Not as well known as Mozart, whose birthday we remembered a few days ago, Franz Schubert was nonetheless one of the most remarkable musicians in Western history.  Immensely productive and profoundly creative, Schubert wrote some of the most ethereal and haunting melodies of all time.  We listen to his music and feel transported, lifted above what is earthly and material, moved into transcendence.  January 31, is Schubert's birthday.

     Schubert's music gives us pause.  If music only told us what we already know, we probably wouldn't get as much out of it as we do.  We do not need to be reminded of what is obvious and normal.  We rather need to be encouraged to ponder what is beyond the apparent, what breaks down the seen, what splits the visible apart.  We want to know what we, at the moment, cannot.

     And this is what Schubert's music does.  Descending into the darkest recesses of his soul, Schubert talks to us about the deepest mysteries of existence, how we walk in a wisp, a gossamer veil stretched between us and the other side of time.  He romanced eternity.
     As do we all.  Every day we balance, balance between presence and absence, perched on a thin line dividing present reality and ultimate destiny.

     Thanks, Franz Schubert, for showing us that life is bigger that life itself.

     Yesterday, January 27, was a day of great solemnity:  International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  It is a day that should cause all of us to stop, think, and weep.  How does one begin to grasp the deliberately engineered deaths of over six million people?  How does one connect with a person who lost the sum of his lineage in a concentration camp?  How can we possibly comprehend being the object of such virulent hatred and racism?

     We can't.  And that's the point.  God aside, evil has no explanation.  It has no point, it has no plan.  It is beyond our ability to fully understand.  Yet evil is us.  We think, we make choices, we act.  And usually with little grasp of its full consequences.  Many Holocaust scholars insist, and rightly so, that the Holocaust is an event that surpasses the widest and deepest boundaries of our ken and imagination.  It's beyond intelligibility.

     For some, it ends all poetry.
     Yet it happened.  Writing to me nearly three decades ago, an American then living in Jerusalem and who had made clear to me that he did not believe in God, allowed that the Holocaust caused even him to acknowledge the reality of the metaphysical.  Why, he reasoned, would anyone with a hatred other than one rooted in the tenebrosity of a twisted notion of the metaphysical engage in such horror?  And why, he suggested, would a God other than one committed to the sanctity of human choice be present as such a thing happened?  Finally, he asked, why, unless Jesus really is humanity's savior, would God ever run away from such pain?
     Weep for our Jewish brothers and sisters, and pray for those who persecute them. And believe:  at all costs, believe in the ultimacy of God.

     It's a big day:  the birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (it's also International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which we will consider tomorrow).  Around the world, people continue to be astonished by the immense creativity and wonder of this Austrian's music.  Fluent in all genres of classical music, Mozart, though he died, sadly, at the tender age of 34, produced an array of musical expression that most musicologists agree is unmatched.  As a contemporary said of him, "He was like an angel sent to us for a season, only to return to heaven again."  Most of us can only stand mute and marvel at Mozart's immense ability.  How could one person write works of such extraordinary beauty?

    

    Rightly do we therefore weep and swoon at the beauty of Mozart's compositions; they are works of unsurpassed wonder.  Yet rightly do we marvel equally at God, the personal infinite God who made and fashioned this artist, with his prodigious talents, and enabled him to be and become who and what he is.

     Similarly, rightly do we marvel at ourselves, who are gifted in a nearly infinite number of ways, we who are similarly made to create in unabashed wonder.
    Thanks, God, for giving us Mozart, as well as every other human being:  these astonishing displays of consciousness and sentience that move across this amazing planet.

      If you are at all familiar with the history of economics, you are likely aware of Adam Smith.  He is most famous for his Wealth of Nations (or An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nation), an Enlightenment era document in which he proposed the idea of an entirely open economic market, one that fosters absolute free trade and rejects any governmental intervention in the marketplace.  For Smith, the market works best when all of its participants are pursuing their self-interest for profit.  When everyone is doing so, Smith argues, the whole (society) will benefit.

     How will this happen?  It is the work of an "invisible hand," the law of exchange, driven by supply and demand, and nothing more.  Crucially, there is no moral point:  it's all about matching supply and demand.  That's all.

     Why does Smith's system find such favor in the West today?  Simply, it has produced immense prosperity in most of the nations in which it has been used.  True enough.  But only if one elevates economic prosperity as the highest value can Smith's system be called moral.  We are more than economic and material beings.  Furthermore, not everyone will prosper in the same way:  there will be haves and there will be have nots.  Monopolies will occur, industries will be destroyed, many lives shattered.

     And when this happens, the market doesn't care:  as a banker at Goldman Sachs remarked in a recent interview, such "disaster" is no more than the "shifting of capital" to a better position.  Again, there is no moral point other than the meeting of supply and demand.  It's very Darwinian:  survival of the fittest.

     So why do many of us reject Darwinism and yet embrace the laissez-faire marketplace?  Do we really want to base our economic activities on the notion of the survival of the fittest?  Do we treasure our material fullness more than the common good?

