More and more commentators have been using the term "winner take-all" economy to describe the state of American capitalism and its work culture.  What do they mean?  They picture an economy driven by only one thing:  personal enrichment at the expense of everyone else.  It's the logical outcome of Adam Smith's thesis about the "self-interest" at the heart of the free enterprise system.
     But a "winner take-all" economy is more than attenuated or exaggerated self-interest.  It is the decision to regard one's personal fortune as paramount, absolutely paramount:  no one else's interest matters.  If one cannot "have it all," she has lost not just the battle, but the war, too.  To use a term bandied about in sports circles, "Winning isn't the only thing; winning is everything."
     All of us of course like coming out on top.  Many of us thrive on competition.  Most of us appreciate the trappings of affluence.  But to decide that we are the only ones entitled to such things, that we alone should have the absolute best is a gross mischaracterization of what it means to be human.
     God didn't make us to put each other down.  He made us to build each other up.  To give up ourselves for the greater good of another.  All is not fair, as the saying goes, "in love and war."  All is fair when we consider, to use Paul's words to the church at Philippi, "Others as more important than ourselves."
     A "winner take-all economy" will never win.

     Morality without God?  This was the question we discussed in last month's meeting of my atheist discussion group.  What do you think?  Can we be moral without God?
     indeed, we can.  We humans are moral animals.  That's not the issue.  The issue is rather whether we can develop standards of right and wrong in the absence of a belief in God.
     The answer is that we can.  What everyone in the group acknowledged, however, is that, our intellects notwithstanding, we will never really know what is right and wrong.  We're defining right and wrong with our standards of, well, right and wrong.  We're an issue unto ourselves.
     Although this has worked fairly well for humanity to this point, it is a facade of who we are.  Are we just flesh and blood beings who tell each other who we are?  Or are we flesh and blood beings whose deepest meaning is not something we define ourselves?  Put another way, are we circular or open-ended?
     If we say that, well, of course it's the latter, we come to recognize what it means to be genuinely free.
     It's hard to be free, free to do anything, if all we have is ourselves to know.
     Stay tuned for next month:  our discussion will continue.

     "Christianity is tough!"  This spoken by a friend of mine, a Jewish rabbi, during a conversation we had a few weeks ago.  We had been talking about grace.  In all of the many times we have talked, we almost always come to the same impasse:  for me, it is grace that compels and enables me to believe in God, whereas for my friend, it is the keeping of the law that leads him to believe in and, subsequently, love God.  On the one hand, favor before belief; on the other hand, favor after obedience.
     That's why my friend made this observation.  He could not understand how God could love people even before they believed in and obeyed him.  It is the law, he has always said, that helps him to love God.  Without the law, there is no reason to do so.
     This is what makes grace so complicated.  Very few of us like accepting things we do not deserve, particularly divine favor.  We would rather earn our way into acceptance.  Isn't that the way the world is?
     Indeed.  We live in a Darwinian world.  But what if it was the other way around?  What if we could learn to accept people, and God, before we know who they are or what they are all about?  What if we could learn to love without reservation or qualm?
     This is a bold agenda, yes, but perhaps it is the only one that will enable us to undo the moral morass into which we have fallen.  I talk not necessarily of sin, but of a mindset in which too many of we humans cannot believe anyone else can be human, too.
     Yes, Christianity is tough!

"To be or not to be, that is the question:  whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them." 
    So wrote the Bard of Avon, otherwise known as William Shakespeare, generally acknowledged as one of the greatest playwrights who ever lived.  As we think about Shakespeare's birthday, which the world celebrates today, we marvel at his ability to write such striking and memorable poetry and prose.  We are awestruck at his insight into the human condition, at his ability to create such stunning portraits of humans at the peaks of triumph or, alternatively, the depths of despair.  Shakespeare had a remarkable capacity for capturing life, for divulging the intimacies of what it means to be a human being.
     To be or not to be?  Do not we all ask ourselves this at some point?  Do not we all wonder why we are here?  What we should do?  Why will it end?
     Indeed.  We are only human, but ironically, that is all, Shakespeare constantly reminds us, we ought to be.
     And so, in this bewildering and astonishing world, is God.

