Perhaps you've seen "Midnight Sky," the much talked about new offering from Netflix.  Based on the 2016 novel Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton (a novel which has little to do with another novel of the same name published in the thirties by Jean Rhys), "Midnight Sky" tells the story of a scientist living alone in a research outpost in the far North who is one of the only people to survive a global catastrophe that killed most of the planet's inhabitants.  As a result of the catastrophe (whose precise nature is never fully explained), the planet's air is toxic and unbreathable.  No one will live above ground again.

     Far away, returning from a two year long expedition to explore one of Jupiter's moons, a spaceship heads to Earth, its crew members looking forward to being at home.  After an arduous journey from his outpost to an even more remote weather station, the scientist, Augustine Lofton, finally establishes contact with the spaceship, named Aether.  He tells them to go back to Jupiter's inhabitable moon.

     At this point, only two crew members, a man and woman, are still on the ship.  One perished in a spacewalk, and two others took a transport pod and bravely flew to the Earth's surface to find their families.  The woman, however, is pregnant with their child.  Remembering Lofton's prominence (aside from his eccentricity) in the scientific community, the two surviving crew members heed his advice.

     They leave to start a new world.

     What would you do?  Would you take a chance on a new world?  Or would you brave your way into the decimated old?

     Put another way, what are you most willing to trust:  what you hope in the new or what you remember from the old?  As we go into 2021, ponder this question.  Ponder your life, ponder God:  what is most worth knowing?

     Happy New Year!

     “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever," writes British poet John Keats, who died at the tender age of twenty-five, "Its loveliness increases; it will never pass into nothingness; but still will keep a bower quiet for us, and a sleep full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing."

    Keats understood, understood acutely, the fundamental nature of existence.  Although this world can be highly mercurial and unpredictable, although this life can be achingly volatile and capricious, its Urstoff, its essence remains the same:  a fount of "things of beauty" which will "never pass into nothingness."

     We will always have the beauty of the planet before us, we will always have the marvel of life's fecundity around us.  Wherever we are, wherever we go, we remain in the gentle embrace of the seminal character of the joy and wonder and beauty of existence.

     The world is just that way.  Like God.

      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 Yukon singer about whom I wrote yesterday says, "the Creator is here," how can anything--and any of us--ever be the same?  History, and everything in it, including you and me, has irrecoverably changed.

     What has made has come to what it has made.
     Christmas reminds us that we live in a universe of meaning.  We could not live otherwise.  Christmas tells us that this meaning's fullness can only be real if it appeals to the fact of a creator, a visible word of the ages, the spoken beginning of space and time.  It is only then that it can be.
     The creator has come.

      Over the weekend, I watched a streamed broadcast of Handel's Messiah.  Although I've seen Messiah many times, I enjoyed this one in particular.  Why?  Presented by the "Against the Grain Theatre," an innovative production and drama organization based in Toronto, this Messiah features a cast of Indigenous singers from all parts of Canada.  From Vancouver to the Yukon to the Northwest Territories to Nunavut to Halifax and Prince Edward Island, a diverse array of Indigenous singers voice the timeless lyrics of Handel's Masterpiece.  Adding to the uniqueness of this production, the singers are presented singing from the wildernesses of their native provinces.  We see the icy stretches of Nunavut, the dense forests of Alberta and Manitoba, the rocky shoreline of Newfoundland-Labrador, and the tundra and mountains of the Yukon.  It is as much visual as it is aural.  The result is highly 

moving and spectacular.     In some cases, the singers have reworked some of the lyrics to fit their Indigenous background.  While some Handel purists and/or aficionados might quarrel with such changes, they may miss the point.  We become party to some insightful observations into the meaning of the Messiah.

     When Yukon singer Diyet van Lieshout hikes through the snowy tundra of her native land, the Kluane Mountains rising behind her, singing in Southern Tutchone, her birth tongue, "O Thou that Tellest Us Good Tidings," she announces, translated from Tutchone, "The creator is here."

     Linguistic "purity" aside, isn't this the point?  In the midst of a troubled world, the one who made it and who has long wished to redeem it, now has finally arrived to do so.  The creator is here.

