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 and undefinable 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 occurred earlier this month, thought much about 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.  In art, Kandinsky 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.

   

    By the way, Happy New Year!

     

    

       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 a Canadian singer about whom I wrote a few years ago 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.  And that we could not live otherwise.  Christmas also tells us that this meaning's fullness can only be real if it is birthed in a spoken origination of space and time, a definitive genesis of all that is real and true.  It is only then that it can be.
     Christmas is only the beginning of what we see.

 

     Although Christmas has dominated the holiday news lately, we cannot overlook that the day after Christmas marked the first day of Kwanza.  Although Kwanza is a relatively new holiday, its impetus, in light of the Advent season, speaks to us all:   a celebration of harvest, bounty, and human diversity.  Yes, Jesus was born a Jew in a forgotten town in Palestine, but he made it clear that God loves every human being, every variety of human beingness and expression, every bit of it.  He leaves no one out.
      
     So it is with harvest.  The world is for everyone.  Kwanza lauds the beauty and meaningfulness of this world, its harvest, its bounty, its joy of a year rightly lived.  The happiness of living in a world whose wonder speaks constantly to us, the beauty of the rhythms of the planet:  a call to treasure the immensity of existence.

     Enjoy the munificence of this wondrous creation.

    When I reflect on the recent passing of South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, I recall one incident in particular which, for me, testifies to the consistency with which Tutu expressed his moral convictions.  It was during a rather dark period in the history of South Africa, a time when tensions were very high, a time when significant segments of the newly freed Black populace disagreed over the right way forward.

    Part of this conflict involved the killing of those deemed traitors to the cause.  It was a particularly ghastly form of killing, too:  being burned alive.  When various mobs identified a person, always Black, whom they considered to be a traitor, they cornered him, trapping him in a tire, dousing him and the tire with gasoline, and setting him alight.

    When Tutu once came upon a crowd doing this very thing, he immediately pushed his way into the center of the mob and singlehandedly halted the procedure, allowing the "condemned" to live.  It was a singular act of courage.  Yet it expressed who Tutu really was.  He did the same in his leadership of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, granting amnesty and forgiveness to people who confessed their complicity in the atrocities of apartheid.  Above all, he encouraged love, forgiveness, and reconciliation.  Not retribution.

    Tutu understood the deepest heart of God.

    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.  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. 

    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 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 humility.  Humble thankfulness for the fact of existence.  Christmas calls us to consider the joy of humility, the humility of being alive, of the opportunity, one we did not create, to partake in the wondrous sentience we all share.

         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 fogotten about him.

     Merry Christmas!

      Who are the Funhogs?  The Funhogs were a group of men, now in their seventies and eighties who, many decades ago, spent their days roaming across the planet in search of adventure.  Some of their names may be familiar to you.  They include people like Yvon Chouinard, founder of the outdoor clothing manufacturer Patagonia; Doug Thompkins, founder of the outdoor equipment company The North Face; and others who are not as well known:  Dick Dorworth, once a prominent skier, Chris Jones, and Lito Tejada-Flores.

     The Funhogs are perhaps most famous for their epic 1968 driving journey from California to the tip of the Americas, where they successfully summited the formidable Fitz Roy in, of course, Patagonia.  They reached the top on Christmas Day.

     1968 is a long time ago, yet the Funhogs still look back on that year as one of the highlights of their lives.  As Thompkins later wrote, "So I give thanks, as I look back, that fate played its mysterious hand guiding me along a wonderful path, in a life with never a single moment of regret.  If I could play it over, I would let it go just as it has, with all the minor bumps that came with it.  Just like those bumps along the last 900 miles from Bariloche to the Fitz Roy valley--sometimes a bit uncomfortable, but still very enjoyable all the way."
     Thompkins's words surely underscore the joy and marvel of life, whose twists and turns he attributes to fate and its mysterious hand.  Don't we all wonder why life goes the way it does?  Do not we all occasionally sit back and ask ourselves how it is that we ended up where we are today?
     Or maybe we do what the Funhogs did:  as long as we are here, we ought to go ahead and embrace everything we can.  After all, when it's over, it's over.  If death is a blank wall, well, the Funhogs have done great.  They've lived to the max.  If death is otherwise, however, we wonder, too, yet in a different way:  what does it mean?
     The abyss between these positions is profoundly deep.  It is in fact unbridgeable.  It all comes to what we know and, significantly, what we believe about what we know.  So we therefore ask, if Jesus, God in human flesh, has come, and every evidence indicates he did, what will we do about it?  Everything, absolutely everything about us, our life, and our world, hinges on how we answer this question.

