Last week, many of us celebrated Christmas.  For the last few days, however, many of us have been remembering Kwanza.  Although Kwanza is a relatively new holiday, its impetus, in light of the Advent season, speaks to us all:   a celebration of human diversity.  Yes, Jesus was born a Jew in a forgotten town in Palestine, but he made it clear that he had come for everyone on the planet.  Jesus reminded everyone who would listen that God loves every human being, that God loves every variety of human beingness and expression, every bit of it.  He leaves no one out.

      
     So it is with harvest.  The world is for everyone.  Kwanza lauds the beauty and meaningfulness of this world, its harvest, its bounty, its joy of a year rightly lived.  The happiness of living in a world whose wonder speaks constantly to us, the beauty of the rhythms of the plane:  a call to treasure the immensity of existence.
     Happy New Year!

     Christmas has come, and now it is gone.  People are taking their ornaments down, stores are offering their after Christmas sales, travelers are going home.  It's over for another year.

     Or is it?  If Christmas means anything, anything at all, it cannot possibly be contained in one day.  If, as the gospel accounts tell us, God has really come, if God has really visited his creation, how can anything--and any of us--ever be the same?  History, and everything in it, including you and me, has irrecoverably changed.
     One can choose to believe this, one can chose to not.  The choice is everyone's to make.  Either way, our corporate interest in and fascination with Christmas underscores the state of all of our hearts:  we long for the joy of the transcendent moment.

     As the Christmas lights fade, we realize that, belief aside, it is in our humanness that we see Christmas most fully.  We look for meaning, we look for the joyous point.  We look for existential authentication.  And, we ought to ask ourselves, why?  Who are we?
     Long after it's gone, Christmas will continue to remind us that we insist that we must live in a universe of meaning.  We could not live otherwise.  Christmas reminds us that this meaning's fullness can only be real if it appeals to the fact of eternity, the visible word of the ages, the spoken beginning of space and time.  It is only then that it can be.
     God has come.

     Most of us have heard the "Christmas story" countless times.  Across the world for thousands of years, people have read and pondered, over and over, Luke's account of Jesus' birth.  One might almost think that there is nothing new to find in it.
     But there always is.  As I was reading it this year, I found myself struck, and not for the first time, by the thought that the first people to hear about Messiah's birth were shepherds.  In the twenty-first century, most of us do not think much about shepherds.  In Jesus' day, however, shepherds were an integral part of the economy of the ancient world.
     Yet shepherds were despised, viewed as the lowest of the low. Few wished to associate with them.  They spent their days--and nights--largely apart from the rest of the people, living lonely lives in the fields and hillsides of the nations. 




  
     But the shepherds were the first to know.  They were the first to be told.  Before anyone else knew, the shepherds knew about the birth of Messiah.

     God remembered those whom the world had forgotten.

     Christmas calls for humility.  It calls us to look not at how we can spend our money on ourselves, our friends, or family, but rather what we can do for others, what we can do for the "shepherds" among us.  Christmas teaches us to reach out to those on the margins.
     And in the person of Jesus, we can.  In the humility of the baby born in a manger, in the announcement made to the forgotten shepherds, we can give.  We can see Christmas as an occasion for humbly recognizing what we can do, not for ourselves, but for the world.
     Merry Christmas!

     Yesterday marked the beginning of Hanukkah.  Although it is a minor holiday on the Jewish liturgical calendar, because Hanukkah usually occurs around Christmas, it has tended to generate a significant amount of attention in the Western world.  For some, it is considered the Jewish "equivalent" of Christmas.


     While this conclusion is far from the historical and theological truth, it does communicate an important point.  Although Hanukkah commemorates the rededication of the Temple after it had been profaned by the Seleucid emperor Antiochus Epiphanes (he sacrificed a pig on the inner altar) in the second century B.C.E. and not the birth of Jesus, it is nonetheless a time to rejoice, to rejoice in lights.  To rejoice in the light and faithfulness of God, to delight in God's continuing bestowal of life and illumination to human beings.  In this, Hanukkah speaks to all of us, all of us who, whether we know it or not, each day walk in the grace of a infinitely remarkable light, a light without which we would not be.
     Enjoy the light of life.

