Think about our Jewish brothers and sisters today.  At sundown last night, Jews around the world entered into the most sacred time of their year:  the high holy days, the Days of Awe.  Beginning with Rosh Hashana (the New Year) and culminating in Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), these days give every Jew opportunity to reflect on the past and prepare for the future.  They're marked by repentance, discipline, singing, gathering, reading, and meditation, moments of intense inwardness--always in community--regarding one's relationship with his/her fellow human beings and God.



     All of us can learn from the Days of Awe.  All of us can profit from taking time to think, to really think about what and how we are doing with our life, about where we have been, spiritually, vocationally, and personally, and where we want to go, come tomorrow.  In this often shallow, media driven age, we all can benefit from setting ourselves apart to ponder deeper things, to contemplating the greater meaning and realities in which we move.



     Although we may not believe we move in a bigger picture, we fool ourselves if we think we can live meaningfully without accepting the fact of its presence.  We are born for transcendence, we are made to look beyond the immediate and present.  In these Days of Awe, our Jewish brethren remind us that we are more than material concoctions, more than nexuses of chemical exchange.  They tell us that we are creatures of this earth, yes, but simultaneously, to borrow the name of an REM song, creatures of the "Great Beyond."
     Enjoy your pondering.

     In the course of my teaching I have lately had occasion to reread Boethius's medieval classic, Consolation of Philosophy.  All in all, it's a fascinating book.  At the same time, I've been re-reading twentieth century historian Arthur Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being.  While Boethius explores and celebrates, using the figure of Philosophy (a woman), the intricacies of divine providence and human choice and eternal time, Lovejoy ponders how, in a world driven by principles of plentitude and continuity, such things can even exist.  That is, how can providence overcome the plentitude which it itself brought into being?  How can we affirm divine sovereignty while also upholding earthly inexhaustibility?
     Although I do not have any ready answers, I offer that neither position can work without the other.  If there is no God, there is no discernible future.  Yet if there is a God, the future is inexhaustible.
     Which do you prefer?

     Do you like the rain?  In the writings of the ancient near east, people certainly did.  In fact, they expected it:  once in the spring, again in the autumn.  They used the spring rains to plant their crops, and the autumn rains to prepare the soil for planting in the coming spring.  It was a rhythm woven deeply into their lives.


     Today, many Indians expect the monsoons to come with startling regularity, and are often able to predict the precise day they will begin.  Far, far above India's teeming cities, Himalayan mountaineers work within a carefully calibrated window of opportunity framed by the monsoon season:  they know that they must seize the time to climb.

     Although climate change has altered the rhythms of weather patterns all over the world, in some cases overturning them completely, it has not yet succeeded in jettisoning them altogether.  Maybe one day it will; maybe not.  Will the earth survive the human species?  I cannot say.  What I can say, however, is that, despite how human machinations and folly have undercut the predictability of earthly pattern, they will probably not end the life of the planet.

     Life, like the God who established it, is more than who we are.

     Have you heard of the punk rock group Green Day?  If you do, you know that Green Day has been rocking the music world for over twenty years, turning out one hit album after another, doing wildly successful concert tours around the planet, and stirring up substantial media notice with some of its members' issues with drugs.

     It has produced several DVDs about its concerts, too.  A number of years ago, I had occasion to watch one:  "Bullet in a Bible."  I've watched it many times since, and never tire of how it presents one of the band's most famous songs, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams."  Why?  Even as the camera shows a perspiring Billie Joe Armstrong belting out the lyrics, it pans the audience, mostly millennials, mostly people who know the words by heart, and mostly people who, for any number of reasons, seem to connect, in an almost visceral way, with them.


     Armstrong sings of wandering amidst broken dreams, hoping that someone "up there" would find him, but concluding that in the end he will "walk alone," his shadow his only companion.  Powerful words, yet words which fit, I daresay, how many of us view the larger issues of our existence.  Most of us hope that, somehow, someway, there is a bigger picture to our lives, that there is a larger reason why we are here, that we do not live and die without any reason.  Most of us do not wish to live alone, be it alone among our fellow human beings, or the vast maw of the universe.  We want to feel connected to something more than us.
     After all, we're only--and only--human.  Happily, God was once, too.

      "Now is the wind-time, the scattering clattering song-on-the-lawn time early eves and gray days clouds shrouding the traveled ways trees spare and cracked bare slim fingers in the air dry grass in the wind-lash waving waving as the birds pass the sky turns, the wind gusts winter sweeps in it must it must."  (Debra Reinstra, "Autumn")

     It's happened:  the autumnal equinox. It's a good day, a fun time.  Turning leaves and brilliant colors; cool, crisp nights and rich blue skies; the rising of Orion, his three star belt shining resplendently; and light and dark woven with liminality and change:  life displays itself once more.