    As many of us enjoy our Christmas season amidst our varying degrees of affluence, we must not overlook those among us who, in what for most is one of the happiest times of the year, are suffering.  In countless ways.  In particular, I am thinking about one, the thousands of people who are dealing with the aftermath of the tornadoes that swept through an incredibly large swatch of the American South and Midwest.  On a daily basis, natural disasters afflict humans all over the world, yes, and each instance is, for those touched by them, horrific.  Nonetheless, the devastation left by these windstorms is nearly beyond comprehension.

    Two, I think about the Afghanis who, lured by hollow promises of the Belarusian  government to come to its country and subsequently migrate to Europe, are doing nothing of the kind.  Prohibited from moving over the border to Poland, they are living in the snow filled forests without shelter, with no relief in sight.

    Three, I remember one of our neighbors whose mother is slowly dying, fracturing the joy of the season.  Christmas will be unspeakably different for her and her family this year.

    And then I wonder, given the innately divine goodness and purposefulness of the world, how to put it all together.  Advent's particularly potent expression of God's light therefore reminds us of how much we, walking as "in a riddle," need to believe in it.

    And, in the biggest picture, very little more.

     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."  Happily, 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. 

    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 these darker days, we come to understand that light is not illumination only.  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--and persistent--personal creation.

      As we remember the fourth and final Sunday of Advent and look towards its culminating event, Christmas and formal remembrance of the incarnation, God's appearance in human flesh, I think frequently about its origins.  As the gospel accounts make clear, Jesus was born in Bethlehem (literally, "house of bread"), a town that we might today call a hole in the wall, a little village largely forgotten by the rest of the world.  Few people cared what happened in Bethlehem.

     Nor did few people care when, after God told Joseph to take Mary and Jesus and flee the country to avoid King Herod's deadly predations, Jesus lived for a time in Egypt.  Mary and Joseph were likely viewed as just one more set of refugees, one more group of aliens moving through the flotsam of the Empire, their lives a mirror of countless migrations before:  no big deal.

     But this is precisely the point.  Though Jesus was an alien and refugee, born in obscurity and forgotten and overlooked by the rest of the world, he was the one in whom God chose to make himself known to all humanity.  Jesus was the one whom God would use to manifest and reconcile himself to his human creation, the one whom God would use to draw all people to himself.  In Jesus, the poor and forgotten refugee, resided the greatest hope of all time.  It's the ultimate irony, the greatest surprise.  It's God's way of demonstrating to us that just when we think we have everything figured out, be it our views about immigration, aliens, refugees, or anything else, we really do not.
     But isn't that what God is all about?

      "The greatest poverty," wrote poet Wallace Stevens, "is not to live in a physical world."  Fair enough.  On the other hand, physicality without a larger framework renders it incomprehensible.  Moreover, it seems that unless we can grasp that larger framework, we would still know very little about who we are.

     

    As spiritual beings, we humans tread a tenuous path.  We love our physicality and the fruits of living in a physical world, and we should.  Yet we are also acutely aware that we are more than our physicality.  We all experience feelings of transcendence, whether we believe them to originate in immanency or something beyond it.  We daily encounter the limits of physical category.

    Maybe that's the logic of the incarnation.  As we continue walking through the Advent season, we have time yet again to ponder that investing in only materiality leaves us wondering what everything earthly really means, a life spent looking for what it can never know.  Yet denying materiality in favor of transcendence, and only transcendence, forces us to construct meaning on a bed of sinking sand, drowning us in what we cannot see.
    

    Only when immanence and transcendence are fused can we see what meaning, and God, really mean.  Only in Advent's coalescing of time and eternity can we see what life can ultimately be.

      Today is      Beethoven's birthday:  his 251st.  What can we say about Ludwig von Beethoven?  This famous portrait of him captures how many of us see him:  a brooding, brilliant composer.  Beethoven's 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 viscerally of Beethoven's melodies, we wonder about the power of the humanness and universe which his songs describe.  A Romantic in the purest sense, Beethoven reminds us of other worlds and other 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 potential and 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 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.

