One day, an attack on a mosque in New Zealand.  And now, almost the next day, the awful aftermath of a cyclone that swept through some of the most impoverished nations on the planet.  Why?
     A number of years ago, I taught at a conference in northern Malawi.  Everywhere I went, I encountered immense poverty.  Mud brick houses, dirt roads, and grass huts.  Stoves were few, cooking over fires commonplace.  Bathrooms?  A screen and a hole in the ground.  Water?  A community pump installed by an NGO a few years before.
     Sitting in our affluence, we wonder why these things happen, why the worse natural malfunctions come upon those least prepared to deal with them.
     I wonder, too.  So I pray.  I pray and believe in God and the essential meaningfulness of the existence he has given us.  That he is there.
     Does this sound facile?  Sure.  But if we insist on the fact of purpose, we cannot look at life in any other way.
     Pray for the people of Southern Africa.

H

     Yesterday was the first day of Spring.  Today is the birthday of Johannes Sebastian Bach.  It's fitting that Bach's birthday should accompany spring.  His music is replete with the sounds of singing birds, greening forests, and deeper skies.  Fresh, bright, and resonant with joy, Bach's music echoes the wonder of the newly born creation.

    We thank Bach for this, for what he shows us about life, death, and spring.  We also thank Bach for giving us a glimpse of the greater mystery of this vast, vast--and loved--universe in which we revel.

   
  So did Bach write on every piece of music he composed, "Soli Deo Gloria" (All Glory to God Alone).  Bach knew from whence all things come.
     Enjoy the music!

     Believe it or not, today is the vernal equinox, the first day of Spring.  The days are lengthening, the sun is shining, and privations of winter are winding down.  Spring has come.  It must.
      We rejoice in the newness, we rejoice in the verdancy, we rejoice in the appearance of new life.  We rejoice in the power of the earth to, once again, rejuvenate and revive itself for our joy and wonder.  It's like a resurrection.
     The writer of Proverbs 27 observes that, "When the grass disappears, the new growth is seen."  Winter can be hard, winter can be harsh, and winter can be long, very long, rife with dissolution and vanishing, departure and hopelessness.  Even in the most tropical regions of the world, however, though spring, fall, and winter do not occur in the way they do in northern regions, "grass" nonetheless disappears.  Things die, things go away, things change.  And newness comes.  It's the rhythm of existence, the song of life.

     While we may not enjoy winter, personal, meteorological, or otherwise, we walk in winters, small and large, every day, for in winters is the stuff of living, the glorious and aching mess of being alive, the raw material with which God fashions, in ways we rarely foresee, our springs.
     As the apostle Paul puts it in his first letter to the church at Corinth, the seed that falls to the ground cannot germinate unless it, now detached from its moorings, slips into the ground--no longer seen--and dies.  A seed's death is the winter that brings spring.
     Rejoice in the disappearance, rejoice in the newness.  Rejoice in a world that has both.
     Happy equinox!

     After hearing about the horrific mosque attack in New Zealand, I sent an email to a Muslim friend of mine.  I told him that we were praying for him, his family, and their brothers and sisters all over the world.
     In writing me back, my friend thanked me, and noted that he and his wife were headed to Pakistan for about a month to tend to some family business.  I wished him safe travels.  As I sent the email, I thought about how much he and I agree, and yet on how much we still do not see eye to eye.
     Nonetheless, in the face of such unspeakable tragedy, we continue to believe in God.  We know that in a dark and capricious world, God, like it or not, remains the sole bastion of meaning.  Though it is very possible to live meaningfully without believing in God, it is not possible to live without God himself.
     Pray for our Muslim brethren.  And pray for the world.

     If you're Irish or have some Irish in you, you may well know what yesterday was:  St. Patrick's Day.  Patron saint of and missionary to the Irish nation, St. Patrick came into a remote and unsettled land dominated by various strands of Celtic religious thought and proceeded to teach and explain the Christian gospel.

     It seems that he did so rather successfully, too.  Despite what has historically been often very deep cultural rifts among the Irish populace, Christianity is still admired and celebrated throughout the land. God and Jesus remain very important.
     One of the beauties of St. Patrick's Day is that although it is a commemoration of the saint's supposed day of death, it is on the other hand a day of tremendous celebration.  Sure, some people celebrate to excess, but usually even this is done with every good intention:  life is beautiful!
     If we stop here, however, we overlook one of Patrick's fundamental observations.  It is summed up in the following quote:

     "Be still and know that I am God.
      Be still and know that I am.
      Be still and know.
      Be still.
      Be."

     Amidst the "beingness" and celebration, remember from whom it all comes.

     "A point," observed Euclid, "is that which has no part."  And a "line," he further noted, "is a breathless length."

