What are we to make of the desert?  Last week, I led a group of students on a camping and hiking trip to Death Valley National Park.  I began our first campfire together by underscoring the power of the desert in human spirituality.  Whether one is a believer in God, nature, presence and being, the fact of the cosmos, or some combination of these, we can all learn from the desert.  With its vast stretches of emptiness, a bitter and stark emptiness that spreads for miles and miles and miles across mountain and valley and the occasional river and stream, and its ability to separate us from all notions of normality, the desert speaks to us of the power of desolation, the incisive power of desolation to render us more deeply human.
     As countless writers, religious or not, have observed over the centuries, it is often in desolation that we find our most fundamental truths.  Shorn of our customary appurtenances, stripped of our regular sensibilities, and rubbed raw by an arid and unforgiving landscape, we have opportunity, opportunity we do not have otherwise, to see what we usually do not see.  We no longer use a filter.  We peer into the depths, the uninterpreted depths of the creation.
     And we come to know essence, the essence of time, space, and reality, in a way we would otherwise not.  We also come to know ourselves.  We see, in a profound way, who we are, creatures of magnificence and grandeur, yet creatures whose foundations rest in movements and forces beyond our earthly comprehension.  We are dust, absolute dust
     Yet we are dust in a drama, a vast drama, a narrative and story of a purposeful cosmos.
     Otherwise, what is life all about?  It's hard to miss God in the emptiness of the desert.

     A few days ago, the world remembered the 334th birthday of George Frederic Handel.  Born in Germany, Handel spent most of his life in London.  He is perhaps most famous for his Messiah, a glorious paean to the salvific love of God.  We frequently see Messiah performed around Christmas and Easter.  Another of Handel's most well known works is his Water Music, a delightful set of processionals often heard at weddings or graduation commencements.
     As I listened to Messiah's "Hallelujah Chorus" recently, I reflected, again, on its power, spiritual as well as political.  As the story goes, when George II, then the British king, heard its opening strains he stood up.  In an era when people sought to emulate, out of respect, what their king did, the rest of the audience stood up, too.
     Perhaps the king stood out of reverence, perhaps not.  Either way, a tradition was established.  To this day, even the most hardened unbelievers will, if they attend a performance of Messiah, stand up for the Hallelujah Chorus. 
     When we review the lengthy span of biblical history which Messiah presents, we realize that, as Handel understood very well, though God may appear to be hidden and unknown, he in fact has been working in the world since its beginning.  He's not a deistic entity.  Transcendent though he be, God is nonetheless thoroughly immanent, constantly speaking into our life experience.
     Only if, however, we listen.
     Enjoy the day.

     Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent.  Ash Wednesday reminds us that, whether we believe in an afterlife or not, we are ultimately no more than dust.  When we die and pass out of this life, what remains of us will soon be no more, too, returned to the earth from which it has come.  Before my siblings and I scattered my mother's ashes atop her favorite mountain in the San Gabriel Mountains of California in October of 2011, we opened the box that contained "her."  All that Mom ever was had been reduced to a small pile of ashes.  All her years, all her love, all her joy, all her meaning, all her hopes and dreams now no more than a bag of ashes.  It was sobering.
     Even more sobering is that one day, every one of us will be exactly the same.  We are so fragile, so frightfully fragile.  What meaning have we?  What is our point?  As we contemplate our mortality, we see ever more clearly how thin the line is between life and death, sentience and dust, fire and ashes.  We are so contingent, so tenuous:  how can we ever hope to be?
     Yet here we are.  This notwithstanding  however, Ash Wednesday reminds us that we are not dust and ashes only, that life is not total absurdity.  It tells us that we are spiritual beings, physical creatures, yes, but metaphysical, too, blessed with spiritual form and vision, creations of a transcendent God.
     Our death is not the end.

     Although in many ways Valentine's Day, which we remember today, has become (or, I might say, degenerated into) a Hallmark holiday, it actually has a measure of legitimate historical origin.  Its name comes from St. Valentine, one of many martyrs in the early years of the Church, a person who gave his life for what he believed to be the greater good of the gospel and the primacy of God.  It marked a purposeful moment.

     Subsequently, however, as Rome faded into history and the Middle Ages began, the name Valentine morphed into a day associated with earthly love and romance.  It still is.  On the other hand, despite the way that various retailers use Valentine's Day to increase sales, doing their best to entice lovers, particularly men, to spend more disposable income than they would otherwise to please their loved one, it's still a good day.  What harm can come from thinking about love?