     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 consider Munch's birthday, which fell earlier this week, 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.  Life is meaningful because it is 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 one who would open the eyes of all those who longed for a bigger picture of reality, who sought to see a greater light,  Who believed in more.
     On the third Sunday of Advent, we remember this fact of Messiah's light.  We remember 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 an often disparate existence.  It is a light that, if we embrace its rising, embrace it 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 measured or even be.  Only in a personal cosmos, a cosmos in which an enlightening transcendence is possible, can hope and purpose be, infused with meaningful light.
     The light of the world.

 

    So many times did I read over Thanksgiving weekend one of the closing verses in Ecclesiastes, "Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.  'Vanity of vanity,' says the Preacher, 'all is vanity'!"  It doesn't seem appropriate for a day of giving thanks, does it?
    It was on Thanksgiving a few years ago that I received word that my ninety-one year old aunt, the last living member of my parents' generation, had been admitted to a hospital with pneumonia.  Her prognosis was not good.  In fact, I learned the next day, Aunt Patty was dying.
    Sunday morning, Patty did die, passing out of this world, this life, forever.  I'll never see her, in this life, again.  It's very final.  And yes, despite the best efforts of the morticians, not too many months will pass before she is, well, dust.
    In a book, He Held Radical Light, which he published a few years ago, poet Christian Wiman writes of our deep desire to "reconcile a deep intuition of otherness with the adamantine materialism that both science and our clock-logic lives seem to confirm."  We instinctively know life is more than what it is, yet we just as strongly want to believe it is not.
    Put another way, the fact of otherness demands that truth and belief becomes one and the same.
    It also enables us to know life as it is most meant to be.

    By the way, next week I'll be traveling in the American West.  I'll catch up with you in a couple of weeks.  Thanks for reading!

      Well, it seems that the Christmas season is upon us.  By all counts, spending should set a new record:  Americans will spend, surveys tell us, nearly two billion dollars on Christmas gifts this year.

     Should we be happy?  I'm happy for the people these sales will employ.  I'm happy for the people who will enjoy the gifts they receive.  I'm happy for the joy many people feel in this season.

     I'm most happy, however, at how the Christmas season should cause us to examine what we are doing with our money.  In the end, it's all about giving, giving, that is, to others rather than ourselves.

     

    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.  What do they know?  Let us concern ourselves with what we can give.  As you go forth to "conquer" the stores before you, 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.

 

     Advent has come.  For many years, mountaineer Charlie Fowler, with his fellow climber Christine Boskoff, scaled peaks all over the globe.  Year after year, they traveled around the world, taking on the most difficult ascents, almost always achieving the summit.  From every standpoint, it seemed that they were blessed, blessed with grace, be it the grace of the mountains, the day, the universe, even God.
      Grace is unmerited favor.  It is something we do not deserve, something apart, something that comes to us, unasked, unbidden, sometimes even unwanted:  it's almost magical.
     In December 2006, Charlie and Christine failed to return from a climb on a remote peak in southwestern China.  Subsequent rescue efforts found nothing.  Some months later, their bodies were found, likely victims of an avalanche.

     In a letter to one of his proteges (Titus), the apostle Paul, writing about Jesus, declares that, "The grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all people."  There is grace, and there is grace.  Some of us like to say that the universe "brought" grace and good favor to us.  Maybe so.  In truth, however, how can an impersonal universe intentionally bestow favor?

     Grace abounds in this world.  That much is clear.  Our challenge, indeed the central challenge of this Advent season, is to decide how we are to understand it.  If grace is intentional, if grace is embodied and has directly and intentionally come, we live in a personal world.  If it is random, if it just happens, we live in a meaningless cosmos.  And "grace" just happens.
     Which do you prefer?

      Hanukkah has begun!  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 lights.  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 speaks to all of us, all of us who, whether we know it or not, each day walk in the grace of a infinitely remarkable light, a light without which we would not be.
     Enjoy the light of life.

      God opens his hands," writes the psalmist, "and satisfies the desire of every living thing" (Psalm 104).  Although we all have much for which to give thanks, perhaps the most important thing for which we can be thankful is that we can give thanks.  We can rejoice that we can be aware of who we are, that we can experience the gracious bounty of the universe, that we can know, really know, that we are beings who can create life, culture, and moral sensibility.  We can be grateful that we are here.