     It's exceeding difficult to be black and white in a gray world.

     

      If you have read any plays by Samuel Beckett, you know that they present a very bleak world, one singularly devoid of meaning.  But that's Beckett's point:  there is no meaning.  It's a dark, cold world.

     Is this true?  Emotionally, it can certainly seem that way at times.  If there is no reason for this world to exist, if there is no reason why we are here, then however grand our life might be, it ultimately means very little.

     For Beckett, this didn't seem to matter.  In his "Happy Days," Beckett presents only two characters, Winnie and Willie.  Winnie is buried in dirt up to her waist; Willie crawls around on all fours.  As the play proceeds, Winnie talks, talks nearly constantly, to Willie.  She talks of everyday things and how blessed she feels to be alive:  she has Willie.  Willie rarely responds.

     By the end of the play, Winnie is buried in dirt up to her neck.  Willie is still only able to crawl.  Yet she continues to insist that these are happy days.  And we, the reader, are left to wonder why.

     It's simple, really:  in a world absent of point, what else is there to do?

     Without intending to, Beckett therefore makes an even larger admission:  when transcendence is gone, we are, too.

      If you live in a region of the world where snow falls, you have probably seen it by now.  Maybe you like it, maybe you don't.  I do!  So when I awoke a few days ago to see snow falling from the still dark sky, I resolved to go outside immediately.

     Reams and reams of paper are filled with meditations on the winter snow.  While I do not wish to be redundant, I will say that, on this morning, as I watched the snow fall, fall ever so gently on the frozen ground and naked trees, and as I listened and listened for sounds of life and heard none, I felt consumed by the silence, the overwhelming silence.

     As many as mystic will tell us, it is in silence that we find voice:  the voice of transcendence, the voice of infinite mystery.  The voice of meaning into which we can fit all else.  When, as the Hebrew scriptures tell the story, the prophet Elijah found himself on the slopes of Mt. Carmel, dejected, discouraged, and absolutely alone, God didn't speak to him with voice.  The mountain shook, a fire blazed, but no voice came forth.  Only at the end of these astonishing theophanies did God speak with voice.

     But he spoke, as the Hebrew verb used here indicates, with absolute silence.  And that's the point:  if we really want to hear, we must be prepared to not hear.  Only then will reality speak.

      As many Americans, and likely many non-Americans as well know, today is the inauguration of Joe Biden as the president of the United States.  Although too many people in America continue to insist that Biden didn't really win the election, that his "forces" stole the election from the incumbent, happily for the country, every single American court to which they have appealed has dismissed their objections over a profound lack of evidence.

     Where does America go from here?  More to the point, where do the, again, too many evangelical Christians who have chosen to cast their lot with the conspiracy theorists and others who continue to promote these specious claims?  I'm not sure, really, I'm just not sure.  While I believe in the fact of God as much as they, I continue to be deeply puzzled by such epistemological schizophrenia:  whatever are they thinking?

     Or does faith as trust in God in the end hinge on no more than one's political leanings and convictions?

     As many of you may know, today the U.S. remembers the birthday of civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr.  Central to this commemoration is King's belief, a belief he shared with millions of others, that freedom, the ability to do what one chooses, when one chooses to do it, is one of humanity's greatest privileges and blessings.  We all deserve to be free.

     For this is what God wants.  He made us to be free, to free to choose, to be free to do.  To be free to live as we like.

     Freedom is wonderful, and freedom is intoxicating.  But freedom can be frightening.  We often do not know what to do with it.  We frequently do not know what its fullness really means.  We frequently miss the point.  We abuse it terribly.
     Maybe that's why, as John records it in chapter eight of his gospel, Jesus told his audience that, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."  True freedom is to know the truth:  the truth of the fact of God.  King knew this well, and steadfastly centered his call for freedom in the presence of God.  He knew that freedom is only meaningful if it is grounded in something bigger than itself.

     He knew that freedom is more than a release from physical bondage, a slip of one material experience to another. 
     As we remember King's birthday, we also remember that the freedom he preached is ultimately, as Gandhi observed in his explication of satyagraha, self-discovery in truth.  We are not free in an accidental universe, a cosmos without definition; we are free in a universe made real by truth itself.

      Despite the controversy it provokes in many parts of the world today, euthanasia is not a novel concept.  It did not suddenly emerge in modern times.  Literally "good death," euthanasia has been practiced for nearly the entire history of humankind.  Some have labeled it merciful, others have called it merciless.

     On one side of the debate is the steadfast insistence on human freedom.  On the other is the equally steadfast insistence on the freedom of God.  In other words, if I may express it rather vernacularly, who is charge?

     I pondered these questions anew when the other night my wife and I watched "Blackbird," a movie featuring Susan Sarandon as a woman who, overwhelmed with the prospect of a life with ALS, has decided to end her life.

