This is our world," David Petersen writes in his On the Wild Edge:  In Search of  Natural Life, and "it is all that ever will be."  This is a classic statement of naturalism, the idea that this world represents the sum of all that we can know, all to which we can go to discover purpose and meaning.  We do not need anything outside of or beyond this world to decide what is real, valuable, and true; we only need this world, this  remarkable sphere of materiality and undeserved grace on which we live, to know what life is all about.
     On the surface, this assertion seems to make sense.  Why, if we live in this world, do we need to look anywhere else for what this world means?  Why, given that this world is the foundation of all that we think and do, must we suppose that we should look in other places to decide what it really means?  We're here and, as the writer Joan Didion put it in a university commencement address a few years ago, "should get on with it."
     
     However attractive this perspective may seem, it overlooks one very important fact:  we cannot know, with absolute certainty, whether this world is indeed "all that is"  Finite creatures that we are, we simply cannot honestly conclude that, without any doubt, what we see and experience every day is all that we will ever experience, or that it is all from which we may draw any ideas for determining truth and meaning.  It is beyond our capacity to fully discern and see.


     Moreover, if we indeed insist that this world is all that we need to explain this world, then we are forced to ask another troublesome question:  how we can use a world whose precise meaning we do not know, a world we ourselves did not make, in order to decide what it means?  We're proving meaning on the basis of what is we already think--without any proof--is meaningful.  It is circular through and through.
     
     What can we do?  As the writer of Proverbs (Proverbs 29:18) suggested many millennia ago, we must look to a source of information and content beyond the world to find what the world--and us in it--means.  We look to revelation, truth that we did not manufacture or make, truth that we did not previously know to make sense of this bewildering existence.  Without revelation, without input from that which necessarily frames the world, we will never know what is really true.  How could we?  Truth is only genuine if it is absolute, and a mercurial and shifting and ebbing world will never be absolute.  It will always be contingent.
     We need revelation to really see.

     Last week, my wife and I took time to visit the Holocaust Museum in Skokie, Illinois.  Although we hope to one day take in its counterpart in Washington, D.C., the institution in Skokie is, surely, the next best thing.

     We are not sorry we went.  While we are quite familiar with the historical underpinnings and existential circumstances of the Holocaust (and given that I've taught about it for decades), we were nonetheless moved.  There is something about experiencing the raw physicality of the concentration camps, the railroad car used for transport, the guns of the guards, the mountains of skeletons, the direct testimony of survivors, the uniforms the prisoners were forced to wear, and more, that enables one to step more fully into the horror of what that unspeakably dark period of human atrocity really means.

    
 I will not here attempt to explicate the many, many layers of the Holocaust's meaning for humanity.  I will leave that for you to discern.  However, I will observe that although it seems that a dictatorial governments initiate more acts of genocide, never suppose that genocide cannot happen in a democracy.  Portents abound throughout the West.  We humans tread a very narrow ledge between fighting for good and promoting evil.  And we rarely know, precisely, when we are definitively walking on either side.

     "If we can measure the metaphysical," Paul suggested to me, "then maybe it's not the metaphysical."  An atheist for most of his life, Paul holds to atheism for two principal reasons:  the "suffering of innocents" and "why can't everyone have a road to Damascus [how the apostle Paul came to believe in Jesus] experience?"  A third one, I learned as we talked over coffee and tea one afternoon, is our inability to measure the metaphysical.

     Paul has a good point.  How indeed can we measure something we cannot see?  It seems to be a non-starter.  Let me suggest that maybe the problem lies in how we look at measurement.  When we measure something, we are assuming that the instruments with which we do the measurement are accurate and reliable.  We also assume that how we are measuring is reliable and true.  Put another way, we measure according to how we have chosen to trust, frame, and understand the world.  While this usually works, it is not as effective when we must measure something we do not necessarily understand.  Or something we cannot see.  Consider dark matter.  We only know of its existence by measuring its effects, that is, the spaces between stars and galaxies, the gravitational pull that seems to hold the universe together, the expanding universe.  We cannot see it. But we assume it's there:  what else could be "there"?
     It seems that we might detect and measure the metaphysical in the same way:  understanding what we cannot see by looking at what we can.