     Years ago, the Beatles sang that, "All you need is love."  In more ways than the Fab Four likely thought at the time, this is one of the truest statements in all the world.  In an impersonal universe, in a beautiful but empty cosmos, love remains the greatest thing.

     But wait:  how can love be in a universe without meaning or words for it?

     It's hard to imagine love without imagining God.
     By the way, I'll be traveling in the West for the next couple of weeks, and will not be posting.  Thanks for reading!

     Perhaps you, like I, find yourself rather distraught about the political events that unfolded in Washington last week.  Perhaps you feel as if justice was not done, as if what ought to have happened did not.  Perhaps.  On the other hand, maybe you're delighted with the outcome of last week's political machinations, that you're happy that things unfolded as they have.  And you're ready to move on.

     Either way, however, we both face the same issue:  what, in this acrimonious debate, is truth?  And how do we know it?  While I cannot suppose I can address this issue fully in a single blog, I would like to note that, if truth is to be had, we will not find it by deciding in advance what it will be.  We will not identify it by using our humanness alone; otherwise, we become our own truth.  We have solved nothing.  No, we need to discern and categorize truth by using what we, in ourselves, did not conceive, imagine, or make.  We need to look outside ourselves.
     What bothers me most about the events of last week is that many on both sides claim to be using the same transcendent source of value for arriving at their truth.  How then are the two sides so terribly different?
     We are, it seems, captives of who we are.  Maybe there really is a God who is bigger than anything we imagine him to be.
     We do well to listen to him.

     As February moves along, I acknowledge that, at least in the U.S., February is Black History Month.  In truth, one finds it rather odd that we must set aside a month to celebrate a history of a people whose lineage is considerably longer than that of the more dominant race in the world today, that is, white people.  In fact, as Nell Irvin Painter points out in her 2011 The History of White People, it is the white skin color that, from a genetic standpoint, is the more "aberrant" of human skin colors.  Moreover, whether we believe that humanity began in southern Iraq vis a vis the Garden of Eden, the savannah and gorges of central and southern Africa, or some combination of the two, we must admit that our earliest ancestors were anything but lily white.
     Be this as it may, we do well to remember our black brethren and not just in the U.S.   Due to racist behavior on the part of other races and ethnicities in the course of human history, the virtues of black culture have often been ignored, suppressed or, worse, abused and destroyed.  This has been at our peril.  We can only enjoy and appreciate humanity when we experience all of its manifestations.  And this experience should 
include not just literary or historical insight, but physical encounter.  How wonderful it would be if we could realize that over and above us all is a God who loves all of us equally and wishes for all of us, again, equally, to become everything that he has created us to be on the world he has made for all us, and to, equally and together, experience.
     As I reflect on the lengthy journey I have made with the African Americans among us, from my days of civil rights activism in California to working in anti-poverty programs in East Texas to participating in political and religious events in Chicago, Washington, and beyond, I realize that I have far to go.  I'll always be white, I'll always be a part of a traditionally Western "elite."  Yet I also realize that, as the apostle Paul wrote many centuries ago, that there is, "neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).  Immense diversity yet enormously one.
     So did God make us:  differently, yet destined to be one.  We therefore celebrate the beauty of the black experience, this month, and every month to come:  it's all part of being one.

     As you may know, last night was Oscar night in Hollywood.  For those who follow the Oscars, it was of course a visual feast:  the the parade of "celebrities" on the red carpet adorning the entrance to the auditorium prior to the ceremony; the interviews with numerous movie stars; the vignettes splashed on the auditorium screen, and more.  Magazines that cover "celebrities" found much fodder for their next issue.

     For the rest of us, however, the Oscars come and go as if nothing has happened.  By next year, the movies and stars which excelled this year will be forgotten, and the new winners will be forgotten promptly in the following year as well.  We wonder:  what is the point?  The movies made money, the stars made money, people were entertained, the culture grew some more furrows, and then we move on to the next thing.  It's gone as quickly as it has come.
     So goes much of Western culture.  It passes over and through us almost seamlessly, as if it had never happened, as if we had never experienced it at all.  Thanks to the magic of soundbites, Andy Warhol's famous fifteen minutes of fame have shrunk to less than a minute, as evanescent as they can possibly be.  We barely know they were here.
     Yet we keep moving on, keep pursuing our life dreams, perhaps thinking about one of the leading characters in the novel Perks of Being a Wallflower's wish that he not lapse into "oblivion."  We strive for presence, for presence is all, in an epistemologically empty cosmos, we have.  It's almost enough to make one wish for a God, for then, and only then, will any of the Oscars ever have any lasting point.
     Indeed, for then, and only then, even after every movie has run, every star has passed on, and all has turned to dust, this presence, more powerful and intense than we can presently imagine, will continue still.

