In talking about the history of perhaps the most famous of Scandinavian peoples, the Vikings, the other day, I mentioned that aside from their well deserved reputation for ferocity, the Vikings were explorers of global renown.  They sailed farther west than anyone before them, traveling as far as Greenland and, eventually, the shores of Newfoundland, establishing settlements which we can still see, albeit in considerably different form, today.  Well before Columbus "sailed the blue," the Vikings had gone to the New World and back.

     Some centuries after the Vikings' heyday, Genghis Khan and his Mongol armies, whose reputation for cruelty perhaps exceeded that of the Vikings, conquered most of the known world, establishing a kingdom that would last for several centuries.  Yet in so doing, the Mongols brought stability to the Silk Road, that ancient connection between East and West, enabling commerce and exchange between these very different expressions of human culture.  Much happened.  As the Vikings pioneered international exploration, so the Mongols opened the door to the European Renaissance.  Ironically, it took those considered lowest on the prevailing cultural totem pole to enlighten those "higher" to the real truth of the world.
     It's a funny sort of wisdom, really, not the wisdom most people would consider genuinely true.  Yet it changed the course of history, changed it, in large part, for the good.
     It almost makes one think the universe really does have a point.  And a God.
     

     "Ice," says artist Zaria Forman, "crackles and pops."  It's a visual image of "familiarity" amidst the remote.  "It's a really beautiful sound."  Forman's paintings, always done in pastels, mostly blues and whites, portray snow, glaciers, and ice.  They reimage some of the harshest and most isolated places on the planet, mixing frigid blue oceans with white calving icebergs in striking portraits of wonder, vulnerability, and terror.
     Wonder?  This is easy:  the sheer magnitude of our planet's sheets of ice rightly inspire awe.  But terror?  Absolutely:  the terror of loss, of distance, of vanished time.  The annals of polar explorers, North or South, speak eloquently and about the unspeakable isolation these lands engender, the way they swallow all sense of space and passage.

     Vulnerability, well, this seems obvious:  little can we do to make any sense of these massively powerful stories of snow and ice.  So does Forman's art remind us of our very human vulnerability before the places and patterns of the planet.  We are in awe of our world, yet helpless to explain it fully.
     When we overlook our vulnerability, when we forget our human humility, when we stop being honest about who we are, we step into another terror, the terror of confidence, the frightening confidence that we, and we alone, are the arbiters of the ways of the planet.
     How we delude ourselves in imagining that we know more than that from which we came.

     Have you seen The Matrix?  You may well have:  it's a perennially popular movie.  That's why I've used its famous scene with the blue and red pill hundreds of times in my teaching:  I know almost everyone will be familiar with it.  I thought about this scene when I recently came across an interview with FaZe a group of people who, unless you're a teenager, you may not know much about.  No matter:  FaZe is an internet sensation.  Why?  Though I could offer a number of sociological theories in response, I'll instead mention a remark one of its members made in the interview.
     "Eventually we will all live in the internet, and I want to exist in that world.  That's where I see us."
     As those who have seen The Matrix know, in the blue and red pill sequence, Morpheus offers Neo a choice.  Pick the blue and you'll live a life of peace and tranquility:  nothing in your world will change.  Pick the red, and you will enter into a life of great hardship, risk, and challenge.  And discovery.

     Like most of us, I appreciate the internet greatly.  I could not do this blog without it.  However, it's not the world; it's not reality.  It's merely a skein we lay on both.  If we wish to live in a skein, sliding and easing our way through existence, we can.  If we really wish to find existence, however, we need to dig into it.  We need to rejoice in its illuminations even while we may cower at its challenge.
     On the other hand, to quote some famous words of Jesus, we will know the truth, and the truth will make us free.
     Which pill will you choose?

     "Not all who wander," observed Lord of the Rings author J. R. R. Tolkien, "are lost."  Isn't this like the human being?  When we wander, we let go.  We let go of our plans and intentions, set aside our immediate ambitions.  We step away from the past, cast aside the future.  We don't plan, we don't frame.  We don't set a time.

     But are we lost?  Over twenty years ago, I read an interview with a person I'll call James, a prisoner on death row in the state of Texas.  Earlier in his life, many years before, in fact, James murdered another human being.  In a week, he was to be executed for his crime.  All his life, James had, by his own account, wandered.  He never thought about what his life meant, never thought about where it began or where it was going.  He only did what was immediately before him.