     Many a theologian has observed that all truth is God's truth.  If so, we can also give thanks for that which enables us to know everything else:  living and personal truth.  Absent this truth, nothing has point.  Give thanks therefore that despite the fractured state of modern spirituality and the numerous political issues that attend this end of November celebration, truth remains.  And that truth is knowable.

     We live in truth's materiality yet we exist in its eternality.

     Happy Thanksgiving!

      Widely renowned for his profound and otherworldly poetry, William Blake, whose birthday we remember this month, wrote some of the most memorable verses in the English language.  Millions of seekers, spiritual and otherwise, have used his lines (in his "Auguries of Innocence), "To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour" as they meditated on the meaning of their lives.  Millions more have employed the metaphysical fractures running through Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" to develop their vision for understanding a material reality which at the same time seems permeated with ethereal activity and semblance.  Blake's words capture the essence of the modern quest for wholeness and meaning:  even though life seems mysterious, even futile, we human beings still want to believe that it matters.  So what do we do?

    

    Particularly if, as modernity avers, there is no God.  It is the perennial dilemma of being a human being.  How do we balance what we want to think with what we feel we must believe?

    Blake pushed creativity to its limits, mining life for all he could.  He took hold of existence in full.  He understood very well that if there really is no God, how are we to understand the metaphysical strivings of the human being?

     Maybe there's more than we think.

    

      If you're a Baby Boomer, you remember.  Fifty-eight years ago yesterday, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was killed, gunned down by an assassin in Dallas, Texas.  For those of us who lived through this day, we will never forget it.  Although a number of presidents had been assassinated previously, JFK's occurred in our lifetime, in our time, in our day.  We didn't read about it in history books; we experienced it, experienced it directly and personally, in a profoundly visceral way.  Our world would never be the same.

     Setting aside the seemingly endless debates about assassination conspiracies, the relative value of JFK's presidency, or intimations that JFK might be the "AntiChrist," and looking at the bigger picture, we see one simple truth:  we live in a frighteningly capricious and unpredictable world.  Though we build our lives on concrete particulars, we construct our life meaning on universals, on hopes and dreams we cannot always see.  We are finite creatures living in a bottomless world.

     At JKF's grave in Arlington cemetery, the flame burns eternal:  only in transcendence do we see what is really true.

    What are we to do with our passions?  In this regard, the American novelist Edith Wharton (1862 - 1937), who wrote a number of novels, including Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome, which explored the complexity of human passion, makes some telling points.

    In Age of Innocence, Wharton tells the story of a married man who, many years before he wed, was in a relationship with another woman.  There is of course nothing terribly unusual in this.  However, as it turns out, once he marries, this woman reenters his life as a person greatly admired by his wife.  Again, no harm done.  But he realizes he is still in love with this woman whom, we read, continues to encourage his amorous desires.  But their affections are never consummated.

    Eventually, this man's wife dies.  As the novel therefore draws to a close, he realizes that he can legitimately re-engage with this other woman.  But he doesn't, remarking that his affections, "Are more real to me here than if I went up [to her apartment]."

    Are passions more real if they are unfulfilled?  Wharton's point, it seems, is that the nature of human passion is such that oftentimes it is the passion and not necessarily its completion that marks the human being.  We live in a twilight between what we feel and what we can do.  So it is with faith.  Although in this life we believe, passionately, it is only in the next life that these passions find final fulfillment.

    It's the grand challenge of being human.

    From many standpoints, life seems fleeting.  Even if someone lives to be over one hundred, once that person dies, that person is gone.  And all that this person may or may not have done in his or her lifetime suddenly seems somewhat empty, swallowed up and erased by the death that has followed it.

    Depressing?  I suppose.  A few days ago, I learned that one of my most memorable teachers in seminary passed away.  He was 77.  I was shocked:  few of us, at least in the West, expect to leave this world at that age.  As I've been reflecting on my teacher's passing, I have thought deeply about the fact of eternity that runs through and undergirds the entirety of how Christians view life and reality.    If there is an eternity at the end of this earthly life, then faith makes the highest possible sense; if there is not an eternity, faith makes no sense at all.