"Resurrection" by El Greco

     Yesterday, Easter morning, my wife and I took a short walk to a forest preserve near our home.  Climbing up to a high point, we sat on a log, waiting for the sun to rise over the lake below.  Our version of a sunrise Easter service.
     As we sat, read, and contemplated, we watched the sky, a budding crimson, and we watched the forest, its trees still naked and bare, the land barely green.  Then, precisely when we expected it to do so, the sun peeked over the hills and began spreading its rays across the water.  The geese continued to fly, the cranes continued to nest.  Squirrels scampered about.  And why not?  The night was over.  The day had begun.
     Out of the abject darkness of Good Friday, the darkness of every human folly and evanescence, the greatest of all sunshines arose.  A sunrise that eclipses and encompasses all others, a sunrise that changed history, bent space, and permanently altered all our notions of meaning and time.
     Yes, we can celebrate the meaning of resurrection, and yes, we can celebrate the fact of new life.  What we will always find confounding--and glorious--however, is the profound physicality of the deed:  that God, the living God, really did die, and God, the living God, really did rise from the dead.  It's nonsensical, it's unbelievable, it's unfathomable, but unless it happened, we are, as Paul wrote, of all people most to be pitied.  We live in a dream of our making.
     How can life ever be the same?

     "I went down to the countries beneath the earth, to the nations of the past; but you have brought up my life from the pit, O Lord, my God."  Jonah understood life well:  so is the fate of all nations.  None will last forever; none will endure indefinitely.
     Neither will we.  One day, we, too, will descend to the lands beneath the earth, slip out of this existence into another one, one far darker than this present experience, fade from all that we know and love, never to return.

     As I try to come to grips with the fact of Good Friday, the day of absolute nadir and blackness, the moment in which time itself ran away, the point when all that we love tumbled into the heart of what it ultimately is, a heartbreaking picture of form and evanescence, I wonder about Jonah's words.  We will not know what death is like until we die.  And we will not know life until it is gone.
     It can seem a cold world, a cold and insensate world, a world that for too many of us often seems to not care one whit who we are.  Or whom we one day might be.  We may tremble, we may leap.  We ponder our joy, we avoid our ephemerality.  But we are both.
     And what will we do?

     "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends."  So said Jesus, Jewish Messiah and, as he constantly made clear, the son of God, on the eve of his crucifixion.  As we enter into the most solemn days of the Christian calendar, we think of these words again and how they speak to all of us.
     Very few of us, however, will ever have opportunity to live out these words in a literal way.  Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish priest who was imprisoned at the German concentration camp Auschwitz.  In an act of selfless sacrifice that will be remembered for many ages to come, Kolbe willingly came forward to serve the death sentence of another prisoner, one Franciszek Gajowniczek, whom he had not even met.  After two weeks of slow dehydration and starvation, Kolbe finally died when the guards injected him with carbolic acid.  Gajowniczek, who died in 1995, devoted the rest of his life to telling the world about Kolbe's incredible sacrifice.

     Kolbe surely exemplified Jesus' words.  As the Christian world remembers Good Friday, that darkest yet most sacred of days, the day on which Jesus, God in the flesh, sacrificed himself, giving everything he was for the world that he had made, all of us should therefore ask, with joy, gratitude, and astonishment:  what kind of a God would do such a thing?
     The answer is very simple:  a God who loves us.

     Do you believe in magic?  So sang the Lovin' Spoonful in the American Sixties.  It was a paean to wonder, a call to explore, an encouragement to dance outside of what seems apparent and true.
     As a band, the Lovin' Spoonful are long gone.  Magic, however, is with us still.  Even in the crucifixion of Jesus.  In British author C. S. Lewis's much loved the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, we read that, as the plot unfolds, it seems that in order to rescue one of the "Earth" children who have fallen under the spell of the "White Witch," Aslan, the lion whose outsized presence is felt throughout the story, must die at the hands of the White Witch.  Aslan must give up his life for Edmund's freedom.
    And Aslan does.  Shortly thereafter, however, Lucy sees Aslan again.  Somehow, he has returned from death.  When Lucy asks how this is possible, Aslan tells her that, "Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know."
     So it is that in the cross, the cross of Christ, in this Holy Week, we consider the the magic of God.  It is a magic at once earthly yet at the same time heavenly.  As it should be.  Were it not of this world, we would have no use for it.  Unless it is of that which orders this world, however, it means nothing, nothing at all:  death is the absolute end.
     Do you believe in magic?

     In a broken world, a world in which things do not always go as we wish them to, a world marked by tremendous joy as well as profound tragedy, we humans seem to cultivate an innate longing for control.  Why can we not control the affairs of our lives? Why can we not ensure that we are not surprised by darkness?