     Most people, I suspect, are at least peripherally familiar with the great British scientist and mathematician Isaac Newton.  Moreover, most of us, I suspect as well, know that he is remembered for his "discovery" of gravity, a discovery that led humanity to realign nearly everything it had previously believed about the structure and workings of the universe.
     A good deal of this realignment had to do with religion.  During the Middle Ages, the era in Western Europe that preceded the period (generally called the Scientific Revolution) in which Newton made his discovery, the Church (at that time solely Catholic) determined what was right and true.  Few dared challenge it.
     As modern science (which, by the way, most historians believe, found its genesis in the then prevailing belief that because God had made it, the universe was one of rationality and order and therefore amenable to thoughtful investigation), bolstered by the development of instruments such as the microscope and telescope, began to learn more about how the universe worked, however, most intellectuals came to view the Church's authority on such matters as decidedly less credible.  As they saw it, it was the scientific method, developed by Francis Bacon, that now constituted the means by which responsible people should ascertain the inner structure of the cosmos.  Nonetheless, nearly all of these scientists continued to believe in God, and to place him as the center and impetus of creation.
     Newton was no exception.  Writing on page 440 of his famous Principia (translated from its original Latin), the mathematician observed the following:

     "And lest the systems of the fixed stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other mutually, he hath placed those systems at immense distances one from another."

      The way Newton put this is highly instructive.  He allows gravity to be the sovereign force that governs the movements of the stars (the "heavens"), yet notes that it is only able to do so effectively because the Creator (God) had set the stars in a certain way. Although we can argue about how God did so--whether he simply "spoke" it or used natural forces to execute his vision--we come away with an intriguing juxtaposition of divine presence and natural capacities.  It is a juxtaposition in which we see a perfectly balanced picture of supernatural and natural in which to frame our understanding of the universe.  God is there, yet gravity is, too, natural as well as supernatural, both present, both necessary, both contributing, both upholding, both ensuring the existence of the cosmos.

     Many years ago, when the church we were attending was preparing to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, I was asked to write the script for the video presentation a committee was developing to commemorate the occasion.  After some thought and prayer, I settled on the initial verses of Psalm 90 as my opening.  They read, "Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations.  Before the mountains were born or You gave birth to the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God."

     Big picture, we little humans have no clue as to how things appear when they do or why things happen as they do.  Usually, all we see are the effects and results.  In like manner, when my church began those fifty years ago, no one knew what would happen.  All they knew was that they believed that their efforts were in the hands of God.

     One Sunday when we were in Nova Scotia last month, we decided to attend church.  It was a little white building on a lonely road in the Cape Breton highlands.  Like many Canadian churches, it was in the United Church tradition.  It had been established in 1832.  I have no doubt that its founders believed precisely what the founders of my church did:  their efforts were in the hands of God.

     And still are.  The threads of belief are lengthy; we cannot measure their full effects.  But their longevity should tell us something about the nature of belief:  if it is rooted in truth, it will endure.

     As I write, the British band the Who are doing yet another world tour.  Its two surviving members, Roger Daltrey and Peter Townshend, well into their seventies, continue to enjoy doing music.  And we are grateful they are.
     Some of us recall how, in the Who's early days, upon completing a performance, the band members, particularly Pete Townshend, would proceed to smash their instruments on stage.  It was part of their act, part of how they saw their music as an expression of an almost anarchaic protest of the stilted manner in which so many of us lived.


     While we can agree or disagree on the merits of such actions, I write about them because I recently came across the obituary of one Alan Rogan.  His job?  Rogan's job was to repair Pete Townshend's guitars in the aftermath of his carnage.  It is an odd thing for which to be remembered, but that's how I noticed his obit in the newspaper.  On the other hand, someone, I guess, had to do it:  Pete had some very expensive guitars.  He couldn't readily afford to buy a new one every week.

     We do not have the capacity to measure the worth of a life.  We cannot see beyond it.  We can't always see it in a bigger picture.  We're only finite human beings.  How Rogan's work fit into this picture I'm not fully sure, but when I was writing my first book and needed permission from Pete Townshend to excerpt a line from his "I'm Free" in my manuscript, one of his representatives called me and told me that Pete had granted me permission, gratis.  I was so grateful:  permissions are often very expensive.
     As Ecclesiastes observes, "we do not know the activity of God who makes all things."  Thanks, Alan, for repairing Pete's guitars.

     Maybe you've heard of Pyotr Pavlensky.  He is a Russian street artist whose art has made quite a splash in Europe lately.  Why?  Pavlensky's art is rooted in him mutilating himself.
     Some of us may be asking whether this is art.  If art is expression, then it is.  Pavlensky does art with a purpose, to make a point.  We may not like it, we may find it repulsive, but we should at least examine its point.  In the same way that Pussy Riot used the interior of a Russian Orthodox cathedral to play music as a protest to what they considered to be Vladimir Putin's repressive policies, Pavlensky uses his own body to lodge his dissent of the same.  At times, his actions make us cringe:  wrapping himself in barbed wire or nailing his scrotum to the pavement of the Red Square.  But like most street theatre, it is art that attracts attention.  And that is the point:  expression as protest.
     More broadly speaking, however, all art is protest.  It is protest against accepting what is and an openness to what could be.  It takes what is there and makes something new, something that has never been seen before.  Art makes us think.  It makes us think about what else, in this broken world, is possible.  We need it desperately.
     Even from a person who mutilates himself.  Even Pavlensky, a person made in the image of God, has reason to be.

