Eternal life?  It's quite a thought.  And it is a thought that came to me this morning, when I received word that one of our neighbors had passed away one day shy of his eightieth birthday.  He had battled cancer for a number of years.  By his own admission, Tom was not a religious person; I can only speculate on his final ruminations.
     Would I like for Tom to live again?  Of course.  When I contemplate the finality of earthly existence, the prospect of never again experiencing this life, well, I'm sobered.  Although I affirm the fact of God, eternity, and the eternal life these make possible, I at the same time feel overwhelmed with the doorway to it:  death.  Embracing the former means embracing the latter, too; the one being a hiddenness to come, the other being a very much present reality.
      The inevitability of our earthly passing is a powerful thing.  It has moved humanity to find itself and its destiny in countless ways, ways too numerous to presently imagine.  It has also generated no small amount of angst.  But it cannot be any other way.  By its very definition, eternity and eternal life will not come into this temporal existence.
     And that's the point.  If not for the life of God that many centuries ago appeared in our world, we would never know.  For this, we are grateful.
     Rest well, Tom.
     By the way, I'll be traveling for the next couple of weeks and will not be posting.  I'll catch up in July.  Thanks for reading!

     I shared last month about my atheist discussion group's recent foray into the notion of objective morality.  This month, we continued conversing on the topic.  As the only believer in the group, I was well aware that the pat answer for a believer is to say that he bases his sense of morality on the Old and New Testament writings.  While I do not dispute the truthfulness of this response, I indicated to the group that it is considerably more complicated than that.  Why else would believers have such divergent opinions on what these writings say about various social and cultural issues?  Everyone brings her cultural and political biases to the task of biblical interpretation, and everyone cannot help but be influenced by her life circumstances in coming to an understanding of what these writings may be saying at a given moment.  Though these writings may well represent a standard of objective morality, we come to them as subjective beings.
     Living in the American Midwest, I am very familiar with the furor about the law regarding reproductive rights that the governor of Illinois signed yesterday.  Some believers want to say that the Bible condemns abortion as murder; others, while not contesting this conclusion, suggest that the issue is grayer than this.  I agree.  If we are to say that abortion is wrong and that women should not be allowed to have one, we must also say that we should support wider availability of contraceptives, family planning, and pre and post natal care.  And that Christians, of all people, should be volunteering to take in women who find themselves pregnant with nowhere to go.
     But I do not see most abortion opponents raising their hands to do any of these things.
     A portion of Psalm 139, used often by opponents of abortion, says that God "knit" each person together in his or her mother's womb.  What then do we say to women who give birth to deformed or extremely ill babies?  Stillborns?  And so on.
     If we are to insist on objective morality and attach God's name to our position on abortion, we should also realize that we are tiny and deeply flawed and subjective creatures trying to grasp, often in vain, the thoughts of a very, very big God.

     A delicate beauty.  Among the plants and flowers we have in our garden are peonies.  Lovely flowers, peonies bloom profusely in early June.  All through the winter and into the nascent spring, we wait for them to come forth, watching the stalks emerge, the buds appear and, finally, the full flower.
     Almost as quickly as they explode with color, however, the peonies are gone.  Their reign is brief, an evanescent moment of glory that, in the space of a couple of weeks, is over.  For the remainder of the summer, all we see are the rapidly drying stalks, falling onto themselves, not to resurrect for many, many months to come.

     And even then for an achingly short time.  The ancients viewed beauty as a sign of wholeness, a vision of integration and order.  Beauty was an ultimate good.  But it was elusive:  who could really attain it?
     So go peonies.  Though we retrieve as many blooms as we can, our time to do so is very limited.  We strive in vain to lengthen it.
     And then we're left with the dust of the earth:  a delicate beauty.
     If not for God.

    It was my dear aunt Jeanne who introduced me to the art of Paul Gaugin.  Over twenty years ago, she and my mother traveled to Chicago to take in an exhibit of his work at the Art Institute.  I'm so happy she did.  Today, Gaugin is most well known for his depictions of the people of Tahiti, the island on which he spent his later years.  Though we can read many things into these paintings, perhaps the most instructive is how different the Tahitians seem from people living in the West.  It's as if they are living in another world.  In a way, they are.

It is a world from which we have much to learn.  Yes, Europeans bravely set sail across the Atlantic in quest of India.  But they had prior information about some aspects of the passage.  The Tahitians and their fellow inhabitants of Polynesia, however, set off from the east coast of Asia with no inkling of what they would find.  And they did so, not as did the Europeans, to find worldly riches, but to simply find new worlds.  Rather than try to subjugate the world, they let the world come to them.

     Many Christians point to God's commands, as they are recorded in Genesis, to Adam and Eve to "rule and subdue" the world as justifying anything people might do to survive on this planet.  Such a conclusion is based on highly risky exegesis.  To rule well is to care and steward that which one rules, to let the world be as it should be.
     Not to twist it into what we think it should be.
     Thanks, Monsieur Gaugin.  Happy trails.