     In this final week of Lent, we have opportunity to rethink our longing for control.  Lent is all about giving up.  We give up our time, we give up our pursuits, we give up our lives, we give up control.  We recognize that we live in a world beyond our control.  We acknowledge that if we try to control everything, we will inevitably end up creating a world of us and us alone, a world without any real point except poor little us.  We reduce ourselves to a collection of atoms spinning madly in a nexus of space and time, avoiding everything but ourselves.
     As Lent moves towards its denouement, we see, again, that though we are remarkable creatures, entirely capable of directing the course of our lives, we will never understand and control it all.  We remember that we are finite, that we have limits, that our marvelous attributes can only take us so far.  Sooner or later, we encounter a bump:  we realize that we are not so remarkable that we in ourselves can decide what we are existence mean. How could we?  We are only us.
     Consider the "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog," standing before the world, watching, planning, waiting, yet lacking a way to make absolute sense of or control it
     And that's precisely God's point:  in order to gain control, we must give it up.  We must give up who we are now to find who we are destined to be.
     In this is the essence of the Cross.

     Earlier this week, the art world observed the birthday of the artist Domenikos Theotokopoulos, otherwise known as El Greco ("the Greek").  El Greco painted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, standing on the edge of the early modern and modern world.  HIs paintings reflect this liminality.  They feature curiously shaped people, fantastical imagery, and unusual colors, blending, it seems, Eastern and Western religion and artistic styles, styles that would emerge in other forms in later centuries as, among others, the Cubism of Pablo Picasso.
     Many years ago, I took in an exhibit of El Greco at the Art Institute in Chicago.  I found it fascinating.  Quite apart from the religious imagery which I, of course, appreciated, I saw inklings of an immensely innovative and creative spirit, a spirit that, in the best traditions of modern art, spoke of transcendence in material terms.  The paintings I saw expressed a powerful awareness of the supernatural, transforming earthly sensibilities into metaphysical longing, even while they contained enough intimations of the chimerical present to keep us thinking.
     As it should:  we tread daily on the cusp of what we cannot see, but that which we sense, in a variety of ways, must be there. 

     A few days ago, my brother and his wife visited us for the weekend.  Early one morning, as my brother and I sat in the kitchen and talked, Summer, our cat, wandered in.  "She's so little," my brother remarked.
     "Yeah," I replied, "only seven pounds.  But seven pounds of remarkable energy and intelligence."
     Each time I look at Summer, I'm amazed at the level of complexity that has been contained in her tiny body.  It's a wonder.  Such a small presence yet a presence with astounding power.  And I ask myself:  why?

     Why, indeed.  Although I believe in the fact of evolutionary processes, I can't evade the next question:  why this way and not another?  What is the point of Summer and her kin?
     There has to be a bigger explanation.

     As many of us know, the beginning of this week marked the championship game that closes the college basketball season:  the NCAA championship.  For those who follow such things, this game is a huge moment in their lives.  They plan parties and vacations around it.  In the big picture, however, a basketball game played between two teams of pampered, well-fed American college students is of relatively little consequence.
      This was brought home to me with fresh force as I was reading through Ecclesiastes this morning.  "All is futility," the writer says, "all is futility."  Though the writer counsels elsewhere to "enjoy life," he recognizes acutely that, in the end, life is finite.  It will not last.  One day, all who live will be gone.
     Like basketball, like a basketball championship.  Life is deeply meaningful and unarguably profound, yes, but it is so frightfully transient.
     Does it need more?

     I recently read a book which I will not long forget:  The Inhuman Land, by Jozef Czapski.  Published in 1949 but only recently translated into English from its native Polish and Russian, Inhuman Land chronicles Czapski's efforts, under order of Josef Stalin, to reconstitute the Polish army to aid the Soviets in their battle to turn back the German invasion of 1941.  Although under the Soviet-Nazi pact Stalin and Hitler agreed to parcel up Poland and refrain from attacking one another, Hitler, as most readers know, soon violated the agreement.  He sent his army into Russia in June of 1941.
     History now knows that this was very likely Hitler's biggest strategic mistake, one that, in the big picture, was the first step in his eventual demise.  At the time, however, the sight of Nazi tanks rolling across western Russia was truly frightening.  Stalin quickly realized that he needed all the help he could get.
     As Czapski sought to meet his mandate, however, he encountered a host of bureaucratic setbacks and cultural obstacles:  he found doing what he had been assigned to do extraordinarily difficult.  But he persevered.  Along the way, and this is the heart of his work, he was given an unique eyewitness view of a nation at once gathering and falling apart, a people whose cultural foundations were being slowly eviscerated, a once proud country now tumbling into a land of twisted and unimaginable horror.  Starvation, massacre, political subterfuge, and military ineptitude fused together in a slow and steady grinding down of any semblance of humanness.
     On the other hand, Czapski witnessed immense acts of altruism, generosity, and wisdom.  Repeatedly, he saw people who were standing on the brink of total life destruction sacrifice themselves for another, letting go of what little they had to help another get through one more day.
     And for what?  In the space of a fortnight, they would be gone, too.  Why?  Why do we cling so desperately to something so achingly ephemeral?
     Perhaps we sense, consciously or not, that life is bigger than itself, that there is more to what we visibly see.