      "For the people who walk in darkness," wrote the prophet Isaiah, "will see a great light (Isaiah 9:1)."  Isaiah speaks of Messiah, the one who would come to illuminate and liberate an Israel darkened by disappointment, abandonment, and sin.
     Not all of us are Jewish, and not all of us long for a Messiah.  But we all long for light.  We all long for greater understanding, for greater insight into the mysteries of this existence.  It's almost instinctive.
     In this third week of Advent, we remember this fact of light.  We remember how, like the sun exploding over a frigid mountain ridge, Messiah--Jesus--has brought us light, the light of enlightenment, the light of hope and meaning that shines through the cold of an often puzzling, even Munchian existence.  It is a light that, if we embrace its rising, embrace it as fervently and without reservation, will change our lives forever.
     Though we may struggle with the idea of eternality, though we may question the presence of God, we do not struggle with realizing that we all long for hope, purpose, and meaning.  We all know.  We all know that we are always looking for a window into a richer existence.
     In an accidental universe, however, richness is impossible, for value and morality cannot be.  Only in the light of transcendence, only in the light of what has made us, can hope therefore be.
     The light of the world.

     Defining spirituality is difficult.  If we attribute it to a god, we miss that many unbelievers attest to having spiritual experiences.  If we assign it to a nebulous immaterial presence, we encounter the problem of making something amorphous into something that is physically real.  And if we say that spirituality is thoroughly human, we run into the perennial dilemma of understanding how consciousness can emerge from inert matter.

     Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian surrealist painter and whose birthday we remembered earlier this week, thought much about spirituality, spirituality in regard to art.  He did so as a way of explaining how art overwhelms what he considered to be the spiritual darkness of Marxism.  Whether or not one believes in God, Kandinsky observed, we all benefit from the spiritual benefits of art.  In art, we feel hints of transcendence, intimations of things we cannot easily fathom, emotional insights that we do not experience otherwise.  We look into another world, a world of purer light, real or imagined, a world that eclipses the rigid (and often meaningless) materialism of the Marxist worldview.
     Kandinsky's art reflects his words aptly.  It is highly abstract and difficult to grasp easily, but that's the point:  spirituality isn't supposed to be simple.  If it were, it would be no more than another product of our material human whims.

     What can we say about Ludwig van Beethoven?  This famous portrait of him captures how many of us see him:  a brooding, anguished, yet brilliant composer. When we think about Amadeus Wolfgang Mozart, we think of the Enlightenment and how it liberated the human mind and imagination from the constraints of a Church struggling with its response to impending modernity.  We see Mozart's music as poetry, lilting and dancing its way across our lives.
     Not so with Beethoven.  His music overwhelms us with its passion.  It comes to us as a force of nature, barreling and twisting its way into our hearts, breaking our souls apart, forcing us to grapple with and contemplate the deeper forces that drive human existence.  We swoon over the viscerality of Beethoven's melodies, we wonder about the power of the universe which his songs describe.  A Romantic in the purest sense, Beethoven reminds us of other worlds and things, of the presence and possibilities of transcendence.
     Beethoven shows us as we are, beings of mind as much as creatures of heart, living, personal, dynamic entities made to step bravely and meaningfully into the weighty contingencies of life, to take hold of everything that is before us.  Given the many stories and legends that surround his life, we may never know exactly what Beethoven thought about God.  Regardless, he makes us think of him.  Beethoven makes us think about our deeper meaning, our deeper experience.  He drives us to wonder about the mystery of life and the mind of its creator.

     I thank God for using Beethoven to open and unfold for us glimpses of what we, life, and God, can be.

     Many years ago, The Rolling Stones sang about painting the world black.  Everything, this song went, should be black:  it's all emptiness, it's all futile.  The world has collapsed, and nothing matters anymore.

     For some of us, this may well be true:  the future may look very bleak.  For others, however, darkness is an invitation to light, a harbinger of dawn.  The French painter Pierre Soulages, whose work is currently being celebrated at the Louvre in Paris, understands this well.  Noted for his long standing commitment (Soulages has been painting for over seventy years) to centering his painting on the color black, he states that the blackness of his paintings is not designed to repel, but rather to draw in, to encourage viewers to find themselves in it.  "It [this drawing in black] happens, between the surface of the painting and the person who is in front of it;" he says, "the reflection of light is what moves us."

     If black is the end of color, it is also the beginning:  color could not be without it.  As are our lives.  Had we not come out of the darkness of the womb, we would not be in this world of color, and had we not seen the darkness of existence, we would miss its light.  Apart from the dark emptiness of space, this world of color could not be.
     So did over a century ago Rudolph Otto observe that, when confronted with the fright of the unknown, transcendent, and divine, though we human beings cower, we are also in awe.  We know, know instinctively, that in the darkest and most mysterious darkness we will see the clearest and brightest light.
     In a therefore inherently meaningful universe, that is the only point.