     Some years ago, I was asked by a student who apparently believed that I had some sort of ultimate insight into what life means, to say what I believed to be the secret to living.  What a question!  It is a question, I daresay, no one should think he or she can ever fully answer.
     But I tried.  First, I mentioned the importance of gratitude.  Every day we should remember that everything we have, even life itself, is a gift:  we did nothing to earn our way into being alive.  We did nothing to be born with the genes we possess.  We did nothing to merit where or how we were born.  It's all a gift, a gift of, ultimately, God, but a gift which he has mediated through the fractured workings of this world.  Moreover, whatever we have achieved in this life, however one measures achievement, yes, we have done so through our efforts, but these were efforts enabled, big picture, by that with which we were born, things with which we had nothing to do.
     Second, I mentioned humility.  When we exercise humility, we are telling ourselves, and the world, that, again, we did not come into this life on our own power or volition.  Although we may be gifted and talented, we did nothing to merit such:  we are ultimately creatures who, as Genesis puts it, came from dust and, one day, will return to dust.  Sure, we can be proud of what we may have done, but we do well to remember that, in the end, we are but one more set of human beings, a few human beings among billions and billions of others, who have strode across this planet:  are we really that special?
     In God's eyes, we of course are.  But we remain human, contingent, dependent, needy.  Perhaps we are strong now, but one day we will not be.  We are victims of our mortality.  Humility is recognizing who we most are:  loved greatly, but enormously fragile.
     We are only ourselves.

     As various Republican politicians, including the American president, increasingly use terms like socialism or communism to describe the views of their Democratic counterparts, I wonder whether any of them have really read the Bible, the book whose teachings many of them profess to obey.
     Consider the second chapter of Acts.  The final verses of this chapter recount the lives of the earliest believers, those who came to faith in the weeks immediately following Jesus' ascension.  Moved and amazed by numerous eyewitnesses accounts of the resurrected Jesus, they proceeded to live in a way that, to our twenty-first century eyes, wholeheartedly rejected Adam Smith's thesis, a thesis that is the foundation of modern capitalism, that everyone who enters the marketplace is to seek his "own self-interest," never that of others.
     As the text puts it, these believers, "Had all things in common, and they began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with all, as anyone might have need.  Day by day continuing with one mind in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, they were taking their meals together with gladness and sincerity of heart" (Acts 2:44-46).
     Some commentators have called this passage a picture of "Christian communism."  Perhaps.  My larger point is that although neither socialism and communism are perfect, capitalism is definitively not, either.  None fully represent a totally biblical view of economics.  To claim otherwise is the mockery of which Proverbs constantly decries.
     Christianity isn't about getting for oneself.  It's not NIMBY (not in my backyard).  It's not about hoarding for one's own pleasures.  And it's not about insisting that capitalism has been ordained by God.
     Christianity is about giving; selfless, sacrificial giving:  to everyone.

     Was it really worth a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court?  Was it really worth moving the American embassy to Jerusalem?  That are my questions for the many white evangelicals who helped put Donald Trump into the presidency.  Were these objectives worth voting for an unapologetic misogynist, makes racist remarks then states that he does so because people agree with him (as if that makes it right), and makes very clear his intention to use, negatively, race and ethnicity to win a second term?
    As a white evangelical who DID NOT vote for Trump, I see absolutely no way that it does.
     He's using you, my friends.  And we're all paying the price. 

     Another life?  In my atheist discussion group last week, we talked about life after death.  Although for most of the people in the room the notion of an afterlife was a non-starter, one person wondered, "What will happen to the person who is "me," the person I have come to know as "me" when "I" die?
     Most told him that, well, you'll be gone.  There won't be anything to know.  The story will be over.  I suppose so.  But Phil's query prompts other questions in turn:  why do we wonder what happens to us?  Why do we always want to know what we cannot, in this life, know?  What does this say about us?

     Either that we are naturally curious or, alternatively, we really are creatures of eternity.  Or both.  Regardless, we work ourselves into intellectual conniptions if we insist that our longing to know means nothing beyond the simple fact of its existence.

     In the introduction to their Summer:  A Spiritual Biography, editors Gary Schmidt and Susan Felch note that, during the summer, time becomes a "pool."  That is, amidst the lengthy days, warmer temperatures, and a languid sense of inactivity, we do not, indeed, in one sense, we cannot, measure time as we do during the colder months.  In a way, they suggest, in the summer we are living beyond time, beyond the other seasons' diurnal constraints, the tensions of waking up and going to sleep in darkness day after day, of racing frantically to complete a task before nightfall.  We do not need to:  time seems to transcend itself.