     The weekend before she has scheduled her passing, this woman invites her children and their children to the lovely oceanside home she shares with her husband of many years.  Everyone spends the weekend together, laughing, crying, even celebrating Christmas.  Quarrels and fights happen, too, but are smoothed out in the end.  Throughout the movie, we are invited to observe the thoughts of a person who knows precisely when she will die.

     Theology and philosophy aside, would I like to know precisely when I die?  Would you?  It's a complicated question.  Countless writers have remarked on the virtue of suffering and its role in the human experience.  Many others have responded that, while suffering is part of existence, why let it happen when we can prevent it?  When do we decide when a life is over?

     No one can.  Nor should anyone want to.  Though we humans are fully capable of starting and ending life, we in no way can define it.  Nor will we ever be able to explain the meaning of its end.  How can we grasp the end of something we did not make?

      Early on in Heaven's Breath:  A Natural Study of the Wind, his magisterial examination of wind, Lyall Watson describes the wind's role in various historical events.  In particular, he notes two of the most pivotal battles in ancient and early modern history.  One is the Greek triumph over the Persians at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE, the other is Britain's defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 CE.

     In both instances, it was wind that ensured the outcome of the fight.  With his intimate knowledge of wind patterns in the Gulf of Argos and the Aegean Sea, the Greek commander Themistocles managed to lure a much larger Persian fleet into a place in which the Persians were at the mercy of the prevailing waves and winds.  Had the Greeks not won, the world may not have been introduced to the powerful philosophical and political observations on which we base Western civilization.

     Similarly, although the British navy did indeed defeat the Armada in open sea combat, its task was made much, much easier by a powerful southwesterly wind which had previously hit and seriously crippled the Spanish fleet.  The armada that Britain fought in the Straits of Dover was a pale facsimile of its original size.  As a result, Protestantism went on to flourish in England and, eventually, the entire British empire.  One subsequent outcome was the founding of the United States of America.

     What's the point?  Although actors on both sides of these conflicts undoubtedly prayed that their god would prevail, we are left to wonder how did, if God did take sides, an unanswerable question at best, his action interface with that of the actions of the natural world.  Whose action really prevailed?

     And whose history is most important in the eyes of the divine?

     In her Blockchain Chicken Farm, a set of "Stories of Tech in China's Countryside," Xiaowei Wang recounts what they (Wang prefers the "non-gendered" form of address) has seen after exploring and examining how various parts of rural China are faring in the "Internet" age.  Some, they report, have capitalized on the opportunity this "age" presents, and are doing very well financially.  Others continue to be left out of the cultural and economic mainstream.

     I share this not because I wish to evaluate the state of rural China, but rather to consider an observation which Wang makes midway through their text.  “Yet the irony is, freedom will always slip away when grasped too firmly.”  As laissez-faire capitalism, a system which is, in truth, rather Darwinian, continues to capture minds and hearts around the word, we must always ask:  at what price?

     Unfettered and untamed, the laissez-faire marketplace, as a senior partner at the investment firm Goldman Sachs noted recently, makes profit the sole criterion of success.  Profit is the only thing worth pursuing.

     Morality is not the point.

     Is this really what freedom should be?

     

 

      George Blake.  Ever heard of him?  Blake served as a spy for Great Britain for a number of years, then became a double agent for the Soviet Union.  Eventually caught, he served forty-two years in prison before staging a dramatic escape to Moscow.  He lived there the remainder of his life.  He was ninety-eight when he died.  Vladimir Putin himself heaped lavish praise on Blake in announcing his passing.

     

     And why not?  Blake's work for the Soviets deeply undermined, even fractured British espionage efforts in Eastern Europe.  In addition to transmitting much top secret information from Britain to the Soviets, Blake's work also resulted in the death of several British spies who had buried themselves deep in the Soviet networks.  The damage was incalculable.

     Yet Blake lived a very long life.  Others of much more noble character and activity, relatively speaking, lived very short lives.  On the tiny orb we call Earth, we wonder why, given the few years each of us has to live, this is.  It's an unanswerable question.

     Even if we believe in an afterlife and, perhaps, God.

     Life may be a mystery too complex for us to ever understand.  But we live it anyway.

     Why?  Only because it has a purpose exceeding itself.

     Today is Epiphany.  The "last gasp" of the Christmas season, Epiphany (a word meaning, literally, "the manifestion of a divine being"), reminds us of the faith of a group of Persian travelers in the Zoroastrian and biblical prophecies about a coming king.

     These texts, the travelers concluded, predicted that this king would, in contrast to other royalty, emerge in humble circumstances, a stable outside Bethlehem, a tiny and forgettable village in southern Palestine.
     In addition, this king would be, these travelers concluded, human and divine.  Small wonder that they made the arduous journey over the Zagros Mountains, across the arid expanse of Arabia, and onto the international trade routes that coursed through the Levant.  Who would have imagined such a thing?
     And that's the point:  who would have imagined that transcendence, God, would appear as a human being?
     Epiphany reminds us that only when we open ourselves to the possibilities of transcendence (which are nearly countless) will we understand what the world is really all about.