     How is your Lenten experience?  In Lent, repentance and circumspection dominate the religious imagination, as those so inclined spend ever more time pondering the exigencies within their lives, the fleeting puffs of materiality in which we have life and breath.  Life looks more remarkable than ever:  a befuddling experience, yes, but the only experience, at this point, we have.

     Given the wonder of the world, it's easy to rejoice in life without also wondering why life is, why we have it, why this existence has been given to us.  To what end do we live?
     I hope you are slowing down, meditating and considering, and letting go of the compulsions of the immediate, Lent calls us to not blast life apart without knowing what we are blasting it into, to stop striving for what will not last, and to relax, as the Psalmist says, in the reality of God (Psalm 46:10).  Lent invites us to look at what matters most.  Who will we really be when we leave this world:  ashes or creatures of eternity?
     Need we acknowledge larger realities in our earthly existence?  Only you can decide that.  One truth, however, will remain.  We will never escape the fact of our mortality.  Lent reminds us of our contingency.  It also reminds us that if the world is contingency only, the universe would never have had a reason to be.  And neither would we.

    Traveling through a bit of Midwestern wildness last week or so, I saw many pictures of a land still deeply somnolent  but a land that is also slowly waking from its brumal slumber.  At present, it is quiet:  a few birds, a few hints of running water, but not much else.  In a few weeks, however, the land will ring with sound, letting all who would notice that it has, in a manner of speaking, arisen.


     How poignant it is that in order to rise, a plant must die, that in order to give birth, a seed must stop living.  We who love life dearly often forget that it can only be itself when it grapples with death, when that which animates it wrestles with its counterpart.  So did Jacob find after spending the night tangling with an angel (who turned out to be God) that, come morning, God gave him a new name:  Israel.  The one who struggles with God.
     We will not find light without walking in darkness.  And even when we find it, we will always test, struggle, and fight its end.

      As it was the last week of January, the last few days have been big for musician birthdays.  April 1, April Fools Day, is the birthday of one of the greatest of the Romantic pianists:  Sergei Rachmaninoff.  Born in Russia, eventually emigrating to America and, shortly before his death in 1943, becoming an American citizen, Rachmaninoff composed some of the richest music ever written for the piano. His work expresses a blending of intense and mournful melody with powerful and intricate chords and keyboard movements, aptly capturing and expressing the deepest spirit of the Romantics.  His playing took his audiences into the fullness of their emotional imaginations; they left amazed.

     Rachmaninoff gives us a glimpse of a human being struggling with what it is to be alive on this planet, what it is to experience, what it is to know, what it is to be as real as anything can possibly be.  He demonstrates to us that although we realize reason is an essential part of who we are, we ultimately make our biggest decisions with our heart.  As Paul says in Romans 10, we believe, as a matter of intellectual assent, that Jesus died and rose, but we trust it with our heart.
     And it is the heart that affirms the presence of God.

     "The heavens are telling the glory of God," says the psalmist, "day by day and night by night."  But, it adds, "there is no speech."
     It is this enigmatic passage that Austrian musician Joseph Haydn set to music.  Earlier this week, March 31st, was Haydn's birthday.  Now that I am back from some traveling, I write of him.  Astonishingly versatile and capable of composing some extraordinary melodies, Haydn expressed, with great beauty, the spirit of his age, the Enlightenment.  Undergirding Haydn's Enlightenment sensibilities of freedom, liberality, and discovery,  however, was his unyielding commitment to the presence of a transcendent God.  Haydn wrote of God, and he found comfort in God.
     But this isn't my main point.  It is rather to say that those who believe in God frequently find the richest way to express their beliefs in what Matthew Arnold called the "perfections" of culture.  That in the greatness of humanness, divinity often finds its most profound manifestation.
     After all, did not the Word become flesh?