Not as well known as Mozart, whose birthday we remembered a few days ago, Franz Schubert was nonetheless one of the most remarkable musicians in Western history.  Immensely productive and profoundly creative, Schubert wrote some of the most ethereal and haunting melodies of all time.  We listen to his music and feel transported, lifted above what is earthly and material, moved into transcendence.  Today, January 31, is Schubert's birthday.
     Schubert's music gives us pause.  If music only told us what we already know, we probably wouldn't get as much out of it as we do.  We do not need to be reminded of what is obvious and normal.  We rather need to be encouraged to ponder what is beyond the apparent, what breaks down the seen, what splits the visible apart.  We want to know what we, at the moment, cannot.
     And this is what Schubert's music does.  Descending into the darkest recesses of his soul, Schubert talks to us about the deepest mysteries of existence, how we walk in a wisp, a gossamer veil stretched between us and the other side of time.  He romanced eternity.
     As do we all.  Every day we balance, balance between presence and absence, perch ourselves on a thin line dividing present reality and ultimate destiny.
     Thanks, Franz Schubert, even if you didn't intend to do so, for showing us that life is bigger than life itself.

     Have you read Augustine's Confessions?  If your immediate reaction is that it is a "religious" book and not necessarily deserving of your time, I say that although the first part of your response is accurate, the second is not.  It is more than deserving of your time.
     Why?  Augustine's life is ours.  His quest for meaning and his various detours through cultural debauchery and theological gibberish speak to all of us.  We all detour, we all stumble.  We all seek purpose.  So did Augustine.  Yes, he found his purpose in God, which might be a a somewhat jarring conclusion to some today.  If we did deeper, however, we see that, in truth, he could not have found purpose any other way.

     I think about a question posed by many a philosopher over the ages, a question that summons us to consider the absolutely seminal fact of reality:  "Why is there something rather than nothing?"  Indeed, why?  Cosmology has done much to show us how the universe came into being.  It has not yet been able to show us why it did.  If we respond that the "why" doesn't matter, we must then answer another question:  why do we even say that?
     Augustine understood that we cannot ask why unless there is a reason for a "why" in the first place.

     Although for some it may have been overshadowed by Mozart's birthday, as I mentioned a couple of days ago, January 27 was a day of great solemnity:  International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  It is a day that should cause all of us to stop, think, and weep.  How does one begin to grasp the deliberately engineered deaths of over six million people?  How does one connect with a person who lost the sum of his lineage in a concentration camp?  How can we possibly comprehend being the object of such virulent hatred and racism?

     We can't.  And that's the point.  God aside, evil has no explanation.  It has no point, it has no plan.  It is beyond our ability to fully understand.  Yet evil is us.  We think, we make choices.  And we act, usually with little grasp of its full consequences.  Many Holocaust scholars insist, and rightly so, that the Holocaust is an event that surpasses the widest and deepest boundaries of our ken and imagination.  It's beyond intelligibility.
     Yet it happened.  Writing to me nearly three decades ago, an American then living in Jerusalem and who had made clear to me that he did not believe in God, allowed that the Holocaust caused even him to acknowledge the reality of the metaphysical.  Why, he reasoned, would anyone with a hatred other than one rooted in the tenebrosity of a twisted notion of the metaphysical engage in such horror?  And why, he suggested, would a God other than one committed to the sanctity of human choice be present as such a thing happened?  Finally, he asked, why, unless Jesus really is humanity's savior, would God ever run away from such pain?
     Weep for our Jewish brothers and sisters, and pray for those who persecute them. And believe:  at all costs, believe in the ultimacy of God.

     It's a big day:  the birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (it's also International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which we will consider tomorrow).  Around the world, people continue to be astonished by the immense creativity and wonder of this Austrian's music.  Fluent in all genres of classical music, Mozart, though he died sadly, at the tender age of 34, produced an array of musical expression that most musicologists agree is unmatched.  As a contemporary said of him, "He was like an angel sent to us for a season, only to return to heaven again."  Most of us can only stand mute and marvel at Mozart's immense ability.  How could one person write works of such extraordinary beauty?