     Many times in my mountain backpacks, I have come upon remote alpine meadows, quiescent pockets of verdancy, grass and tundra covered with wildflowers, streams running lazily, sun shining continuously.  It's a vision of near complete equanimity and bliss.  Time really does seem to stand still.
     Imagine if we could live beyond time, all the time, ensconced in a meadow for eternity.  What would life be like?

     A musician, an artist:  colorists consummate, each paints images of the world.  The one does so with his music, the other with her brushes.  In looking at Schumann's music earlier this week, we observed its sense of fantasy and wonder, its blend of reality and magic, the way that its melodies transport us to new lands.  When we turn to the work of the Dutch artist Rembrandt Harenszoon van Rijin, otherwise known as Rembrandt, we stumble into an equally remarkable vista, one of profound detail infused with rich and vibrant color.  We often wonder whether our world is really this amazing.

      Perhaps it is.  Perhaps what Rembrandt most does for us to open our eyes a bit, to allow us to shed our preconceptions about existence, the often utilitarian way that we view being alive, to encourage us to let our imaginations roam to what could be--and what ought to be.  Maybe Rembrandt is showing us how to look for more than we expect to see.


     To see what is really there.  What is, in the "Return of the Prodigal Son" pictured to the left, most working in the lives of those so portrayed:  the love of God.

     I've always enjoyed thinking about sled dogs, those incredibly durable animals who absolutely delight in pulling heavily weighted sleds across miles and miles of snow.  Unlike most animals, including people, who are usually looking for a way to get out of work or a way to make a given task easier, sled dogs cannot wait to do what they have been bred to do.  They live to pull a sled.
     In This Much Country, her recently published memoir of her life in the backcountry of Alaska, Kristin Knight Pace writes movingly about her affections for her sled dogs.  She tells of her many adventures with them, particularly their days on the Yukon Quest and Iditarod, perhaps the most famous dog mushing races in the world.  Over and over, she tells of how once she harnessed the dogs up each morning on these races, they are more than ready to go, more than ready to push through the hundreds of miles of fresh snow--and minus twenty or thirty degree temperatures--that await them.  It's quite amazing. She loves her dogs like her own children.
     As a long time traveler of the Arctic and similarly wild places, I reveled in Pace's descriptions of the vast lands through which she and her dog teams traveled.  With its starkly circumscribed vistas of mountain, lake, and tundra, and its immense emptiness and isolation, the Arctic is not for everyone.  But it is provocative and amazing.
     On the other hand, just as sled dogs are bred to pull, so are we designed to explore.  We are made to adventure, seek out, and pursue.  Although how these will happen differs for everyone, in the joy, tenacity, and loyalty of a sled dog we see glimmers of perhaps how it should:  in the firm yet boundless love of a creator God.

     Early last month, the world of music remembered the birthday of the composer Robert Schumann.  Like so many of his contemporaries, Schumann died young, passing out of this world at the age of 45.  In his relatively short life, however, he composed some of the most lovely and ethereal melodies of all time.  His music was full of fantastic and images of other worlds, challenging us to dig ever more deeply into who we really are.

     Ah, the Romantics.  Rebels to the Industrial Revolution, advocates of the senses and imagination, creators of a new picture of God.  Sliding in and out of the nineteenth century, the Romantics strove to push Western Europe past its obsession with technology and open its eyes to new possibilities of what humanity can be.  We are not mere robots of mind and materiality, they said, but creatures of the heart.

     And why not?  We live in a personal world created by a personal God.  Unless we acknowledge this, we would not otherwise know what to do with whom we suppose ourselves to be.

     I know that the United States celebrated Independence Day last week.  Though because I was traveling out of the country, I didn't see the usual evidences, but it was OK.  It was good to experience a wider world.
     There is freedom, and there is freedom.  One day, while talking to a group of his opponents, Jesus remarked, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:32).  What did Jesus mean?  We all deserve personal freedom, yes, and we all deserve to know truth.  Both are within our grasp as human beings.  
     Genuine freedom, however, is more than either one.  Genuine freedom is understanding why we can even entertain the idea of freedom at all, why we are beings who are capable of comprehending such a thing.  Genuine freedom is knowing why we are here, why we are how we are, and why one day we will no longer be around.  And these are questions that, finite and limited that we are, we will never understand on our own.  How can we?
     Be it July 1, July 4, July 14, or any other day of independence around the planet, we do well to remember that although we're free to be free, we are not free to be free to be free.
     It's a fragile thing, freedom:  treasure it as nothing else.  It's the gift of God.