Fireflies?  The other day I was looking at the work of New Mexico artist Kit Lynch (we own one of her paintings).  One of her current works depicts a night sky, shot through with falling stars, hovering over a river on whose bank we see enormous clouds of fireflies.  The total effect is mesmerizing.

                         Kit Lynch

     In studying this painting, I was reminded of a time a few years ago when my wife and I were staying at a cabin in the mountains of Albania.  When darkness finally arrived (it was the night of the summer solstice), all we could see were fireflies:  massive swarms of light filling the sky.  It was a remarkable sight.  All the more because there was very little ambient light to distract our largely citified eyes:  a vision of another world.

     Which is my point.  Broadly speaking, the life of a firefly is rather evanescent.  A firefly appears for a couple of months at the peak of the summer, then disappears, not to return for another year.  When the firefly's lights shine, however, it captures all that is confounding, amusing, and amazing about existence:  lovely yet transient,  pointless yet entirely not, rippling with beauty and wonder that overwhelms all before it.

     That's life.  It's also why life is:  the personal experience of a personal creation.  And creator.

      Perhaps you can identify with a longing for outdoor adventure, a longing to step out of the regular and normal, a deep seated desire to break away from the staid rhythms of quotidian existence.  If so, you are decidedly not alone.

     But you might wish to be.  You might wish to be tromping through an uncharted wilderness area hundreds of miles from anyone or anything else.  You may seek the deepest unknown there is.

     A book published by the Sierra Club in the Seventies chronicled the adventures of two young men as they explored the wild places of the American continent.  Its opening page recounts some words of the late actor Steve McQueen, "I'd rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than any city on earth."

     Put another way, it is this spirit of adventure, this thirst to explore, to topple boundaries, to abandon everything in quest of inner fulfillment that overrides all else.  It captures the heart of the lonely yet determined human pitted against the forces of the distant and remote, the former hinting at meaning, the latter inundating him with it.

     There are many wilds, there are many unknowns.  In focusing on the wilds of the material world, however, it's not difficult to see that in seeking them, we cannot help but find the wilds of another.  Finite creatures wandering in a nearly infinite cosmos, we humans need the wilds of transcendent mystery to really see whom we are.

      

      As you may know, a few nights ago was Oscar night in Hollywood.  For those who follow the Oscars, it was of course a visual feast:  the the parade of "celebrities" on the red carpet adorning the entrance to the auditorium prior to the ceremony; the interviews with numerous movie stars; the vignettes splashed on the auditorium screen, and more.  Magazines that cover "celebrities" found much fodder for their next issue.

     For the rest of us, however, the Oscars come and go as if nothing has happened.  Indeed, the television audience was down by fifty-four percent from last year.  By next year, the movies and stars which excelled this year will be forgotten, and the new winners will be forgotten promptly in the following year as well.  We wonder:  what is the point?  The movies made money, the stars made money, people were entertained, the culture grew some more furrows, and then we move on to the next thing.  It's gone as quickly as it has come.
     So goes much of Western culture.  It passes over and through us almost seamlessly, as if it had never happened, as if we had never experienced it at all.  Thanks to the magic of soundbites, Andy Warhol's famous fifteen minutes of fame have shrunk to less than a minute, as evanescent as they can possibly be.  We barely know they were here.
     Yet we keep moving on, keep pursuing our life dreams, perhaps thinking about one of the leading characters in the novel Perks of Being a Wallflower's wish that he not lapse into "oblivion."  We strive for presence, for presence is all, in an epistemologically empty cosmos, we have.  It's almost enough to make one wish for a God, for then, and only then, will any of the Oscars, or anything else, ever have any lasting point.
     Indeed, for then, and only then, even after every movie has run, every star has passed on, and all has turned to dust, this presence, more powerful and intense than we can presently imagine, will continue still.

      Pray for India.  With one of the world's worse outbreaks of the coronavirus, this nation of 1.4 billion people is struggling greatly.  Cremations are running around the clock, oxygen shortages are frequent, and hospitals have long run out of beds to care for the sick.  There seems to be no end to the country's suffering.  It's unspeakably tragic.