     Genesis tells us that God created people in his image, in his likeness.  For this reason, every person who has ever walked through the history of this planet has the potential to duplicate and express, albeit in finite form, the creativity that birthed the cosmos.
     Rightly do we weep and swoon at the beauty of Mozart's compositions; they are works of unsurpassed wonder.  Yet rightly do we marvel equally at God, the personal infinite God who made and fashioned this artist--with all his prodigious talents--and enabled him to be and become who and what he is.
      As he does for all of us, we who are gifted in an nearly infinite number of ways, we who are made to create in unabashed wonder.
     Enjoy and appreciate the people--all the people--whom God has made.
     Thanks, God, for giving us Mozart.
     (And, God, help us to ponder, tomorrow, the horrific darkness of human choice.)

     "It is he who reduces rulers to nothing, who makes the judges of the earth meaningless.  Scarcely have they been planted, scarcely have they been sown, scarcely has their stock taken rot in the earth, but he merely blows on them, and they wither and the storm carries them away like stubble."
    Ancient words, modern sentiments.  When the Hebrew Isaiah wrote these words in the eighth century B.C.E., his nation, Israel, was gripped with turmoil.  Foreign armies stood poised to invade, cultural and religious apathy were tearing its social fabric apart, and many citizens had lost all hope, all hope that God would ever care for them again.

     Is this not very much like many nations today?  As I look at the impeachment proceedings being conducted in the U.S. Senate, I think often of Isaiah's words.  Here we are, little human beings, caught in a unique historical moment, wrestling mightily with its portents, bickering over its meaning, both sides certain of the validity of their positions, no one to judge.  Not that the hearings or those who involved in them are meaningless, just that, broadly speaking, without a bigger picture, they have no ultimate point.  Absent this, these hearings are merely another permutation, another machination in the lengthy journey of humanity into the mists of history.  Though they are vastly important in this moment, if one day the universe will cease to be without a trace, how will we ever grasp them?  And ourselves?

     Last week, at my atheist discussion group, I presented on the concept of memory.  After describing the physiology of memory and the "history" of memory (how people have viewed and treated memory through the millennia), I offered some thoughts on the spirituality of memory.  This being a gathering of atheists (except for me), such thoughts were of course not fully aligned with the viewpoints of most of the people who had come that night.  Nonetheless, we all left with some things to think about.

    As I described it, memory is almost otherworldly.  It’s here, but it’s not; everywhere, but nowhere.  We know and believe it’s here (or there), somewhere, but we also know that this somewhere is a somewhere that is not “there” for long.  In this, I quoted Henri Bergson who, in the opening pages of his Matter and Memory, opines that memory is that which lies at the “intersection of mind and matter.”  It is the phenomenon that connects, in the human being, material and ethereal, and spirit and matter.  Linking together inner rumination and outward experience, connecting and fusing mind, heart, and spirit, memory centers us even while it deepens us, grounding us as much as it extends us, stretching and guiding our vision between what we see and what we do not.  It brings us to the liminal, the border, the boundary, the formless membrane between physical mystery and the invisible and unseen presence encompassing it all.  Memory demonstrates that materiality does not fully explain us.

     Indeed.  Although we can readily describe the physicality of how memory works, we have not yet found a reason as to how we can "see" our memories without actually "seeing" them.  What is it about us that we are able to picture that which we cannot physically see?  While an obvious answer is that we are creatures of imagination, the larger question is why?

     How can inert matter birth the ability to see the unseen?

      As many of you may know, earlier this week the U.S. remembered the birthday of civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr.  Central to the day is King's belief, a belief he shared with millions of others, that freedom, the ability to do what one chooses, when one chooses to do it, is one of humanity's greatest privileges and blessings.  We all deserve to be free.
     For this is what God wants.  He made us to be free, to free to choose, to be free to do.  To be free to live as we like.