     In the ancient near east, the land of Egypt, Assyria, Sumer, and Babylon, autumn was a significant moment.  It marked the time of harvest and thanksgiving, a season of expectation--the life giving autumn rains were imminent--and days of ingathering and contemplation.

     So it can be for us.  Amidst our technology and worldly disenchantment, we can learn from our long ago brethren, our many ancestors who placed such tremendous faith in the certainty of the seasons, ordained, as they saw it, by the gods.  It's good to reach ends, and it's equally good to meditate on beginnings; it's good to remember the ceaselessness of the rhythms that ripple through the cosmos.  It's good to ponder the certitude still embedded in a mercurial and capricious world.
     
     In autumn's transforming predictability, we also catch a deeper vision of the creator God.  In a finite and often fractured world, change is inevitable.  Amidst all of our seasons of malleability and change, however, God's love, guidance, and presence remain firm.  Take heart in autumn's changes, and realize, once more, the fact and necessity of an eternal God.

     Holiness?  I thought about holiness the other day as I listened to Australian born singer Megan Washington do her song "Holy Moses."  She is afraid of Moses, she says, afraid of his aura, his aura of holiness, fearful of what it might mean.

    Washington's song underscores our innate human propensity to wonder about what moral perfection really looks like.  Because we are aware that we will never achieve moral perfection, we tend to regard those whom we believe have it with a measure of respect and trepidation, even dread and fear.  Early in the last century, Rudolph Otto, in an influential book, The Idea of the Holy, argued that although we may cower before what we consider to be absolute holiness, we at the same time are drawn to it.  It is a dread of fascination, a dread of compulsion and interest that engenders a quest to know even more.  Like watching a horror movie.



     For this reason, Otto contended, although we may reject the idea of a holiness, particularly in a God, when push comes to shove, we have difficulty escaping it altogether.  Like it or not, it circumscribes who we are:  beings who seek holiness, in some form, yet beings who know that, all things being equal, we will never find it unless we acknowledge our dependence something greater than who and what we are.  We know that we cannot have it both ways.

     As I put it in a chapter on holiness in a book (Thinking about God) I wrote a number of years ago, "Forget about holiness, and you'll be running the rest of your life."

     "Though the mind of a person plans his way," notes the writer of Proverbs 16:9, "the Lord directs his steps."  On the one hand, this seems to put us into a trap:  what happens to our capacity for choice?  On the other hand, it may be a comfort:  someone wiser than we helps us find the better way.  Which should--or can--it be?

     Think about a bird winging its way south for the winter.  Does anyone tell it to go?  Does anyone tell it when to go?  Many decades ago, I was backpacking through the remote Brooks Range of northern Alaska when I chanced upon a duck tending to its affairs in a tiny pond.  I did not expect to see this duck; given the relatively late date (August in the Arctic), I had assumed it and its companions would have been long gone by now.  The next morning, however, it was gone. 
     Somehow, it knew.  And it knew at just the right time.


     As do we.  We know when we are supposed to do things, we know when we are supposed to be a certain way.  Unlike the duck, however, we can choose not to be or do them.  We are more than instinct.  We have a choice.

     Consider the universe.  It steadily spins itself out under the umbra of its creator, gyrating, expanding, turning in on itself as it deepens the abundance of its form and ambiguity.  We little know where it will end up. We only know that it is going.

     As we do for our lives.  We only know that they are going, going somewhere, and going, in an odd way, everywhere, everywhere the universe can be, the universe of our spatiality, the universe of our hearts.

     So, yes, God directs our steps.  But he does so as an infinite God in an infinitely transforming universe.

     The possibilities are endless.

     One of the books I read in the course of my mountain sojourns was Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame.  Although I had read bits and pieces of it in previous years, along with his more famous Les Miserables, this was the first time I had read it all the way through.  I found it to be even more remarkable than I had imagined.
     
     In addition to providing an insightful look at the history and structure of the famous cathedral, Hunchback also presents, in the manner of Beauty and the Beast, a compelling tale of redemption.  Poor Quasimodo, so named because he was considered to only be part human, struggling with identity, meaning and, most significantly, love:  what would his destiny be?  Somehow, he had to set himself free.

     
     Yet as Beauty and the Beast demonstrates, genuine redemption is not necessarily something we create or plan.  It is rather something that comes upon as we live to love.  When the Beast loved, he experienced love in return.  So did Quasimodo, when, in his fractured way--like the Beast--loved, he found love in return.  Not until, however, he died.

     In this, however, is the deepest shape of freedom:  only as we love to our death, the death of what we know, the death of what we think, the death of all to which we cling, will we be genuinely free.  We must let go of our present freedom to find the freedom which we can never lose, be it now or at our earthly passing.

