As Halloween, the Celtic Samhain, the night that, in ancient tradition, the spirits and goblins of the inner earth escape, for one bone chilling evening, their chthonic imprisonment and roam about the planet, weaving magic, confusion, and mystery into the lives of those still living, approaches, we wonder.   Why do we think about such things?  Why do we speculate on what might lay on the "other side"?  
     For many of us, Halloween is a night in which a new reality emerges, sometimes subtly, sometimes violently, always irruptive, always transforming, telling us, reminding us that our assumptions are not what we imagine them to be.  There is other, there is more.  There is a beyond, a somethingness which we might not otherwise see.
     Perhaps deceased spirits are wandering, wailing about their ignominy.  Perhaps.  Yet how could spirit be without spiritual presence?

     A light that always overcomes the darkness.

      A few nights ago, my wife and I watched the new Netflix movie, "Chicago Seven."  It presents the story of the trial of that name which took place in Chicago in the fall of 1970.  On trial were seven of the leading protagonists of the various protest movements that dominated the American Sixties.  They had been charged with, supposedly, conspiring to cross state lines to cause a riot.

     That these gentlemen crossed state lines to come to the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago was not in question.  What the Seven's defense team found problematic was that none of the players in question ever intended to start a riot.  They simply decided, but separately and without consulting each other, to show up in Chicago.

     No matter.  The Nixon administration was looking for a scapegoat (other than the excessively heavy handed Chicago police response to the protestors) for the disturbances at the convention.  The ensuing riots had made international headlines.  As the leaders of the demonstrations had predicted, the whole world was indeed watching.

     Having lived through this time, I found the reenactment of the events fascinating.  I also found it sobering.  Many of these leaders are now dead, some at the proverbial ripe old age, others way too young.  How passionate they were for the cause, how dedicated they were to end the war in Vietnam and restore accountability to American democracy.  In many ways, they succeeded.  In other ways, they did not:  American democracy is less accountable today than it has ever been.

     I admire these people deeply.  I admire their courage, I applaud their convictions.  I'm sorry that some of them are no longer with us.  Very sorry.  I only hope that we all can learn from their lives, that we realize that our lives are as much a measure of the years we have them as the degree to which we invest in the transcendent meaningfulness that pervades them.

     Thanks, God, for humanness.

    

 

If you are at all familiar with the history of art, you are aware of Pablo Picasso, the famous Spanish painter who is perhaps best known for introducing the world to cubism.  Much has been written about Picasso, and countless museums have mounted exhibitions of his art over the years.  He has achieved a notoriety, good and bad, and fame which few artists have surpassed.  Next week, we remember his birthday.
     It is in the thinking behind cubism, however, that Picasso perhaps made his most significant mark.  Prior to Picasso, art, despite its numerous divergences into Impressionism and Postimpressionism and the like, continued to present its images reasonably proximate to the object it was portraying.  But cubism broke up its images, fracturing them, twisting them up and down and around, bending them in ways that they would never be in real life.

     Picasso dared to break boundaries, dared to dream in ways that others either could or would not.  Although some religious people found his forays threatening and felt as if his art was making their world less secure, others welcomed Picasso's perspective.  It was simply another way of looking at the human condition.  It underscored that a world wrestling with the ennui of modernity was looking for a way out.  Though Picasso's cubism didn't necessarily solve the problem, it more than made it plain:  we are significant people in, apart from loyalty to a divine being, an insignificant universe.
     When boundaries fade, we find new boundaries still.

      Most of us like music.  Many of us enjoy piano music.  Recently, I came across a book titled The Lost Pianos of Siberia.  It's an account of how, in the midst of the prisons and gulags that have filled Siberia over the centuries, pianos and the music a skilled pianist can produce on them, have endured.  It's a tale of the power of melody to move the human heart.

     And move the heart it does.  Regardless of how rational, unimaginative, or tone deaf we might suppose ourselves to be, most of us cannot help but be captivated by a richly composed and played piece of music.  Music seems to penetrate us in ways nothing else can.  It grabs us in the innermost workings of our hearts, stirring, evoking, and probing, tangling past, present, and future together in the contours and folds of our minds.  It speaks to us profoundly.

     We may wonder why we have ears, we may wonder why we are soulful and tune happy beings.  We may wonder why music is.  As we should.  Fragile beings we be, we grasp at the metaphysical implications of our existence as in a riddle, as in a mirror darkly:  we cannot easily discern the patterns of our deeper selves.

     Maybe that's why, in the face of music that opens our souls, we need a bigger explanation for ourselves than, well, ourselves.  Absent transcendence, why, really, are we here?