     With their wealth and influence, the nations of the West were first in line for the virus vaccine.  Everybody else had to wait in a long line.  This also applied to medical equipment and assistance.  If a nation didn't have enough of either, it could not count on a wealthier nation to come to its aid: everyone was on her own.

     In his Shantung Compound, theology professor Langdon Gilkey describes his time in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in World War II China.  To Gilkey's embarrassment and chagrin, he observed that it was the most religious and most affluent inmates who proved to be the most selfish.  Few wanted to share.

     Such disconnected behavior makes one wonder:  why believe in God, anyway?  It doesn't seem to change anything.

     To this, I say, gingerly, that we can only believe, with good reason, that God's love is greater than how too many believers interpret it.

     True selflessness can only be infinite.

     (Happily, as I finished this blog, I noticed that the U.S. had offered India some assistance, and even its lifelong enemy Pakistan expressed its solidarity with its neighbor.)

     "To be or not to be, that is the question:  whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them." 

    So wrote the Bard of Avon, otherwise known as William Shakespeare, generally acknowledged as one of the greatest playwrights who ever lived.  As we think about Shakespeare's birthday, which the world celebrates today, we marvel at his ability to write such striking and memorable poetry and prose.  We are awestruck at his insight into the human condition, at his ability to create such stunning portraits of humans at the peaks of triumph and the nadir of despair.  Shakespeare had a remarkable capacity for capturing life, for divulging the intimacies of what it means to be a human being.

     To be or not to be?  Do not we all ask ourselves this at some point?  Do not we all wonder why we are here?  What we should do?  Why will it end?
     Indeed.  We are only human, but ironically, that is all, Shakespeare constantly reminds us, we ought to be.
     And so, in this bewildering and astonishing world, is God.

     Today is Earth Day.  Established in 1970, Earth Day is a day on which we think anew about the wonder and fragility of the tiny globe on which we spin through this vast, vast cosmos. Earth Day is a call to attend to the ecological balance of the world.

    Many, however, deride Earth Day.  The reasons for their rejection are religious, political, and economic.  They draw from all corners of the human spectrum.



     Underlying all them, however, is human arrogance.  People who dissent from Earth Day do so ultimately because whether they know it or not, they are assuming that they, and only they are the most important thing on the planet.  They assume that nothing is more important than the human's "right" and capacity to fulfill his or her own needs above, in absolute fashion, all else.  Our desires reign supreme.
     Perhaps Earth Day opponents should learn from the Greek mythological character Narcissus. So obsessed was Narcissus with his own image that when he noticed himself reflected in a stream, he bent down to look.  Enraptured, he continued to look, getting closer and closer until he put his head in the water and drowned.
     We are living in a world which we in no way made and in which we will in no way control fully.  We are only human.  If we think otherwise, the world will drown us, metaphorically for sure, in actuality perhaps, in the effects of our ecological follies.  We will lose everything God has given to us.
     As the psalmist writes, "The earth is the Lord's and all in it" (Psalm 24:1).  Let's use our gift responsibly.

     It’s “news from nowhere,” wrote nineteenth century artist and anarchist William Morris, a new age that has come.  So his patterns and sketches state.  But unless we seek the well at the world’s end or, if we are so inclined, follow Charles Williams, he an Inking of Oxford fame, in his descent into hell, we look for this age in vain.  Like kainos, like chadash:  it comes out of nowhere.

     As it should.

     Yet this still leaves a problem.  From where did this new age come?  We treasure the thought of it, we love the sound of it.  And we know that we do.  But other than defining its importance by our subjective response to it, we struggle to see why it’s here.  Why it captures us as it does.

     Why it makes us believe in it.

     Many a theologian, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jew, and more, has of course told us that, well, it is God from which everything comes.  From this God, this hidden and omnipotent presence embedded in the circles of the universe, this immaterial yet material somethingness that somehow pervades all of reality, seen and unseen, they argue—in a variety of ways—comes all that is to be, as well as all that is to come.  What will one day be.  Even nowhere.  Once where, now nowhere, nowhere is where in disguise, a doppelgänger, a phantom, a voiceless voice of another world.

A world waiting to be known.

Besides, where did God come from?