     Perhaps you've heard of The North Face, a leading purveyor of outdoor clothing and equipment that began in the mid-Sixties in Berkeley, California.  Once small, it is now massive, a corporation with thousands of employees around the globe.  Its products are first rate and technically astute:  if you can afford them, buy them.  Everything comes with a lifetime guarantee.
     I've written here before about Doug Tompkins, the entrepreneur who established The North Face and who, tragically, perished in a kayaking accident at the age of seventy-two in 2015.  Before he died, Tompkins and his wife, Kristen, had begun to arrange to donate millions of acres of wilderness in the spectacular Patagonia region of Chile for a series of unforgettably beautiful national parks.
     Recently, Kristen completed the donation process, creating one of the most magnificent stretches of protected wilderness areas on the planet.  Prior to his death, Tompkins was not always understood by the locals; not everyone grasped the importance of what he was doing.  In light of his remarkable donation and how it stirred fresh memories of his passing, however, people have begun to appreciate his vision.  They have come to see his wisdom.

     
Too often wisdom is cast aside in the interests of profit.  In addition, too often wisdom is framed and interpreted through the lens of our own wants and needs.  Rarely do we know whether we can properly call our visions wise.  Who can know?
    Maybe that's why Paul, writing to the church in Corinth, reminded his readers that although we revere much of what we corporately determine is wise, we cannot necessarily insist that it is true, much less truth.  Again, how do we know?
     We don't.  All we know that what is genuinely wise is beyond our human ken.  We are left to pick away at the intimations of the transcendence in which we live our lives.  And to always believe we see, as Paul said, "in a riddle."
     Faith is difficult, isn't it?

     "Look what the universe did for me!"  Have you ever heard someone say this?  Though I'm not always sure what a person means when she puts things this way, I find it curious that, more often than not, I hear it from a person who does not believe in God.  A person who doesn't want God to interfere with her life, a person who feels no need to trust anything bigger than herself.

    Sure, I am well aware of the numerous difficulties that attend a belief in destiny, foreknowledge, or predestination.  No argument there.  Yet it seems that to invoke the universe as an agent is doing no more than substituting an impersonal presence for a personal one as an explanation of agency in our lives.  It really doesn't solve the problem of a world in which physical laws juxtapose with human choice.
     
     We can accept that life is entirely random, yes, but then we must also accept that we are, too.  And I wonder whether, when push comes to shove, anyone really can.

     Innocence, hope, and redemption.  That were the words comprising the title of a symphonic piece I heard this morning.  The announcer played it because he thought that, on the anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001, such words would be appropriate.
     I agree.  Before that September 11, before international terrorism made itself known in the nation with such striking effect, America was, to an extent, akin to how it felt prior to the attack of Pearl Harbor:  innocent.  Set astride a vast continent, separated from the world by two wide oceans, the nation sat, comforted by its wealth, soothed by its ability to remain aloof from the troubles of the rest of the world.

    No more.  Sometimes, however, darkness harbors the deepest hope. Sometimes the coldest and bleakest night creates the brightest of dawns.  Life renews.

     And redemption.  To redeem is to set free.  Perhaps America was, in a peculiar way, redeemed by the events of that fateful September day.  Perhaps America was set free from the complacency it had nurtured over the decades, its blindness to the way that some of its foreign policies had contributed to the attack, its penchant to focus only on itself.  Perhaps 9/11 set America free to realize that it, and the watching world, could be more than the sum of its parts.  Perhaps the terror of the day planted the seeds of a better world.  Like biblical redemption, a redemption of unspeakable darkness that
set humanity's hearts free, so did the darkness of that summer morning liberate us to see that yes, there really is something more to life and existence than simply living them.
     Pain endures, but hope conquers still.

     Although our children are well beyond college, I enjoy seeing other families in our neighborhood sending their children off to school.  For most of us, it's an essential rite of passage.  As I observed one of my bicycling buddies take his son for his freshman year at the University of Wisconsin yesterday, I thought about how he and his wife feel, letting go of their oldest child and only son, setting him off on a new journey, a journey from which he will likely emerge definitively separated from them as he begins a new life of his own. It's hard to let go.  Yet it's also hard to hold on.
     It's an apt parable for our lives.  We try so hard to cling to what we know because in that we find security and, for most of us, control.  Conversely, we ought to try equally hard to let go:  security is welcoming, but it only perpetuates what is already there.  The greater challenge is to embrace the unknown.
     So often have I seen my students, most of them believers in God, balance these polar opposites.  It's never easy.  Yet why believe in God if we cannot trust him?