As many people know, today is the 75th anniversary of D-Day.  For those who lived through it, D-Day was the day on which the Allies made their decisive assault on the Third Reich, a day of immense carnage and pain that led, after many more months of deadly and sustained warfare, to the fall and collapse of Adolf's Hitler's ambitions of a 1,000 year Aryan empire.  It is a day that the West will never forget.  We honor and remember those who gave their lives:  they died without knowing the outcome.

     While we could go on for some time debating the idea of a "just war" and whether we can rightly apply it to the West's response to Hitler, we would be hard pressed to argue that we are anything but thankful that things turned out the way they did.  It's exceedingly difficult to measure the net worth and effect of our actions; it is equally taxing to determine what we do today means in the counsel of God.  We see, we act; we act, we review; and we go on.
     What can we say about the many thousands of people who died in this terrible conflict?  Moreover, what can we say about the thousands of people who, unlike my siblings and me, were, because of these deaths, were never born?  Though my parents served in the War, they survived.  Why?  It's far too facile to say that it's the will of God, yet it is decidedly tenuous to attribute it to pure chance.  In the end, we are left with mystery, mystery rooted in the vexing tension between human will and the vision of God.

     It's our burden, yes, but it's also our greatest calling and challenge.

     Over the weekend, I watched, again, the movie Free Solo, the film documenting free climber Alex Honnold's 2017 climb of Yosemite's El Capitan.  I've written about Honnold in this blog before, of his willingness to climb, unroped, thousands of feet off the ground, his only recourse if he were to fall to do exactly that, to plummet all those thousands of feet back to the ground.  There's no margin for error, absolutely none.
     I've said that I respect Honnold's willingness to do this, his decision to engage in such live and death gambles, and I affirmed that, oddly enough, his choices are reflective of his creation in the image of God.  Although all animal species make, after a fashion, decisions, we human beings can make them in ways that are unique in all creation.  We know that we are making them, and we know that we are the beings who are deciding things.  We are self-aware in ways that our fellow animals are not.
     Like God.  Watching Free Solo is a nerve wracking experience.  While I know that the story has a happy ending (Honnold successfully scales El Capitan without ropes), I still cannot help but be nervous.  After all, he is negotiating extremely difficult moves on a massive and lofty slab of granite with absolutely no room to err.  I know he doesn't fall, but what if he does?
     Honnold's girlfriend, Sanni McCandleness, wonders about him, too.  She wonders about the extent of his willingness to live, she wonders about the intensity of his commitment to the things of this present existence.  For Honnold, however, life is most alive when he is testing its limits.
     If we affirm the fact and presence of an eternity, we might say that there are bigger limits than mortality, that the end of this life is no limit at all.  We may live as we choose in the present, but we must also consider that we will live beyond it.
     It's all up to us.

     As Ramadan draws to a close (it ends tonight), those who are celebrating it will be participating in Laylat Al Qadr.  On this night, centuries ago, the prophet Mohammad is said to have received the first of the divine revelations which would eventually become the Qur'an.  Laylat Al Qadr is a night in which God (Allah) visited and manifested himself to his human creation in a way, as Muslims see it, he had not done so before.  It is a night of revelation, a night of divine unfolding, a night in which the distant and unknowable God expressed himself in ways his human creation could understand.

     In this understanding is Laylat Al Qadr's greatest contribution to humanness.  By affirming the possibility of revelation, Laylat Al Qadr reminds us that whether we believe it or not, God speaks.  God speaks through nature, God speaks through image, and God speaks through word.  Life is the speech of God.
     How much more remarkable do I therefore find the apostle John's understanding of word, which he articulated several centuries before Mohammad walked upon the earth.  Not only does God communicate himself through the written word (which Jew, Muslim, and Christian alike confirm), but he communicates himself by showing us, directly and visibly in the person of Jesus, who he most deeply is.
     John showed us that although as Laylat al Qadr affirms, we do well to treasure the words of God, we come to know God most fully when we see him face to face.
     And everyone can know him.

     Have you heard Brahms's Requiem?  Based on words from Psalm 90, Requiem is surely one of the most powerful pieces of music Brahms composed.  It is a profound reminder of our humanness, our fragility, our mortality.  "Teach us, Lord," it says, "to number our days so that we will develop a heart of wisdom."
     The Requiem also uses a line from Isaiah 40, "All flesh is grass."  How can we not agree?  We are indeed "grass," here today, gone tomorrow, and we surely do well to watch our days closely, as they are the only days we will ever have on this planet.
     Reams have been written about whether  Brahms believed in the worldview behind these words, but that's not the point.  Our lives are gifts, gifts not of an unconscious and impersonal universe, lives that therefore mean absolutely nothing, but rather gifts of a purposeful God, lives that therefore mean everything.
     As we remember Brahms's birthday from last month, we might also ponder this point of his legacy, that in his Requiem we see the richest wisdom of all.