     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, struck anew, 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, the modern day equivalent of the Roma of Europe.  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 reminds us that when all is said and done, we should understand that God, the vastness of personal transcendence, is not about greatness.  He's about thankfulness and gratitude, humble thankfulness for the fact of existence.  Christmas calls us to consider what we can do to express our gratitude for the humility of being alive, for the opportunity, one we did not create, to partake in the wondrous sentience we all share.

     To give.  For that is what God, all those centuries ago, did.  In the humility of the Christ child, the baby born in a manger, his birth announced to marginalized shepherds, we see the true nature of God:  love.  Love of gratitude, love of humility.  Love for a humanity who had dismissed and forgotten about him.

     Merry Christmas!

    Last week marked the end 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 the fact of light.    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, like Hinduism's Diwali and Christianity's Incarnation, speaks to all of us, all of us who, whether we know it or not, each day walk in the grace of an infinitely remarkable light, a light without which we would not be.
     Enjoy the light of God.

     If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you may know that today, December 21, is the winter solstice.  The "shortest" day of the year.  Or as Robert Frost puts it in his "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "the darkest night."  Yet although it may not seem like it, the winter solstice is actually the grand turning point of the year, the day and night in which time and light begin to grow.  It's the end of the light, yes, but its genesis, too.  We lose, yet we win, moving, ever so slightly, toward the greater light to come.

     While most of us continue to see some daylight, some of us, those of us who live well beyond the Arctic Circle, see only darkness.  But do they?  Although darkness seems to reign, a continual black gloom, the light is never really gone.  Our hearts remain engaged with existence, illuminating us, disclosing the world.  We still see.
     I love the winter.  I love how it masks and shrouds, I love how it engages reflection, I love how it sends us into places we would not otherwise go.  And I love how winter helps us "see" what sight can be.  As we trek through the darker days and hours, we come to understand that light is not what we think it is, illumination and no more.  Light is rather the underlying rhythm of all creation, a continuity of divine favor, a favor that speaks in gloom as well as joy, a favor that underscores the fact of a purposeful planet:  the light of the world."

      

     Step into the darkness, treasure the light.  Enjoy the marvel of a remarkably consistent personal creation.

      Mountains.  Mountains of imagination, mountains of dreams.  As much frightening as they are alluring, mountains, of all kinds, penetrate our lives.  We climb them, we fall off them.  And then we climb them again.  And again.

     

     For British mountaineer Doug Scott, one of the first two Brits to make the summit of Mt. Everest, there are no more mountains to climb.  After a brief battle with cerebral lymphoma, he passed away earlier this week.  He was 79.  Scotsman Dougal Scott, the person with whom he made the summit, has been gone since the late Seventies, lost in an avalanche while he was skiing near his home in Switzerland.

     The light of life is incredibly compelling:  most of us would like to bask in it forever.  But we can't.  For Doug and Dougal, it was the light of mountains; for others, it is something else, something that ripples through mind and heart for as long as they live this life.  One day, however, it ends.

     As I ponder the enormity of time and the inexorable passage of its many moments, I think about Doug and Dougal.  I think about their adventurous spirit, I think about their profound joy.  I ponder the meaning of their days.

     How thankful I am that we live in a personal universe.

     How thankful I am that there is a God.

     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 remember today, thought much about spirituality, spirituality in regard to art.  He did so as a way of explaining how art overwhelmed 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, he said, 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, to him, 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.

     Today is Beethoven's birthday:  his 250th.  What can we say about Ludwig von Beethoven?  This famous portrait of him captures how many of us see him:  a brooding, 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.

     I thank God for Beethoven.  I thank him for giving him to us, for giving him to show 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.

     A few summers ago, I was backpacking through a portion of the Sierra Nevada, the massive mountain range that cuts through heart of California south of San Francisco.  The morning of the first full day, I rose extra early to prepare for what I expected to be a lengthy hike to the base of a pass which I intended to surmount the following day.  When I got out of my tent, the sun had not yet risen over the peaks below which I was camped.  The air was still cold, the lake basin still shrouded in shadow.  So I waited.

     I waited for the sunrise, the sun, that brilliant and life giving orb of light to rise over the peaks and bathe my camp in warmth and radiance.  As I waited, I packed up my camp, prepared breakfast, and got ready to go.
      Then it came.  Exploding atop the ridge, the sun burst, popping with rays of brilliance and wonder, its multiple filaments of splendor spreading over and across the waiting land.  I rejoiced:  the light had come.
     "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 an Israel darkened by disappointment, abandonment, and sin.  He speaks of the Messiah (the Christ) who would enlighten and save all those who longed for him.  He speaks of the light that would come.
     As we journey ever deeper into this season, we remember this fact of light, 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 a terminal existence.  It is the light of purpose, the light of meaning, the light that, if we embrace it, embrace it as fervently as we do the warmth of the sunrise, mountain or not, of our lives, will change our lives forever.
     Once we touch this light, we'll never be the same.