     By his own account, James was lost.

     At some point in his imprisonment, however, James embraced Christianity.  He gave his heart to Jesus.  Everything changed.  Though he continued to wander, to wander through the permutations of the appeals processes of death row, to wander through the many doors he found in his new life with Jesus, he no longer felt lost.  He knew, ultimately, where he was going.  As he put it in the interview, "All my life, I never had a home.  Now I'm going to have one."

     Sometimes we wander, sometimes we make plans.  Still other times, we have no clue about either one.  Perhaps it is when we are the most lost that we are the most found.

     Perhaps you've heard the phrase, "There is nothing new under the sun."  Believe it or not, this line comes from the book of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible.  It was written by a person who, like many a philosopher and thinker, had had a good deal of leisure time to reflect on the meaning of existence.
     And that was his conclusion:  although every successive generation of human beings develops new art, literature, and technology, all of these are, at best, reiterations of those that have proceeded them.  This is not to discount the creative force between each iteration, for it is singularly magnificent.  Yet it is to underscore the futility, the hidden futility of these endeavors, that in the biggest possible picture they are merely clones, parallels, and duplicates of something else.  And what's the point?
     So, the writer observes, it is this:  we will only find genuine newness when we look for more than that of which we think newness consists.

     The recently deceased artist Gillian Jagger (no relation to MIck) once said, "I felt that nature held the truth I wanted."  Jagger understand the human being very well.  Rarely do we find the truth in ourselves:  we need another perspective, one outside of ourselves, to discern what might be ultimately true.  For Jagger, it was nature; for others, it is science; for some, it is spirituality and religion; for still others, it is God.

     "What's truth?" Pontius Pilate asked Jesus.  Jesus didn't answer.  When we look at Jagger's art, we might see why.  As one critic said of her work, "Sometimes it felt like it was shattering.  It's not work that lies and sleeps.  It's work that kind of shakes one."
     If truth doesn't shatter us, it's not worth knowing.

      I was camped in the Canadian Rockies, my tent perched on the edge of the Athabasca River, "Old Man" Mountain to my north, Mt. Edith Cavell to my south.  I had been there for several weeks, hanging out with a number of other itinerant youths in search of the lost meaning of the now vanished Sixties.

     One of the group was a guitarist.  As we sat around the campfire one night, he played Bob Dylan's "Heaven's Door."  It fit:  though we were not expecting to see our earthly end any time soon, we were all looking for what this earthly existence meant, what being alive was all about, what we should think when, decades later, we took our last breath.
     We didn't want to still be knocking on heaven's door.  If there was to be darkness, we wouldn't want to see.

     Don't we all?  You may believe in heaven, you may reject the afterlife altogether.  You may be looking, you may think you have found your life meaning.  We all want hope, we all want meaning.  We all want to find what it means to live, to grasp the essence of beingness.

     And that's the point.  Absent our hope, we would not be human.  And absent a hope of more than what we now see, we would not be--really "be"--at all.

     As you may know, today, November 11, is Veterans Day in the U.S.  As most students of World War I are aware, November 11, 1918, marks the day that the armistice of World War I took effect (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month).
     
     All things considered, I would rather the nations of the world never fight again.  I do not live to engage in war and combat, and I do not favor using war to resolve international differences.  Broadly speaking, I do not believe that God does, either.

     Yet wars happen, and many people feel called to or are conscripted to fight in them. Unfortunately, while some survive, far too many do not.  And this doesn't count the untold numbers of civilians who perish, as well.  War's tragedy is immense.  Veterans Day is therefore a mixed bag, a remembrance of a heart aching nexus of duty, honor, suffering, and pain.  When I think about Veterans Day, I therefore think about such things; I think about heartfelt conviction, I think about the subtle character of sin.  I think about the beauty of peace and and the joy of human compassion.  And I wonder how God, in Jesus Christ, one day intends to set all these ambiguities right.  And I try to put all of these together.

     It's not easy.  It's not easy to know what, amid the forest, God thinks.  It's not easy to know what eternity, the lens by which all things will be assessed, envisioned, and judged, means.  We live in a riddle.  Yet God is present, in peace as well as war, his love for us ever unchanged.

