After an invigorating and, oddly, meditative backpacking sojourn in the Colorado Rockies, I today prepare to leave once again for a backpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California.  It is very likely my "last hurrah" for a while.

     In the Colorado backpack, I hiked with two dear college friends.  In the California backpack, I'll be hiking with my youngest sister.  As I reflect on the trip to America's Rockies, I am struck that, in an eventuality of which I had no inkling beforehand, we ended up following a trail on which my wife and I had hiked forty years before.  It was mind boggling, really, to revisit a trail so full of memories, a trail that represented our first foray into the wilderness together, all those decades in the past.

     But the mountains had not changed.  The peaks were as jagged as ever, the meadows still overflowed with wildflowers, and the lake, our destination, as lovely and serene as it was forty years before.  It was a picture of timelessness, really, a picture of the incredible ability of a landscape, when untouched by human hands, to sustain itself, presenting wonder for every successive generation of backpacker to tread its depths.  It reminded me of a time, as I backpacked through Alaska's Brooks Range in 1972, I emerged from a thicket of willow bushes to see a grizzly sow and her cubs some fifty yards away.  Happily, the sow didn't seem to detect my presence.  As I delicately spurred away, however, I thought of how wonderful it was that this family of grizzlies is able to continue its ways, unbothered by human intrusion:  all sense of time and chronology vanishes.
     One of my Colorado companions believed in God; one did not.  The one who did not often struggled to balance his sense that something spiritual ran through this world with the notion that, on the other hand, this could not possibly be.
    Who is right?  Without claiming ultimate insight, I suggest that if time can stand still, it needs somewhere, something bigger than what it is, in which to do so.
     Thanks for reading.  I'll catch up when I return next week.

     It's an old debate, one to which I've referred numerous times:  divine sovereignty and human will.  I mention it now because I've been thinking about how hard it is to live with the prospect of a metaphysical.  By its nature, the metaphysical invites tension. For starters, we can't see it.  And if we attribute to the metaphysical some ability to confer worldly value, such as human worth or cosmic meaning, we compound the issue.  How do we measure such assertions?  How do we compare what we see with what we do not while believing that they are both true?

     On the other hand, if the metaphysical exists, and if it exercises some degree of activity in this material reality, we will always find ourselves wrestling with its relationship to the fact of human will.  They're both real, they're both true.  By themselves, they do not always make sense, yet together they do not always, either.

     So what do we do?  We decide that we can live without knowing everything fully even while we resolve to live knowing everything fully, everything, that is, we can hear, taste, smell, touch, and see, yet also everything, that is, we do not.  We cannot escape our finitude, we cannot elude our place.  We're sovereign, yet God is, too.  It's a story both of us begin, yet it's a story only one of us will end.
     The challenges--and joys--of humanness.
     By the way, I'll be traveling for the next week or so, backpacking in the mountains of the West.  I'll catch up when I return.  Thanks for reading!

     Perhaps few people have been so convinced of the greatness of humanity (and the absence of God) as the twentieth century anarchist Emma Goldman.  In her fiery speeches and voluminous literary output, Goldman encouraged the formation of numerous movements to set workers and, in truth, all humanity free.  To set it free from its oppressive bosses, free from its restrictive governments, free from its social conventions and, most importantly, free from religion.

     Writing in The Philosophy of Atheism, which she published in 1916, Ms. Goldman remarked that, "Atheism in its negation of gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty," and that, "Under the lash of the Theistic idea, this earth has served no other purpose than as a temporary station to test man's capacity for immolation to the will of God."

     On the one hand, it's not difficult to disagree with Goldman.  Wrongly interpreted, religion does tend to reduce our existence on this earth to a way station, a stepping stone to something which, absent a direct vision or attestation, cannot be fully proven.  In addition, religion, as it has sometimes been interpreted, tends to denigrate the human being, claiming that humans are little more than the spittle of the divine.  Also, needless to say, religion has, alas, been responsible for countless pain and wars throughout history.

     On the other hand, rightly interpreted, religion has brought immense joy and happiness and meaning to millions, perhaps billions of human beings.  It has also provided many answers to ultimate questions.  Religion has brought hope.  While this of course doesn't make religion true, it certainly proves its worth in the human experience.  Religion is not wholly without merit.

     Goldman asserts that atheism is the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty.  Countless adherents of religion would assert this about religion, too.  But we can't have it both ways.  If humanity is solely material, how can it have eternal longings?
     It's hard to escape eternity.