"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 here:  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 its glory 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.  Certainty, however, remains.  Amidst all our many season of life, those countless days of malleability and change, God's love, guidance, and presence reign firm.  Take heart in autumn's changes, and realize, once more, the fact and necessity of an eternal God.

     By the way, I'll be traveling for about a week and will not be posting.  Talk to you soon!

      Regardless of how you feel about the judicial pronouncements of recently deceased U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I hope you recognize how much she did to advance the ability of women to pursue any vocation of their choosing.  Her ground breaking work on ending gender discrimination in the marketplace has enabled millions of women to enter careers from which they had previously been excluded, and always by men.  In addition, in numerous judicial victories over the years, she succeeded in persuading courts to acknowledge that, be it in terms of spousal benefits or taxation, men and women deserved equal treatment under the law.

     In many instances, Justice Ginsburg centered her argument on the law's tendency to construct its dictums on the basis of social custom rather than innate ability.  Too many times, legislators (again, always male) developed laws rooted in their perception, one which their culture had fostered, of women as an inferior being.

     Much ink has been spilled in various religious circles about the person and being of women.  Almost all of it has been grounded in social convention and not the intrinsic fact of humanness.  Yet Genesis is very clear:  God made man and woman equal beings.

     It has been society, a male dominated society, that has made it otherwise.

     Be well, Justice Ginsburg.

      In talking with some members of my atheist discussion group last night, I ended up explaining how, unfortunately, for a number of reasons, some segments of Christianity have come to conclude that science and faith are incompatible.  That is, one cannot be a scientist and believe in God.     Nothing could be further from the truth.  If, as modern science insists, quantum physics notwithstanding, the world is an orderly phenomenon governed by unchanging physical laws, well, that is exactly what Christianity insists.  The breaking point is, of course, the fact of God.  One believes that the order is of God; the other holds that the order emerged as an inevitable result of natural forces.  Either way, the fact of order remains.  And both sides trust it.  They trust it implicitly.

     It's no secret that science as we know it today developed as Christian thinkers, convinced of the existence of God, sought, through thought and experimentation, to understand the intrinsic order of the universe.  Yes, they said, God created it, but this didn't mean that we cannot explain it with the tools of logic and falsification.

     That the world is here no one doubts.  The lingering question is, why?

     For this question is far more important than how it came to be here. 

      As I write this blog, millions of acres of forest continue to burn in California.  It's tragic, so very tragic.  Lives lost, livelihoods destroyed, homes gone.  And more.  To the south, a hurricane is sweeping through the Gulf states, inundating the land with high winds and several feet of water with no respite.  Treasured possessions, innocent people, much loved dwellings:  gone forever.

     Loss is one of the most difficult things about being human.  As finite beings, we have no way to resurrect what is now gone.  Once we lose something, be it a person, place, or thing, we cannot bring it back.  We're helpless before the trauma and entropy of existence.

     More than one philosopher has noted that, in the big picture, all on which humans can really count is their will.  Their passion, their impetus, their desire.  Whether people win or lose, they do so amidst their efforts to exercise their will.

     If this is absolutely true, we are indeed faced with a decidedly bleak existence.  We wonder, we wander, we glory:  we live life to the fullest.  We "will" our way through our days.  Then we die.

     Yet if the rhythms of the planet are to mean anything, loss also means, in some way, gain.  Only if, however, we acknowledge the we live in a framework of purpose larger than ourselves.  Otherwise, any and all material and worldly gain will lose again.  And again.

     In a finite world, we cannot "will" ourselves into meaning.

     

"To have lived without glory, without leaving a trace of one's existence, is to never have lived at all."

So said Napoleon Bonaparte, the brilliant French general who, after bringing the bloodshed of his country's revolution to a close, went on to conquer the world.  Although he didn't succeed--the Battle of Waterloo, in 1815, spelled the end of his ambitions--he certainly managed to change the face of Europe.  His legacy remains with us today.

The general's words asks us to consider a number of things.  One, what is glory?  Many religions talk about God's glory.  Others discuss human glory.  Some do both. For Napoleon, however, it seemed that life is all about human glory.  About the here

 and now, and never mind any afterlife.

Two, what is life anyway?  Is it to live and die?  To live, die, and live again?  If life is simply to seek one's glory, to, as Napoleon put it, ensure that a trace of one's existence remains, life seems rather futile.  We won't live on this planet indefinitely:  however much "glory" we amass, once we're gone, it's gone, too.

Nonetheless, as Napoleon might say, we lived.  We left our mark.  Fair enough.  Not that we shouldn't strive to create a positive legacy.  Yet if that's all we seek, we misunderstand the nature of existence.

After all, did we even ask to be born?