     Yesterday marked the birthday of the Italian artist Donatello.  Working in an entirely different milieu than Edvard Munch, whose birthday we remembered last week, Donatello was a person of the Renaissance, an integral part of one of the most glorious period of human achievement.  The Renaissance was a time, a very brief time, when, amazingly enough, spiritual fealty and artistic inspiration fused, fused in a way that produced some of the most magnificent works of art in history.

     A sculptor, Donatello was known for his highly realistic depictions of the human being, for extraordinary sculptural detail:  his works are remarkable studies in the immensely complex nature, external and internal, of the human being.  Like most of his contemporaries, Donatello grasped that humanity is more than material and yet more than spiritual, too:  it's both.  He understood that a person cannot be material without being spiritual, and spiritual without being material:  the two are inseparable.
      Although as Western Europe moved beyond the Renaissance, the influence of this perspective diminished, and many people concluded that, in truth, they are products of materiality alone, Donatello's work reminds us of who we really are.  We are indeed immensely amazing in our material abilities, yet we shortchange ourselves if we insist that we should not be in turn equally amazed that we are creatures of spirit, a spirit without which we could not be meaningful material beings in a material world.

       Have you seen Edward Munch's The Scream?  A piece that has puzzled and cajoled people for decades, The Scream seems to exemplify the alienation that so often characterizes the inhabitants of the West.  Overwhelmed by a world that offers them everything but meaning, countless people in the developing world cry out for help, some help in making sense of what seems to be a pointless reality.       Affluence reigns, yes, but without any foundation other than the assumption that life is worth it, and this only because those who decide this have nowhere else to go.  If the world is a closed system and we are therefore born only to die, then life, however wonderful it may be, ends before it begins.  So we scream:  why must this be?

     As we remember Munch's birthday tomorrow, as we look toward Christmas and the New Year, as we continue to do what we can to live a good life, we realize that the world is not closed, that it is in fact entirely transparent and open, open and streaming into a web of reality vastly larger than we can imagine, a web grounded in a transcendence that has spoken, a transcendence that has made itself known.  Life is more than itself.  And we are more than who we are.  Love is present, ascendant and true.

     Hence, in contrast to Munch's bleak perspective, we scream not why must this be, but rather how can such wonder be?

 

     "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 an Israel darkened by disappointment, abandonment, and sin.  He speaks of the light that would come.
     In this second week of Advent, we remember this fact of Messiah's light.  We remember how, like the sun exploding over a frigid mountain ridge, Messiah--Jesus--the Word become flesh--has brought us light, the light of enlightenment, the light of hope and meaning that shines through the cold of an often 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 all long for light. We all long for hope and meaning.  We all long 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, a transcendence wrought in personal presence, can meaning be.
     The light of the world.

 

     I heard the other day the poet/songwriter Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”  It reminded me of Canadian (and now American) singer Neil Young’s song, “When God Made Me.”  In it, Young questions God, asking him why he made people a certain way, why he made people when he knew they wouldn’t believe, and more.  Both pieces ask a very good question:  how can I believe in a God if I do not understand him?  Why must I wander in the darkness when I’m standing in the light?
     Yesterday, many across the planet remembered the fortieth anniversary of the death of John lennon.  In one of Lennon's most famous songs, "God," he says, "I just believe in me; Yoko and me.  That’s reality.”

            Granted, transcendence and religion do not lend themselves well to our perceptions.  And that’s the problem.  Ironically, it’s also the solution.  If we could explain everything with chemicals, if we never developed questions like Cohen and Young pose, if we subsumed all experience into a plastic (or computerized) box, then, yes, we would need nothing else.  But we can’t.  So we wonder.

     And we mourn those whom we've lost.

     As we therefore remember John Lennon, we also ponder the ultimate challenge:  how do we know who we are if all we know is ourselves?