     Can we give before we get?  Although this adage seems counterintuitive in our "modern" industrial age, an age in which "getting"--in every way--is lauded as one of our highest values, it is in fact the glue that holds everything together.  When we suppose that we must get before we give, that is, if we decide that before we can give, we must accumulate, we miss the point.  Why store up for a "rainy day" that may never come?  While we rightly need to attend to our physical needs, short and long term, we err when we imagine that we can, in the so-called "prime" of our lives, predict, accurately, our future and, subsequently, plan precisely for it.
     If our lives are to have any point, any point at all, we ought to live to give.  Only then will we capture the essence of existence:  it's a gift we receive, yes, yet it's a gift we are called to give away.  We are brief moments.  The universe is nearly forever.
     When we give, we echo and reflect the essence of what is.

     In the course of writing this blog, I have often referred to the premature passing of my father.  He passed away at the age of 63.  A few days ago, February 1, would have been his 100th birthday.  The thought gave me pause.  One of my sisters sent all (I have one brother and two sisters) of us a text, a text in which she had posted one of our favorite photos of our parents together, in front of which she had lit a candle.  Before I went to bed that night, I paused to look, again, at the several photos of my parents my wife and I have set on some of the shelves in the living room of our home.  How utterly human, I thought, how utterly, and tragically, human:  Mom and Dad lived, loved, and died.

     Though it's easy from an empirical standpoint to deny that there is nothing "bigger" than us, it's decidedly less simple to deny it from an experiential one:  we want to believe we and our lives have a point.  Millennia ago, the Hebrew prophet Moses wrote of God, the one whom he considered ultimate meaning, the one he called Yahweh, the living one, "Even from everlasting to everlasting, you are God."  He didn't need to say much more.  We can suppose that we have no point, but we know, deep in our hearts, that we want to have one.  And without a larger point, we never will.
     For us, one hundred years is a long time; for the cosmos, it is an instant.  For God, it is even less.  On the other hand, it is everything:  Dad had a point well beyond what I can ever imagine.

     Did you watch the Super Bowl?  I did not (except for the halftime show).  But billions of other people did.  Despite the well attested damage that playing professional football can do to the players' brains, and despite the NFL's curious tax exempt status, people continue to watch the Super Bowl.  It's not a football game; it's an institution.

     I often wonder what our many animal friends think about the sight of that many people glued to their television sets for over four hours, eating, talking, laughing.  Whatever are those human beings doing?
     Simply being, I guess, human beings, magnificent, glorious, frail, intelligent, self-conscious and incomplete sentient beings availing themselves of the only existence they will ever have on this planet.
     Therein lies the puzzle.  Where else will we find such an intriguing combination of will, tenuousness, folly, and determination?  Is this God's intention or is this evolution's result?  Either way, it's nothing anyone could have predicted:  life's essence eludes us unless we can see beyond it, unless we understand what a flourishing life really is.

     From Mozart to Schubert to Mendlessohn:  this last week has been filled with numerous musician birthdays.  Their contributions to music and the enriching of the human adventure have been singular and vast.  Born into a Jewish family (although his father separated himself from Judaism before Felix was born) and later baptized as a Christian, Felix Mendelssohn composed in a wide range of genres, choral to orchestral to chamber to operatic, each work distinguished by its melody, passion, and attention to detail.  Some of his most famous, and most recognizable, works include "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing," 

"Overture to a Midsummer Night's Dream," and the "Wedding March."  He was acknowledged as a prodigy early in his life, most notably by Goethe, writer of the timeless story of Faust.  People found his music uniquely captivating.
     As I think about the Grammy awards that were presented a little over a week ago and the numerous musical forms they recognized, I realize, again, the remarkable fact of music in this adventure we call life.  To form sound, to frame melody, to write song:  there is nothing quite like these in all the cosmos.  Our ability to visualize and compose music mirrors, mirrors as both reflection and extension of the marvel of existence, the capacity of the universe to express itself in sound.  Unbidden, unsought, the universe speaks to us every moment of every day.  It's never totally silent.
     Before composers like Mendlessohn, we can therefore only weep in amazement, astonished that we understand the fact of melody and sound, and that we can emulate, albeit in shattered form, the timeless and ageless marvel of that which empowers and expresses what is.