     Remember the Khmer Rouge?  In the mid-Seventies, led by Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge terrorized the nation of Cambodia as they sought to transform it into an agrarian Marxist state.  Their methods were brutal, harsh, and unforgiving:  murder, imprisonment, confiscation, and torture.  Photos from Tuol Sleng prison, the chief torture site (photos which the torturers systematically took of those on whom they would soon visit unspeakable pain) show unsmiling people with identification tags on their shirts.  If they arrived at Tuol Sleng without a shirt, the staff simply pinned the tag directly onto their skin.

     A couple of weeks ago, Kaing Guek Eav, otherwise known as Duch, who earned a reputation as the cruelest and prolific torturer at Tuol Sleng, died at the age of 77.  Few tears were shed.  According to news reports, however, some years prior to his death, Duch had converted to Christianity.  Therefore, according to nearly every Christian tradition, upon his death Duch would enter into the presence of God, redeemed and forgiven for all time.   

     Huh? one might ask.  It's a legitimate question.  After all, many of Duch's victims had not been given the same opportunity to believe in Jesus.  Why should he?

     One of the greatest puzzlements about being human is the confounding character of God's grace.  None of us asked to be in this world.  But all of us are.  What do we then do?  We can either live for the moments we have, however, few or many they may be, or we can live for the Moment in which all moments are incised and framed and given meaning.

     It's indeed a peculiar, astonishing, and remarkable and mysterious thing, this presence of God.

      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 redeems.  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.  

    Perhaps.  There really is something more to life and existence than simply living them.

      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.

     David Starr Jordan, the taxonomist (not taxidermist) and first president of Stanford University, hated chaos.  Using category, level, ladder, and division, he spent almost his entire eighty years trying to bring some sense and order to the glorious riot of species diversity he saw in the animal world.  Tirelessly and repeatedly, he sought connection and linkage, descendant and antecedent:  whatever he could employ to establish a degree of form and, perhaps, predictability, to the cacophony of living beings swirling around him.

And he did.  Modern taxonomy owes much to David’s pioneering work.  Ironically, and too often, however, as his many biographers note, even as he had finished categorizing a particular animal class, even as he brought a modicum of structure to how we might view this level of animalia, he lost it.  Be it an accident in the laboratory, problems at home, an earthquake, even a flood, the chaos of the world intruded.  David’s order vanished.  His genuses broke down, his categories disappeared.  In the span of a few moments, David saw his life’s work, to that point, smashed and dissembled, scattered and shattered.

He had to start all over again.  On the other hand, maybe, despite his frustration, David found unexpected virtue in his task.  Now, we all love order.  Admit it.  You like having a structure.  Of some kind.  Indeed, much science and philosophy has established that we humans are order loving beings.  We look for order, sometimes we crave it.  Perhaps more darkly, sometimes we are willing to give up our freedom for it.

But if order is intrinsic, why did God make the world from a sea of chaos?

Only if order is intrinsic can chaos exist.

 

    Like perhaps some of you, I am so very weary of hearing about yet another police shooting of a Black person in the United States.  Will it ever stop?

Leni Riefenstahl

    Though I am reluctant to speak for God, I cannot help but think that, all things considered, he favors life over death.  While the New Testament affirms the necessity of rulers, it also demands that those in power rule justly, and not necessarily according to their own standards of it.  The New Testament looks at the big picture.  It recognizes that, believe it or not, there is a God.  A sovereign God.    We may struggle with divine sovereignty.  I know that I often do.  But I'm not convinced that we would be better off without it.  Sure, it would be a brave new world, but it would be a world in which nothing has any reason to be here, other than it is.

     It would be a world, as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche observed, reduced to will.  Unfettered, dispassionate human will.  Its outcome is perhaps best expressed in British mystic Aleister Crowley's contention that, "Whatever is met."  Whatever you wish to do, do it.

     Is it therefore any accident that Leni Riefenstahl, Adolf Hitler's filmmaker who died at the age of 102, titled her magnum opus "Triumph of the Will"?

      Pray for the people of Belarus.  Newly emboldened to change their country, and at great risk to themselves, millions of them are taking to the streets in protest and dissent.  They're brave, very brave:  the ruling powers will not yield their position without a fight.  An ugly fight.  A violent fight.  The thought makes me shiver.

     Historically, people have overthrown numerous tyrannical, after a fashion, regimes.  Many nations, including the U.S. and France, have rooted their national perception of themselves in these efforts.  In America, it might be represented by "Don't Tread on Me;" in France, it is embodied in "liberte, egalite, fraternite."  But neither of these efforts succeeded apart from violence.  On the other hand, Mahatma Gandhi liberated India from the British without spilling a drop of blood.  And he was a Hindu.

     Belarus faces a different opposition altogether:  a distorted vision of Marxism, a misshapen view of the world and the human being that leaves no room for the spiritual.  The material is all.  Not that the American and French Revolutions were religious movements; they were decidedly political and economic.  Nonetheless, they emerged from a view of the world and humanity that recognized the possibility of transcendence.

     I wish the people of Belarus well.  I also wish them success in creating a society in which freedom is guaranteed in the umbra of transcendence and spirit.