     Freedom is wonderful, and freedom is intoxicating.  But freedom can be frightening.  We often do not know what to do with it.  We frequently do not know what its fullness really means.  
     Maybe that's why, as John records it in chapter eight of his gospel, Jesus told his audience that, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."  True freedom is to know the truth:  the truth of the presence of God.  King knew this well, and steadfastly centered his call for freedom in the greater fact of God.  He knew that freedom is only meaningful if it is grounded in something bigger than itself.
     As we remember King's birthday, we also remember that the freedom he preached is ultimately, as Gandhi observed in his explication of satyagraha, self-discovery in truth.  We are not free in an accidental universe, a cosmos without definition; we are free in a universe made real by truth itself.

     In the midst of the winter throes of the Midwest, I often take time to think about what lies beyond . . . In particular, I think about the mountains of the West, mountains which are, without dispute, my favorite place to be.
     In his Clouds and Storm, the French mountain guide Gaston Rebuffat, one of the most famous of all the guides of the Alps, writes eloquently of his affection for the heights and his love for all things remote and wild.  He offers poignant thoughts and insights into living life with mountains, and not.
     As he closes his book, Rebuffat writes, "It is raining in Paris, and I am dreaming of high hills."  He cannot wait to get back to his beloved mountains.  He knows that in the mountains he--we--encounter a deeper awareness of life, an awareness we cannot experience in the land below. He realizes, as did the famous American naturalist John Muir, that a day in the mountains, treading in the light of their heights, is like a day that we would have nowhere else.

     It is this sense of transcendence, this feeling of lilting and otherworldly beauty that draws people, including me, to the mountains.  The mountains, the lofty landscapes of tundra and rock that roam about the planet, speak to us powerfully about the promise of our human condition.  We all dream of better and higher things.
     So do we need God to experience this longing, this desire for some type of transcendence?  Mountains are indeed remarkable and amazing, but if they are our only source of transcendence, we miss the point of what transcendence is all about.  It cannot be real unless God is, too.

     Is spirituality really emergent?

     If you've read Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, you know that they present a highly intriguing mix of piety, critique, and bawdiness to its readers in early Renaissance England.  Chaucer's stories describe a people on the cusp of modernity, poised between the rigidity of medieval dogma and the more expansive theology of early modern Europe. As such, they speak to all ages and times.
     In the "Miller's Tale," we read about a somewhat dense carpenter who has married a lovely woman many years younger than he and the various attempts of men closer to her age to persuade her to focus her attentions on them.  One of them, Nicholas, succeeds, though not without considerable physical hardship on his part.  In the end, the poor carpenter becomes the object of general parody in the town in which the story takes place.

     What's Chaucer's point?  While there are many, the one which I mention today is that however pious someone claims to be--and the carpenter's wife's various "suitors" certainly claimed to be so--it means little unless it is a work of the heart.  Outwardly, we all look good and respectable.  It is inwardly, however, that we find our real selves.
     Yes, we all mistakes, and yes, we all make poor decisions.  The more important point is that we affirm the fact of transcendence as essential to being a human being.  Moreover, a transcendence into which we, finite and very much attached to who we are, step each day, step so that we understand that, in the big picture, we are no more than that in which we place our ultimate trust.  If our world is ourselves, we'll never really see what it means.  If our world invests in transcendence, we will:  humility demands that we need something other than ourselves to know who we most are. 

     Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the famous British Romantic poet, once observed that imagination is how the self grapples with its perception.  Put another way, imagination is how we give life to what we perceive.
     Writing nearly two centuries later, modern neurobiologists conclude that imagination is the result of metaphoric processes which happen, often unconsciously, in our brains.  It is the product of our innately metaphorical selves.
     Writing from another angle, the early medieval theologian Augustine suggested that humans use analogy to understand the transcendent, in particular, the person of God.  Confronted with the transcendent and infinite, people tend to think in terms of analogy.  Their finite minds cannot directly grasp the nature of the infinite.  So they resort to analogy and, by extension, the metaphor making ability of their imagination.
     We may never "see" the transcendent in this existence.  But we certainly sense that it is, in some shape or form, "there."  We are creatures of an analogical imagination.
     It might therefore be easier to imagine God than we think.