    Therefore, if, as the New Testament account makes clear, Jesus rose from the dead, then everything about this life changes.  However finite, bleak, fleeting or, alternately, joyous or meaningful we may suppose this life to be, it is, in the big picture, simply a ground and harbinger of what lies beyond it.  Of what will follow it.  It is, as poet Emily Dickinson observed, "Not conclusion; There is a species beyond."

    Rest well, Mark.

    Last week, Aaron Feuerstein, the aptly named "mensch" of Malden Mills in Massachusetts, died at the age of 95.  I mentioned Mr. Feuerstein because in a time when corporations, faced with financial challenge, are all too quick to shrink their workforces, did just the opposite:  he retained and actually grew his work force.  Financial stability, he often remarked, is not worth more than workers' livelihoods.

    Words well said.  Capitalism can be a very rapacious enterprise, elevating self-interest and profit above every other consideration.  Although, broadly speaking, capitalism has produced much material gain for many people around the planet, its essential worldview also makes it fertile ground for human exploitation.  Too many people fall through the cracks, abandoned and forgotten.

    When in the Eighties countless domestic clothing manufacturers shut down their factories in the States to pursue low wage help in other parts of the world, laying off thousands and thousands of people in the process, Mr. Feuerstein did not.  He believed in his people, he cared about his people.  And he cared about them more than trying to satisfy shareholder demands. He stayed right where he was.

    And Malden Mills prospered greatly.  In the Jewish worldview, a "mensch" is a person among persons, a person who stands above others in his pursuit of what is right (this in sharp contrast to Friedrich Nietzsche's "ubermensch," the one who cast all else aside to pursue his personal vision).  it was Mr. Feuerstein's deeply held Judaic belief in doing good deeds before all else that impelled him to look after his workers.  He believed in a God who cared profoundly about his human creation.

    As should we.  Capitalism without moral foundation is, in the big picture, worth very little.  Indeed, it misses the biggest point:  to reverence who and what God has made.

    Rest well, Aaron Feuerstein.

 

     Do you like haystacks?  I say this somewhat tongue in cheek to make a larger point:  this month, November, marks the birthday of French painter Claude Monet.  One of the most famous of the nineteenth century impressionists who transformed the nature of art, Monet achieved perhaps his greatest fame for his series of haystack paintings.  Visit the Art Institute of Chicago and see many of them:  Monet had a haystack for every time and season.

     Yet Monet was more than haystacks.  He painted a number of pastoral scenes, deeply impressionistic reworkings of the French countryside, masterpieces of the subtley of light and color.  They shine with joy, a joy of happiness, a joy of the very essence of the sublime.

     Consider one of Monet's most well known theses:  "I wish to render what is."  In Monet's work we see an effort to take what "is" and make it as we feel it should be.  Not what we think it should be, but what we feel it should be.  We turn rationality on its head; we elevate emotion over all.
     And in so doing, we capture the heart of who we, and the world, most are.  Although we are indeed rational beings, we are also, in our deepest essence, beings of passion, creatures of viscerality and pathos.  So do we embrace the world, so do we embrace its hiddenness, the powerfully ordered transcendence that ripples through it.
     We thank Monet for this insight, that amidst our dogged attempts to understand life rationally, perhaps we do better to grasp it as it most fully is:  the passionate rendering of a profoundly passionate creator. 

 

    Yesterday, November 11, was Veterans Day in the U.S.  As most students of World War I are aware, November 11, 1918, marks the day that the armistice of World War I took effect (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month).

     Despite all that humanity may do to prevent them, wars continue to happen, and many people feel called to or are conscripted to fight in them. Unfortunately, while some survive, far too many do not.  And this doesn't count the untold numbers of civilians who perish as well.  War's tragedy is immense.  Veterans Day is therefore a mixed bag, a remembrance of a heartbreaking nexus of duty, honor, suffering, and pain.  When I think about Veterans Day, I therefore think about such things; I think about heartfelt conviction, I think about the slippery nature of sin.  I also think about the beauty of peace and and the joy of human compassion.  And I wonder how God, in Jesus Christ, one day intends to set all these ambiguities right. 

     It's not easy.  It's not easy to know what, amidst the forest of human ambition and emotion, God thinks.  It's not easy to know what eternity, the lens by which all things will be assessed, envisioned, and judged, means.  We live in a riddle.  Yet God is present, in peace as well as war, his love for us ever unchanged.