      Do you watch television?  Almost all of us, at some points in our lives, do.  Some watch it every night, hour after hour, while others watch it primarily on weekends, catching football games, and still others tune into it for special shows and programs.  Or all three.  Either way, the television has become rather ubiquitous in most lives, be it in the affluence of the West, where we see people walking out of Best Buy and Costco with 72 inch screen monstrosities, to the most rural hinterlands of Romania, where the barely brick and wood homes of a gypsy village in which I taught a number of years ago sprouted any number of satellite dishes rising into the sky, looking for a signal.

     For better or worse, television is everywhere.  I thought about this a bit as I recently read the obituary of Bob Shanks, a former television executive who pioneered the idea of the early morning talk shows to which countless millions of people now tune every day.  His timing proved highly prescient:  today, talk shows dominate the airwaves, coming on at all times of the day or night.

     In The Cool Fire, one of the books he wrote, Mr. Shanks said this about television, "Television is used mostly as a stroking distraction from the truth of an indifferent, silent universe, and the harsh realities just out of sight and sound."  It's quite an indictment, really, of television, the human psyche, indeed, the entire cosmos.  If television is in fact just a distraction from an absolutely insouciant universe--and the random and unpredictable existence that this implies--we may well wonder why we're even alive.

     If life is to live and die and be no more, is it really life at all?

      Today, as my siblings and I will remind each other, marks another year, another year since the passing of our father over thirty years ago.  Despite the span of those decades, we still miss him, and our mother as well.  Time may heal some, yes, but time will never fully overcome the scars its events imprint on our lives.  There are  losses that, try as we might, we cannot completely assuage.  Although we learn to live with them, though we may even come to develop a measure of acceptance about them, we will never totally erase them from our hearts.  For always and forevermore, they are embedded in the innermost patterns of our soul.

     As my siblings and I prepared to leave our mother to return to our lives after saying our final good-byes to Dad, one of our uncles remarked, "Everyone is going back to their lives." True enough.  But we'd never look at our lives in the same way again.  Nor should we.  We're personal beings who respond to our lives in personal ways.  Our lives continue, yes, but take on more furrows with every passing year.
     And the universe remains, an inscrutable mystery, heading to its final denouement, its ultimate destiny.  As are we.  And what then?  Almost inevitably, death makes us wonder: what lies on the other side?
     As the Beatles's "In My Life," a song I happened to hear played today, so poignantly observes, "There are places I remember, some have gone, and some remain . . . "
     Thanks, God, for my father, who he was, and who he was to me, and thanks, God, for the fact of eternal destiny.
     And thank you, Dad.  Thank you for everything.     

     

     Many years ago I had a conversation with a young man on his way to the Burning Man Festival in the desert of Nevada.  At the time, I happened to be in South Dakota, working on an Indian reservation.  As we talked, it became clear to me that even though this young man didn’t appear to have any use for conventional religion, Christianity in particular, he had decided to journey to the Festival because he had “to find my spiritual roots.”  Although he wasn’t sure what those roots were, he was pretty much convinced that the Festival was the place to look for them.  He was persuaded that amidst the cacophony of cultural expressions he would see there, he would eventually step into a place, a place of spirit, however he defined it, he had not been before.

     As we talked, I thought often about the opening pages of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  The person before me seemed a mirror of the young man Joyce so insightfully describes, a person alone and apart, untrammeled and free, someone standing on the cusp of his destiny, poised to find his path forward.  Rather like, I thought, German painter Casper David Friedrich’s “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog”:  poised on the edge of his calling.

     In the end, however, this young man told me that although he had definitely heard a call, a deeply compelling internal directive to find himself, he didn't want to learn about it in the framework of the Christian God.

     It was that fact of framework, he said, that held him back:  spirituality, he said, has no boundaries.

     Fair enough.  If an infinite God is there, then, yes, spirituality has no boundaries.  On the other hand, if an infinite God is there, it seems as if whatever spirituality we encounter will be grounded ultimately in him.  And how will we know either way?

     We will only know if God makes himself known in ways we understand.

     Ever heard of Jesus?

     A few weeks ago, the literary world remembered the birthday of William Wordsworth.  With a last name entirely fitting for his profession of poet, Wordsworth is known as one of the early Romantics, those who, before most of Western Europe had woken up to the intellectual excesses of the Enlightenment, urged readers to think about matters of the heart. 

     Wordsworth's literary heirs, people like Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to name just a few, further refined his vision.  Running through all of their writings, however, was an urgency, an urgent call to Western humanity to find a new God.  While people loyal to a particular God, those who, for instance, inhabited the Christian tradition, looked askance at this thought of a new God, they, along with the rest of us, can learn from it.       