     Can we prove what Euclid called these "definitions"?  No.  We must accept it as, well, the way things are.  We just "know" that it's true.  We just "know" that a point could not be any other way than how he defines it.

     For some of us, such talk is maddening.  We cannot abide accepting things without proof.  Yet all of us, every single one of us, daily accepts all manner of things without any proof.  We could not live otherwise.

     Yesterday, for the chemists among us, was Pi day.  As you may know, Pi, named after a letter of the Greek alphabet, is, the number 3.14.  The remarkable thing about Pi, however, is that 3.14 is only the beginning of what Pi is.  We could go out to 20,000 decimal places, and beyond, and still not find an end.  Pi's decimals go on and on and on, seemingly forever.

     For this reason, Pi is used in many formulas which determine the areas of various shapes, including the circle.  But we still do not know, really, why Pi is what it is.  It is just is.  And yet in a way very similar to how we use Euclid's definitions, we use Pi without any proof of why Pi is the way it is.

     The beauty of Pi, among many other things, is therefore how it reminds us that there are things that we can prove, things that we cannot prove, and things that elude definitiveness either way.  Yet somehow, some way, we believe them to be true.

     You may believe in God, you may not.  Either way, however, unless you stretch beyond the notion of rational proof and into the realm of "nonrational" understanding, you'll never know for sure.

     It's the greatest mystery of all.

     Tomorrow (at least in the Western Hemisphere), March 15:  the Ides of March.  On this day in 44 B.C., Julius Caesar, a general and would-be dictator of the Roman republic was assassinated, set upon by a group of nearly sixty people, including his supposedly best friend and associate Brutus, and stabbed to death on the floor of the Roman Senate.  It was an ugly demise.

     As the historian Plutarch tells it, some time prior to that day, Caesar was warned by a seer that he would die before the day, March 15, ended.  In a movie made about Caesar a decade ago, he was pictured seeing a crow fly overhead as he traveled to the Senate that day.  In much ancient lore, including that of Rome, a crow was considered to be a bad omen.

     In his piece "Crossroads" (popularized by the long gone band Cream), the legendary blues singer Robert Johnson paints a picture of a decision to be made, a barrier to be bridged or, to borrow from Caesar once again, a Rubicon to be crossed.  Though the story is that the song describes a pact that Johnson supposedly made with the Devil, we cannot be sure.
     The point is this:  we all have our Ides of March, we all have our crossroads.  We all face, whether we sense it beforehand or not, potentially transforming moments.  How these moments will transform us we usually do not know.  But we understand that each of our moments lingers on the cusp of change.
     But why?  We do so because we believe that the world has meaning.  We believe that what we do matters.  We believe that we are creatures of sense living in a sensory world.      In a solely material world, a world absent of transcendent presence, however, we cannot legitimately claim that what we do matters.  From what would meaning come? 
     Unless this world is personal, unless this world has an ultimate origin in what is not chemical, we cannot have an ides of March.  Caesar--and all the rest of us--would not matter one whit.

     How sad I was to read a few days ago of the discovery of the body of Tom Ballard on the slopes of Nanga Parbat, the tenth highest mountain in the world.  Once anointed the "King of the Alps" for his immense prowess on the peaks of that range, he had, with fellow climber Daniele Nardi, set out to climb Nanga Parbat by the most difficult route possible in the most arduous season possible:  winter.  Everyone had high hopes.

Alison Climbing

Tom at Four Years

     Ballard's death was particularly tragic because he was the son of British climber Alison Hargreaves, the first British woman to summit Mt. Everest and, a mere month or so later, the first British woman to climb K2, the second highest (and considerably more dangerous than Everest), in the world.  She perished in a storm as she was descending from the summit.  Tom was six years old.
     Now Tom is gone, too, his life snuffed out at the age of thirty (his mother was thirty-three when she died).  Oh, life!  We love it, we live it.  But we can never master it.  

Tom                                                Daniele

     We can only love God.

     Although she has been gone for nearly nine years now, I could not help but think of my mother on Saturday of last week.  It was her birthday.  I recently heard John Lennon's "Mother." For those who have not heard the song, Lennon sings of the mother and father whom he always wanted but, as he puts it in the song, were never there for him.  They didn't "have" him.
     Would we all wish for parents who are there for us, who "have" us, who love us as we wish them to love us.  In contrast to Lennon, I experienced this love in full, and more, in the love of my parents, my mother and father.  I really needed nothing more from them, for in their love they gave me everything I could possibly want and need.  I left home believing that the world was a good place, that people were decent beings, that love reigned in the universe.
     I hope that you find this kind of love, too.  Whether it's from your parents or others, I hope that, through it, you come to see the fullness and presence of love in the cosmos, and enjoy and appreciate its every expression on our behalf.  That you see love as something that always wants you.
     A love like the love of God.  Thank goodness for a loving God.