     And maybe, in all of our human stumblings and beautiful yet flawed rationality, that's what we most need to know.

     A book that is currently making the rounds of the mainline book reviews is a new biography of the social critic Susan Sontag.  Although Sontag died of cancer some years ago, she remains a presence in many discussions about culture and society.  In her essays and novels, she offered some profound insights into the nature of how we think about things like art, photography, and disease.
     A number of years after her death, her son, David Rieff, published a book about her final months and days.  Titled Swimming in a Sea of Death, it was a moving portrait of a person who loved life dearly and was therefore deeply anguished that she had to let go of it so soon.  She died at the age of seventy-one.

     At one point in this new biography, the author quotes an exchange between Sontag and a nurse after the latter informed her that her remaining time was waning rapidly.  "You might want to take this time," the nurse suggested, "to concentrate on your spiritual values."
     "I have no spiritual values," Sontag replied.
     It's a striking statement.  Whether we believe in God and, sometimes by extension, an afterlife, or not, we all tangle constantly with the notion that we think and dream in terms other than raw materiality.
     Particularly if we deny that we do so.  

     Although he died in an asylum at the end of the nineteenth century, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche continues to speak to us today.  I recently came across a rarely published addendum to his work, Will to Power, and share it here.  
     
     So does Nietzsche write, "All these bold birds who fly out into the wide, widest open--it is true!  At some point the will not be able to fly any farther and . . . But who would want to conclude from this that there was no longer a vast and prodigious trajectory ahead of them.  All our great mentors and precursors have finally come to a stop  . . . and it will also happen to you and me!  Of what concern, however, is that to you and me!  Other birds will fly farther!"

     Although divining the precise intentions of Nietzsche's mind is difficult, it seems that what he is saying here is that even though we one day will "fly" no longer, others will.  The human adventure will continue.  It's a reassuring thought.  By the time he penned these words, Nietzsche, though he was the son of a Lutheran pastor, had come to reject everything about Christianity and its promise of eternal life.  It was a religion for weaklings, he averred.  Better to live bravely and die!
     Maybe so.  Our humanity is indeed wondrous and grand and, to this point, seemingly capable of sustaining progeny, seemingly capable of birthing even more "birds" to extend its experience of existence beyond the present.
     And then what?  Absent an eternal, when humanity is over, it will be as if it had never existed at all.

     It's an ancient story.  After he fled from his brother Esau, the one from whom he had stolen his father's birthright blessing, Jacob, as the Genesis account tells us, spent the night at the Jabbok River.  There he wrestled with a man until daybreak.  As morning dawned, the man, who was in fact an angel, perhaps even God himself, left Jacob.  Before he did, however, he gave him a new name:  Israel.  That is, "the one who struggles with God."

Eugene Delacroix, "Jacob wrestling with the Angel"

     It's an apt portrait of the human experience.  Though not all of us may struggle with God directly, we all struggle with understanding ourselves and our lives.  We all wrestle with life's meaning and the puzzles of existence.  We all feel as if we do not always know why the world goes the way it does, why things happen as they do.  After all, we are only human.
     
     But that's the angel's point:  to be human is to struggle.  It is to struggle with capacity, it is to struggle with choice.  It is to struggle with the emptiness of contingency and the darkness of finitude.  And to realize that, over and above it all, contingency's emptiness and finitude's frustrations only exist because infinitude surrounds and defines them.
     
     Otherwise, there would be no point to anything.

     Yesterday, we thought about Halloween, the night of the hidden, the dead and gone.  In contrast, today we think about All Souls Day.  In Halloween or, to use the Celtic term, Samhain, we remember what we never knew, the dark, the mysterious, the frightening and awe-ful.  All Souls Day takes us into the other side, the bright, the future, the promise, the life beyond life before which we may be amazed, but rarely cower:  it is part of who we are.
  
     Earthly memory tells us who we were.  Eternal memory tells us where we will one day be.  Remember those who have preceded you in passing; think about the many memories you and they share, the sundry times and encounters you have had.  Then consider the full weight, the total import of what they mean, mean to you, mean to the world:  the darkness of Samhain cannot be without the light of what it follows it.  Apart from light, darkness cannot be.