     Whenever I go away, for whatever reason I do, our cat, aptly named Summer, remains at home and, in her funny little way, greets me upon my return.  Summer has a cute little life, really, a life of routine, yet a life at the same time that is always new and changing.  Like ours.  Year round, her daily patterns remain about the same, exploring the backyard in the morning, having a bit of "breakfast" when she returns, then "retiring" to a comfortable chair for a nap.  In the afternoon, after she is "rested," she does the same thing.  Likewise for the evening (although we do not let her outside after dark).  But one day she might see a butterfly she has never seen before; another day she might find a puddle of water left by the rain from which she can drink; yet another day she comes upon a new flower in the yard.  There's always something "new" to see.

     If she looks for it.  And she does.  Summer is a very curious cat.  Are you a curious human being?  You likely do not sleep as many hours as does a cat (well over eighteen hours a day), and you probably do not thrill over a new puddle of water in your yard.  Nonetheless, we build our lives around the new.  That's how we are made.
   
  Again, only if we look for it.  The world is indeed a remarkable place.  But like Summer, we will never know this if we do not look for its wonders and, more importantly, we realize that, all laws of physics aside, a world without "newness" is a world without transcendent truth.  Newness is only as amazing as the framework in which it occurs.

     Only last week, I was wrapping up my final backpack of the summer, this one a trek with my youngest sister in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California.  We had a lovely time, really, a lovely time hiking through the mountains together:  a wonderful gift!  Though we have both been going to the Sierra since we were children, finding the time, as we "age," to step away from the campers who come to Yosemite and moving ourselves into the high country, is always a treat.  In the high country, the land of flower dappled tundra and quiescent lake, of sculpted peaks towering over dense river valleys, of entirely  cloudless and ever blue sky, we find another world, a world which, as my sister remarked on our first night out, that is "real."
     Not that the world we inhabit outside the mountains is unreal; it is quite real.  Yet in the world of the mountains, a world in which what is important is gazing across a glistening lake or taking in the alpen glow of a sunset, we find life distilled into its essential purity:  sheer beauty.  It's the beauty of nature, it's the beauty of our companions, it's the beauty of God.
     As the famous Scottish mountaineer John Muir observed upon hiking through the Sierra for the first time, "These mountains are the finest temples to God."
     You may believe, you may not.  But I suspect you'd be hard pressed to deny the fact of a beauty you cannot fully understand.

     As we in the West leave the traditional summer behind, we might find ourselves remembering some of its joys.  Perhaps we remember a trip we took, or maybe a family reunion.  Perhaps a baseball game.  Maybe a wedding, maybe a birth.  Whatever our memory may be, we remember it in the enduring warmth and expansiveness of the summer, the season when many of us try to make time to do something for which we do not have time at other parts of the year, a season when we can go outside without bundling ourselves up, a time when we just hang out with family and friends.  Either way, we remember those summer days as wonderful gifts in our lives.

     Not to say that summer is over:  almost a month remains until the autumnal equinox.  It is to say, however, that as, in some fashion, the weather changes and our lives resume their "normal" rhythms, we remain grateful for the opportunity, for a season, to let go, to loose ourselves, even for a little while, of our responsibilities.  To lose ourselves in the wonder of just "being" in the world
     Although with climate change, summer is beginning to look very different in many parts of the world, its inevitability remains constant:  it will always happen.
     Thank goodness--and God--for the rainbow.

     Earlier this week, America (and Canada) celebrated Labor Day.  It's a good day.  It's a day to take time to think about and honor those who, like most of us, work, those who, day after day after day, engage in some type of vocational occupation.
     Most of us accept work as an inevitable fact of existence.  In many respects, it is. However, not all of us enjoy getting up for work each day. Nonetheless, to work is to be human, and to be human is to work.  Working enables us to discover our humanness most fully.  Ideally, work challenges us, involves us, equips us, fills us.  Working gives us a more complete grasp of who we are in our world.

     More broadly speaking, 

work has a point.  When we work, however enthusiastically, imperfectly, or apathetically we do so, we affirm our meaningfulness.  Whether we know it or not, when we work, we are contributing and communicating.  We are contributing to the greater good of the planet, we are communicating the presence of a meaningful world.  We are underscoring that life has a meaning greater than merely living day to day.  We are stating that although, yes, we must in most instances work to survive, we nevertheless see hope and meaning beyond it.  We affirm that we are made with purpose.

      Absent an intentional beginning, shorn of a God, the cosmos has no reason to be.  And we have no reason to work.  Beyond the authenticating boost it might give us, a boost which never lasts, why would it matter?  We live, work, and die.
     Oddly enough, work, whatever it may be, testifies to the fact of a meaningful universe, a therefore personal universe, a universe which, therefore in turn, is made, somehow, some way, by a personal God.