      "It is a day that will live in infamy," said Franklin Roosevelt after the attack on Pearl Harbor.  For those who were alive when it happened, the attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor, whose 79th anniversary is today, changed their world forever.  Never before had America been attacked, never before had such devastation been visited upon its shores.  Life was turned upside down.

     But isn't that the nature of existence?  It's capricious, random, and unpredictable, a series of unexpected waves in an unfathomable sea, an illusory skein on an abyss whose bottom we will never see.
     
     Yet we go on.  We grieve for those who lost their lives in this attack.  And we grieve for the thousand and thousands of additional lives that were lost redressing what happened.  The pain and carnage defy all form and sensibility. 
     
     And we continue to believe in meaning.  As we should.  No one should die unremembered, no one should die alone. No one should leave this life lost and abandoned, a forgotten and abandoned image of God, an entity without a point.
     Advent is upon us, reminding us that the horrors of existence are never the end.

      In his celebrated novel Frannie and Zooey, author J. D. Salinger at one point has Franny complain about the meaninglessness of existence.  For her, it is the ego that underscores life's futility:  hers and everyone else's she meets.

     

     Ah, the ego:  we can't live with it, we can't live without it.  For some, including Sigmund Freud, the ego is the seat of all neuroses.  For others, say, Friedrich Nietzsche, it is the path to greatness:  to rise above the herd.  For a contemplative like John of the Cross, it is something to be erased so as to allow God to flourish more fully.

     Maybe all three are right.  Our ego is our drive and center as well as a source of stumbling and imperfection.  But we need it to be who we are.  We are creatures of ego.

     Yet it is in humility that our ego finds its truest home.  We revel in our achievements even as we acknowledge we are dependent on our cultural systems to accomplish them.  We rejoice in our spiritual insights and wisdom even as we recognize that apart from present transcendence we would be not be able to inhabit them.

     And we laud the fact of existence, the existence without which any of these, even the meaning of existence itself, would happen.

      Because we cannot possibly deem ourselves alone in a personal universe.

      As the story has been told by generations of Persians, when one day the twelfth century poet Farid ud-Din Attar was tending to the aromatic spices he sold in his tidy shop in Nishapaur, a wandering fakir asked him, "How are you, with all of this, planning to leave?"

     It is an invitation akin to Jesus' calls to some of his disciples, seemingly on the spur of the moment (although these men had clearly been thinking about Jesus for some time), to leave everything and follow him.  It is asking a person who seems reasonably satisfied and content with his life to, without much further ado, leave it.

     So the question before us is, why would anyone leave a life of satisfaction?  From almost every standpoint, such a departure defies common sense.  But that's the point.  Any person who seeks genuine greatness, be it in the heights of material achievement or the depths of interiority, realizes that she must let go, often without knowing what comes next, of the present moment.  To depart, abruptly and immediately from the known:  to abandon what she sees.

     Attar and Jesus' disciples were being called to pursue interior greatness.  Although we can disagree about whether pursuing interior greatness or exterior achievement is the better choice, it seems that the latter will not be whole without the former.  Until Attar left what he had materially, he did not discover who he was spiritually.

     Not to say that the material is bad.  Not at all:  we need the goods of the material to stay alive.  Absent interiority, however, we will never understand why we  even need to live.

      Well, it seems that the Christmas season is upon us.  Given the pandemic, it promises to be very different.

     I'm happy for the season.  I'm happy for what it commemorates, for what it remembers.  I'm thankful for the opportunity to think afresh about things beyond us.

     About transcendence made known.

     I'm also thankful for the occasion to consider, once more, how the Christmas season should cause us to examine what we are doing with our money.  Unless we make this season about giving, that is, giving to others--and I am not talking about people we know--we've missed the point.
 

     Thinking about the congregations in Macedonia many years ago, the apostle Paul observed that, "According to their ability, and beyond their ability, they gave of their own accord, begging us with much urging for the favor of participating in the support of their brethren" (2 Corinthians 8:3-4).

     Consider:  these people didn't wait to be asked to give; they instead begged for the opportunity to give. Moreover, they gave beyond what anyone thought they could give.  They understood that, "God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed" (9:8).
     If God is there--and he is--we can never give enough.
     Let the retailers worry about what we should get.  Let us rather concern ourselves with what we can give.  As you go forth into the season, realize that it's no challenge to "get."  We can always do that.  The far greater challenge is to give.
     Life is a gift; give of it freely.