     Over the weekend, the first winter storm of the season came through my section of the American Midwest.  By most standards, it was not terribly onerous:  a few inches of snow.  Its winds, however, made up the difference.  All night and all day, for two days and nights running, the winds howled, screaming through the trees, sparking every chime into life, sweeping madly across the land.  I was amazed.
     Many years ago, when I lived in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a region known for the ferocity of its weather, I always took walks in the blizzards which regularly pummeled us.  While everyone else was bundled up in their homes, drinking a hot drink by their fires, I was outside, trekking through a nearby forest or field, taking it all in.
     And what was I taking in?  As I look back on that time in my life, I realize I was taking in, or at least trying to take in, the deeper power that I felt was moving through the storm.  I think I was trying to grasp the meaning out of which this meteorological moment was coming, the point of the world in which such wonder was occurring.  I was looking, I think, for the purpose of existence.  Why such power?  Why such magnificence?
     Although today I find it logical enough to say that existence's purpose is to be found in the fact of God, as I reflect on the storm that rocked, literally, my area over the weekend, I see that perhaps it is not so simple.  God notwithstanding, I would say that I will never know purpose with precision; I will never know why, independently and absolutely why there is purpose, why we live in the midst of such awesome display.
     I'll never know why there is a God.  I only know that we would not "be" without one.

     "Life, I love you, all is groovy."  Do you believe this to be true?  Taken from a song written by Paul Simon, these words say much about how we try to see the shape and form of our existence.  After hearing the song this morning, I looked out my study window at the budding day.  Rain was falling, the trees were bare, the gardens unkempt and abandoned, deadened by the brumality of the moment.  Then I recalled the words of a song by George Harrison, a song which appeared on his first solo album, a song in which he asks repeatedly, "Tell me, what is life?"

     Harrison captures the point.  If we do not know what life is, how can we love it?  And if we do not know why we're here, how can we know all is groovy?
     As an ancient ascetic put it, apart from the presence of larger purpose, we're no more than "pelicans in the wilderness."
     And a pelican can't hold more than his or her mouth is large.
     The rain is still falling.

     I'm currently teaching a class on the spiritual disciplines.  Although at some first glance, some may find the word "spiritual" off putting, these disciplines are in fact practices in which everyone can engage, regardless of her degree of belief (or disbelief).  Properly understood, many of these disciplines invite us into moments in which we find the space to contemplate on the deeper elements of our existence.
     This week, we are talking about meditation.  If you are familiar with Transcendental Meditation, which, thanks to the Beatles's summer of 1966 interest in the work of the Maharishi Yogi, took the West by storm in the Seventies, you should know that it is but one of many options for practicing such things.  Reduced to its most fundamental parts, meditation is simply a way to put oneself in a place in which one is more open to engaging with the bigger picture of what life is.

     Even if you don't believe that life has any larger point, you doubtless affirm that your life has purpose.  And what is it?  That is the point of meditation:  to find who we, and life, most fully are.
     It's no accident that even the most ardent disbelievers find meaningfulness in the thoughts and writings of those who, even many centuries ago, journeyed into what they could not visibly see.
     That's really the point, isn't it?