     And maybe, in all of our human stumblings and beautiful yet flawed rationality, that's what we most need to know.

    Have you heard of CRISPR?  Although CRISPR has been used in the world of genetic research for some years, it has recently emerged into the cultural mainstream.  Researchers now realize that, if they wish, they can manipulate or delete any gene in a given genome to essentially "manufacture" a person to order.  In other words, "designer babies."

    CRISPR was the topic of my atheist discussion group this month.  One of us is a molecular biologist and very well informed about the current state of research.  Running through his presentation and our discussion was the question of ethics:  how do we decide to draw the line?  If we can, say, eliminate the gene that causes sickle cell anemia, should we?  Do we know enough to be able to assess the broader consequences of such an action?  And what is the line between that and a parent's desire to ensure that his/her child will be born with a particular set of genes, genes that, to the parent's mind, help the child achieve "success" (whatever this is) in life

    Where do we stop?  And what is our basis for doing so?  As we talked, I sensed that although everyone who was sharing would oppose allowing the creation of "designer babies," other than asserting the special nature of the human being (this from a human being), no one could offer a solid ethical basis for such opposition.  On the other hand, some people suggested that, well, humanity's ability to alter its genetic pool is just another step in the evolution of the human species.  It is an organic happenstance that reflects the continuing creative capacity of humankind.  We may not like it, but we should understand that this is the inevitable fruit of being human.

    It seems to me that what is missing from the debate is a solid starting point for assessing what CRISPR means.  If we attribute CRISPR to the wonder of human evolution, we treat it as an amoral development in the life of a given species:  it has no real point.  It happened.  If we insist that humanity is special, on what basis do we do so?  We're humans trying to justify our humanness to a random world without a larger point.

    Absent inviting transcendence and its liberating vantage point into our deliberations, we are simply looking at ourselves to figure out ourselves.  It's a journey that, if materialistic evolution is true, has no meaningful starting point and no meaningful end.

    It just is.

    Is this enough?

    

    The poet Anne Sexton, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer who died in the last century, led a rather melancholy existence, one rich with insight yet one tempered with deep angst.  In the end, she took her own life.

    Along the way, Sexton penned some profoundly constructed words about her relationship with God.  One of her most well known poems is this regard is "Rowing Toward God."  In this poem, which is actually a set of poems, Sexton writes of how she is constantly rowing toward God yet how this rowing is an "awful" rowing toward her goal.  For when she seems to reach God, he does not seem as friendly or welcoming as she thought he might be.  She realizes that however well she has lived or believed, God holds all the cards ("five aces," as she puts it).  Her ultimate destiny is completely in his hands.

    So hers is an awful rowing, an awful rowing toward a destination which, to her, deeply disappoints, a destination that, to her, is devoid of hope.  Who really am I? she wonders.  If God makes the final call, what is the point?
    Indeed.  Apart from visible exchange with God, we might all wonder the same thing.  In a world which we did not make, a world in which a God seems to hold all the cards, world whose destiny we cannot possibly see, who and why are we?  Is there a reason beyond the moment?
    Only if, as the apostle John wrote, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us."  Only if God has made himself known.

    The good news is that, in the person of Jesus Christ, he has.

    Today, I celebrate my birthday.  And, by many standards, it's a significant one.  Birthdays are the stuff of existence.  Birthdays herald, birthdays announce, they herald, they demarcate and divide.  Birthdays ground the shapes and patterns of our lives.  They also remind us of the fragility we all inhabit:  we cannot predict how many birthdays we will know before we know them no more.

     The year I turned twenty-two, I was in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.  I had just emerged from four months of backpacking in the Canadian Rockies and was now traveling east, taking a long way back to the States.  Given all that was happening in the world and the majesty of the mountains in which I had been, my birthday seemed a very little mark in a very large canvas.

     

     It still is.  At the time I turned twenty-two, all I could know is that life was a promise and expectation, an inkling and anticipation, a river and ocean coming constantly together in a creation I did not really make, a creation that, regardless of how I then saw it, could only be meaningful if it spoke of transcendence.

    So it is today.  Otherwise, nearly fifty years later, although I still believe all of us to be poems, beautiful and gripping poems of existence, unless we are poems with transcendent purpose, destiny, and conclusion, we miss the whole point.