     Calling all men and women:  today is International Women's Day!  Why should set aside a day to celebrate women?  Do we not celebrate women every day of the year?  Absolutely.  Historically, however, women have faced oppression on scales to which most men simply cannot relate.  A complex web of tradition, sexism, condescension, and patriarchy has created a world in which, even today, many women are considered to be second-class citizens, and in some cases, tragically, less than human.




     Politics and culture aside, however, I believe we do well to consider why the human race is composed of men and women.  The reason is far more than mere procreation.  The most profound reason for two human genders is that, bottom line, men and women need each other, need each other in more ways than they can individually or corporately imagine.  Humanity cannot be fully human unless male and female are flourishing, unless both genders are able to be all that they can, before God, be.  As Genesis makes clear, humanness is male and female, and we are duty bound to achieve its fullness.
     Do we have a long way to go?  Sure.  But we are not mere dollops of masculinity and femininity tossed into an accidental cosmos, nor are we male and female, complementary in gender, without reason.  We are as we are because of God.
     And God wants nothing more than our human completeness.

     Yesterday, we remembered Michelangelo, the famous artist of the Italian Renaissance.  We talked about how by fusing his belief in God with his immense creative ability, Michelangelo produced art that, from a number of standpoints, affirms the near limitless possibilities of the human imagination.  
     In contrast, today, we remember our limits.  As we think about Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, we are reminded that whether we believe in an afterlife or not, we are ultimately no more than dust.  When we die and pass out of this life, what remains of us will soon be no more, too, returned to the earth from which it has come.  Before my siblings and I scattered my mother's ashes atop her favorite mountain in the San Gabriel Mountains of California in October of 2011, we opened the box that contained "her."  All that Mom ever was had been reduced to a small pile of ashes.  All her years, all her love, all her joy, all her meaning, all her hopes and dreams now no more than a bag of ashes.  It was sobering.

     Even more sobering is that one day, every one of us will be exactly the same.  Yet Michelangelo's vision remains with us still.  True, as Ash Wednesday reminds us, we are thoroughly material beings.  But we are spiritual beings, too, physical creatures with spiritual form and transcendent vision, created by a present and always God.
     Our life is ending, yet our possibilities are endless:  death is only the beginning.

     Today marks the birthday of one of history's most remarkable artists:  Michelangelo di Lodovica Buonarroti Simoni, otherwise known as, simply, Michelangelo.  Why do we find  Michelangelo so significant?
     Like all of us, Michelangelo was a creature of his time, a person working in one of the most fascinating eras in the history of the West:  the Renaissance.  As I have said elsewhere in this blog, the Renaissance was a singular point in the evolution of European thought.  It was a time, a very brief time, when the secular and sacred seemed to fuse together, blending in the most amazing way in all areas of human endeavor.
     This was perhaps most notable in the art of the period.  Across the board, people sought to do art as a fusion of unwavering belief in the goodness and creative power of God and their comcommitant belief in their innate creative abilities, abilities given to them, they constantly affirmed, by God.  Deeply committed to the joy of art, profoundly dedicated to the presence and love of God, Michelangelo's astonishingly fertile mind produced some of the most memorable artworks in human history.
     Although much of today's art is very different from the of the Renaissance, the essential truth about its origins remains:  the human heart and mind cannot help but create, be it to the wonder of humanity and its world, the glory of God or, ideally, both.  Michelangelo demonstrates to us that we are awesome beings, beings capable of creating things beyond our imagination.  We are creatures of immense possibility, possibility inherent in a universe created by an infinite God.
     There are no limits to whom we can be.
     

     Paradise?  As I, along with millions of others, contemplate the surge of cold that is currently sweeping across the midsection of the United States, I think once again of Joshua Tree, that oasis of cactus and rock in the remote California desert where I was last week.  I think also of a novel I read many years ago called Islandia.  It is a tale of a utopia set in a series of idyllic and pastoral islands in a distant ocean.  Far away from the turmoil of war and the ravages, as it saw it, of capitalism, Islandia offered its inhabitants a life without worry or care.  It was a life shaped by mutual exchange, cultural openness, and community, a land in which all people are at peace with each other.
     Although Joshua Tree and Islandia are very different places, they both offer havens, respites, places of solace and rest.  Just as it's not surprising that historical visions of the afterlife pictured a land of glory and peace, so it is no accident that some of the most intrepid monastics, regardless of religion or creed, found their richest insights in the desert.
     Oddly enough, while places like Islandia and Joshua Tree provide comfort in very different ways, we need both of them to find our meaning.  In bucolic bliss we find joy through leisure and ease; in the rugged landscapes of the desert we find joy through abnegation and sacrifice.
     Would his mission really have changed the world if God, in Jesus, had come to Islandia?