      In its evisceration of long standing notions of whom God could be, the Enlightenment took Western humanity into cultural waters that eventually called people to abandon religious affections altogether.  Here is where the Romantics had significant insight.  Though Wordsworth and his fellow Romantics largely rejected the traditional picture of God, they also recognized that, absent allowing some dimension of transcendence into the human experience, humans would become little more than reasoning automatons:  talking heads without hearts.

     Wordsworth understood that "a [human] slumber" neither "hears nor sees; rolled round in earth's diurnal cause, with rocks, stones, and trees."

     We will always live in mystery.

      At the moment I'm working with some of my artist colleagues on a new project:  things lost and found.  Although we are still in the early stages of formulation, we've had fun.  For instance, think about life and the world in which we live as a big-picture portrait of lost and found.  If this world is in a universe, which it is, whatever we may think it loses is never really lost; only "found" in a new way or new place.  And whatever we may think is "found" has in fact been with us all along.  We just 

didn't see it.    

     We will live with loss, yes, yet we will also live with found.  Loss can be difficult, it can be wonderful.  So too can finding be:  painful or beautiful.  Or both.  In a closed universe, a universe beholden to certain unchanging physical laws and patterns, these facts are not likely to cease:  it is the way of existence.  Consider, however, if the universe is only closed to itself and not to anything outside of it:  what if there is a greater "found" that we will not know until we lose the idea that there is nothing more than what we see?

     What if we are "found" in ways that we least expect, ways that transcend everything we can imagine?

     Then we will really know what it means to lose and be lost:  no longer will we be able to shape the ultimate meaning of our existence.

      "Do not rejoice at your enemy's misfortunes," a Hebrew proverb says, "but want the best for him."  Or God will bless him anyway.

     In this era of highly polarized political dialogue and disputation, avoiding what we might call Schadenfreude is difficult.  However, it seems to be the only way forward.  We demean ourselves if we suppose our integrity to be ours, and ours alone.  There is always a bigger picture.     And we do not paint it.  Although it may be easy enough to say that, well, one day God will judge all things and hold everyone accountable for his or her deeds, I'm not sure this resolves the issue.  We live do not live in the "later;" we live in the here and now.

     Nonetheless, unless there is a bigger picture, we have no business judging anyway.

      Over the weekend, I joined a Zoom conversation between a group of some of my oldest friends, people I met decades ago when we were all, to paraphrase one book's title, college students and young.  A couple of years ago, we held an in-person reunion; for now, however, we must resort to Zoom.

     We all shared our lives.  Many of us have retired, some of us are still working, full and part-time.  All seemed happy.  After I read through the first chapter of Ecclesiastes this morning, a chapter rife with observations of the seeming futility of existence, the almost frightening way that life and its rhythms repeat themselves over and over again with no explanation of why other than this is just the way it is, and the writer's conclusion that because everything that has been done is what will be done and that one day no one will remember us anyway, however, I thought anew of the point of our time on this planet.

     None of us would deny that it's been a grand time.  None of us would say that being alive has not been worth the cost.  And none of us wants to leave life anytime soon.  All of us would agree that each of us has mattered.

     No argument there.  What always makes me stop and think, however, is how we come to this conclusion.  The easy answer is to say that, well, we're human beings: aren't we and our lives important?  The far more difficult question that this answer poses, however, is, why is this important?  We're only affirming our own importance!

     And then we die.  REM once wrote a song called "The Great Beyond."  Without repeating its exact words (copyright laws), I will say that this song states, in sum, that life is nothing if it were not for the Great Beyond.

     It's hard to disagree.

      As I mentioned about a week and a half ago, I took some time to do a little traveling, my destination, of course, the American West.  I never tire of seeing the mountains:  I've adventured through them all my life.  I am of course certainly not unique in this regard:  millions of people enjoy the mountains.  For those of us who do, we would agree that there is something, a something that spans all corners of the human mind, heart, sensibility, and imagination, about seeing mountains.  Mountains are special.

       That said, as I looked last week at the peaks of Wyoming's Rockies, observed how they thrust themselves so effortlessly into the cerulean blue sky, how their slopes catch the sunset and dawn, and how their jagged edges glisten with fresh fallen snow, I thought about, as I often do, about why they are they way are.  Whether I say the ultimate origin of mountains is cosmically impersonal or the work, however, distanced, of a transcendent and personal God, the mystery remains:  why mountains?

     Religious loyalties aside, this is the most important question of all:  why do we, we fragile, finite human beings, get to enjoy such wonder?

     We grasp the meaning of existence only by admitting to its opacity:  the silent work of a hidden God.