    Happy birthday.

    Yesterday marked the beginning of the festival of Diwali.  It is a holiday sacred to over a billion people around the world:  a joyous occasion.  Diwali is known as the festival of lights, the lights of color, brilliance, enlightenment, and happiness:  all that which enters into the mystery and wonder of life and the God who gives it.

    It's apt.  Unless we celebrate life in the framework of higher purpose, its lights becomes little more than momentary confluences and coalescences of dust and plasma, things in which we have found (or according to German philosopher Martin Heidegger, have been "thrown") ourselves, raw and unknown, and told we must live.  And as the late evolutionary biologist William Provine acknowledged, if life is random, we are no more than plops, born only to die.  There is no meaning.  We're here, but why?
     Enjoy life, enjoy its lights.  Be happy for it.  And rejoice in the fact of purpose, the purpose of a creator.  Light doesn't shine long in a forgotten universe.

     As we consider the fact of All Souls Day, which many of us celebrated a couple of days ago, we remember.  We remember our loved ones who are gone, we remember what has gone well, we remember what has not.  We remember existence, we remember life itself.  We ponder the import of memory.

    We also ask, how do we explain what has happened, what has been?  How do we measure the span of our existence?  How do we measure the value of our days?

   

    In ourselves, though we may take pride in reflecting on a life we believe to be well lived, a life that has made its mark, how do we really know?  We have only ourselves and our fellow human beings by which to assess such things.  We can only measure by what we know.  And what we know is frightfully little.  Rarely do we see the big picture.  Rarely do we grasp the full meaning of our years.  We're finite creatures living in a finite world, a world that, one day, according to all cosmological predictions, will be burned up by an expanding sun, gone forever, never to be seen again.  And it will be over.

     Even if we are but dust, we affirm that dust only has value if it has a reason to be.  Absent this, though dust could well be, we have, apart from anything in us, no reason to believe it should.  It all just happened.  But why?

     As we remember, as we look back, as we look forward to, as poet Robert Browning once wrote, what is to come, in this life or the next, we come face to face with the fact of existence:  why must it be?

     Revel in the fact of personal creation.

       Back from traveling, I ask a question:  do you listen to opera?  Not everybody does, and not everyone enjoys it.  Some operas, however, are worth listening to.  I say this because a few weeks ago the world of opera remembered the birthday of Gioachini Rossini, the famous Italian composer of the Enlightenment and Romantic Era. You may have heard of some of Rossini's works, such as the Barber of Seville (a delightful comedy) and William Tell (a dramatic presentation of the life of William Tell, one of the people who, legend has it, helped birth modern Switzerland).

     Interestingly, Rossini's break with musical tradition, particularly in opera, represented yet another picture of the way that his predecessors, including Mozart and Handel, had already broke open musical possibility. Steeped in the Romantic tradition, Rossini was able to infuse his music with emotions the West had not yet seen.

     As I ponder this and listen to a few of Rossini's most famous overtures (like the one from William Tell), I often return to contemplating the remarkable way in which humanity has become itself.  Creativity bequeaths creativity, newness births more newness, and what has been, as Ecclesiastes observes, is always becoming what is.  Like Arthur Lovejoy's Great Chain of Being, a portrayal of life opening more and more in history and time, music opens up too, ever speaking to us of future and possibility, steadfastly reminding us of the near inexhaustible character of humanity and the cosmos.
     Music makes us see that reason alone will not give us meaning.  We need the emotion, the emotion and moral force of music in our lives to tell us that life has hope and that life is more than mind.  For reason alone, as philosopher (and atheist) Kai Neilsen points out, will not lead us to what is moral.  We need the transcendent, a realm to which Rossini's soaring arias point us, to know what is most valuable and true.

     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.  This 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 people found his forays threatening and felt as if his art was making their world less secure, others welcomed Picasso's perspective.  Yet his 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.  Picasso's fractured images made modernity's paradox frustratingly plain:  though we like to think we are significant beings, we do so in what we, gripped in modernity, have no choice but to insist is an insignificant universe.

    Asserting that we can live without boundaries only underscores that we need them more than ever to find who we are.  However mysterious they may be.  Perhaps that's why even some of the most committed modernist painters continued to affirm the idea of God.

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