     As I consider the turmoil that is currently rippling through the Middle East, I wonder about the notion of good.  How does one do "good" to a neighbor when everyone is, form the standpoint of scripture, her neighbor?  How does one decide who is her enemy when the text calls the reader to love one's enemies?  And how does a ruler wield her authority for good?
     There are no easy answers to this questions, if there are any authoritative answers at all.  Even if we appeal to a sacred text or divine being, our wisdom in understanding such things is as varied as our human diversity:  how do we know?  Does any of us have the ultimate insight, the absolutely most profound word?
     I pray for the rulers of the world, I pray for the nations they rule.  And I pray for those over whom these rulers have authority, for it is they who, unfortunately, are most affected by a ruler's decision, often with little recourse of appeal.
     Oh God of the cosmos, illumine us, speak to us; give us a path forward.

      Today is Epiphany.  The "last gasp" of the Christmas season, Epiphany (a word meaning, literally, "the manifestion of a divine being"), reminds us of the faith of a group of Persian travelers in the Zoroastrian and biblical prophecies about a coming king.
     These texts, the travelers concluded, predicted that this king would, in contrast to other royalty, emerge from humble circumstances, a stable outside Bethlehem, a tiny and forgettable village in southern Palestine.
     In addition, this king would be, these travelers concluded, human and divine.  Small wonder that they made the arduous journey over the Zagros Mountains, across the arid expanse of Arabia, and onto the international trade routes that coursed through the Levant.  Who would have imagined such a thing?
     And that's the point:  who would have imagined God would be born as a human being?
     Epiphany reminds us that only when we open ourselves to the possibilities of transcendence will we understand what the world is really all about.

     Majid Majidi's film Color of God tells the story of a blind boy who, though he feels God when he roams the hillsides near his home, he really wants most to see him.
     
     Meanwhile, as the boy's (Mohammad) father, a widower, prepares to remarry, he is reluctant for his bride-to-be's family to know about Mohammad.  He fears they will see Mohammad's blindness as a bad omen.  So he sends Mohammad away to live with, ironically, a blind carpenter.  When Mohammad tells the carpenter that he wants not just to feel God, but to see him as well, the carpenter reminds him that God is everywhere: wouldn't you, he asks Mohammad, therefore know him as well as anyone who sees him?

     As the story continues, Mohammad's father's fiance's family learns of the boy's blindness and calls off the wedding.  Crestfallen yet now realizing that he can bring Mohammad back, his father fetches him and begins the journey home.  Along the way, however, a bridge on which they are walking collapses and Mohammed falls into the water.  As the current carries him away, his father hesitates, then goes after him.  But soon he, too, is caught up in the swift flowing water.
     
     In the closing scene, Mohammad's father finds himself on the shore of the Caspian Sea, shaken but alive.  Then he sees Mohammad's lifeless body, washed up nearby.  He weeps. As a woodpecker hammers away overhead, his father sees Mohammad's fingers move, seemingly tapping to the sound.  Maybe, he thinks, his son finally sees God.  Maybe now, in the land beyond death, in the land of green fields and profuse gardens, Mohammad's wishes have come true.  He is known as he was created to be.

     Strolling through an art show earlier this year, I came upon a work which, as I reflect on it, captures, for me, the essence of the moment, this New Year and the liminality with which we deal every day.
     This work featured a row of trees stacked atop a hill, a vista of cloud and sun lying beyond.  We all seek vistas, don't we?  We all seek dreams and meanings to fill the years of our lives.  And we all come to see, eventually, that the roads to such things are often filled with tangles of difficulties that we frequently do not expect or anticipate.  Eventually, however, joy comes.  It's life, life in the world God has made.
     We live in a tenuous moment, a moment perched between what has been and what will come.  And we never fully understand either one.  On the other hand, unless the world offered the recondite and intrigue, it would not be much of a world.  Though we often loathe not knowing, we remain aware that without it life would not be the experience it is, a mystery, a beautiful, glorious, and vexing mystery, a mystery grounded in the infinite--and personal--presence of God.
     As this New Year comes upon us, rejoice in the hiddenness and incomplete, the opaque implicit in the meaningfulness of existence.  Embrace the liminality of the divine activity intrinsic to humanness.  And step confidently into what is to come.
     Happy New Year!