, hoping that someone "up there" would find him, but concluding that in the end he will "walk alone," his shadow his only companion.  Powerful words, yet words which fit, I daresay, how many of us view the larger issues of our existence.  Most of us hope that, somehow, someway, there is a bigger picture to our lives, that there is a larger reason why we are here, that we do not live and die without any reason.  Most of us do not wish to live alone, be it alone among our fellow human beings, or the vast maw of the universe.  We want to feel connected to something more than us.
     After all, we're only--and only--human.  Happily, God was once, too.

      "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")

     It's 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.  Amidst all of our seasons of malleability and change, however, 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.