This we will never know.  Nor do we really need to.  Besides, if we really knew where God, however we choose to define him, came from, what would we be?  We would know too much to be where, yet too little to be nowhere.

And that’s the point.  If, as the curious and inquisitive medieval thinker Hermes Trismegistus once contended, “God is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere,” then even if we know where “God” is, we really don’t.  Or as the Italian and, allegedly, pantheist Giordano Bruno noted, building on Trismegistus’s words, “We can [only] state with certainty that the universe is all center, or that the center of the universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.”

We are helpless to really be ourselves.

     As more and more people emerge from months of Covid-19 quarantine, I hear much talk from any number of writers and pundits about how a year of living in a pandemic has changed them.  Many of these intuitions of changes have to do with how people now view their loved ones.  To a person, people vow that, going forth, they will spend more time with their parents or children.

     While I heartily applaud these sentiments, I offer two thoughts.  One, our newfound desire to devote more attention to our loved ones should remind us of the rather precarious state of our lives.  We are so busy living that we forget who allowed and enabled us to live in the first place.  We forget our roots.  We frequently live as if we are suspended between a voiceless beginning and a blank ending, striving desperately to fill the inbetween with meaning.  Surely, life should be more than this.

     Two, and this is not necessarily new, these thoughts should speak to us of how we tend to measure the meaningfulness of our existence.  As goal driven as many of us are, particularly in the West (and those nations seeking to emulate such), we define our lives on the basis what we accomplish in them.  This rings hollow.  Although we should indeed develop goals and ambitions, we do well to frame these in a larger picture.  What value are accomplishments if, outside of their inherent factuality, they are just one more display of human ingenuity--and nothing more?

     And then we're gone.  If nothing else, the pandemic has demonstrated that how we choose to see life determines what we will see in it.

     And what we see beyond it.

     Have you read T. S. Elliot's masterpiece, The Wasteland?  Written in the shadow of the destruction of World War One, The Wasteland brings Greco-Roman, Christian, and Eastern imagery, thought, and mythology together into profound observations on the meaningfulness of existence.  It's worth reading again and again and again.

     As I read a recently published book on T.S. Elliot's early life, I thought of The Wasteland often.  Though I have read it many times, reading this book spurred me to do so again.  Coming on the heels of a thesis on nuclear warfare I recently supervised, it caused me to ponder, once more, the ubiquitous revelry and yet hollow maw of existence.
     Western Europe fought its war, yes, successfully turning back the predations of an empowered Kaiser and his German armies and restoring most nations to their original status.  Some political entities, of course, never reappeared, including the Ottoman Empire.  Yet out of this empire's ruins emerged new nations.  Moreover, seizing the time, Vladimir Lenin led the Bolsheviks to victory in Russia, a feat whose effects are still with us today.
     Materially, I suppose, most (and I use this world guardedly) of the world is relatively better off today.  Politically, too:  most, but certainly not all nations enjoy a greater semblance of freedom than they did at the turn of the twentieth century.

     

     Spiritually, however, little has changed.  We remain beings on a journey in search of meaning.  As Elliot noted, meaning will be always elusive, hidden and buried as it is beneath lingering years of cultural neglect.  And despite what many think, war doesn't enable increased meaning; rather, it pushes it further away.  As Jesus once said, everyone is trying to force his/her way into the kingdom of God--but none will find it this way.
     Violence, be it cultural, economic, social, or political, will not produce real meaning. Sometimes meaning has to find us.  Not without irony did Jesus say to the Jewish rabbi Nicodemus, "Unless you are born again, you will not see the kingdom of God."
     Put another way, sometimes meaning is something that is, outside of us acknowledging our human limits, in every way,  we cannot now imagine.  Sometimes meaning surprises us:  in the best of ways.
     We're so very human.

      Do you pay taxes?  More to the point, do you like paying taxes?  To the former, most of us might reply affirmatively.  But to the latter, well, probably not.  Few of us enjoy giving some of our money to the government under which we live.  On the other hand, if we live in a democracy, a democratic republic in the finest Roman tradition, we generally have some say in what the government does with our money.  Generally.  Unfortunately, multiple vested interests with more influence than we have too often succeed in persuading the officers in a given government to bend their actions to their advantage and not ours.

     Many of us fall through the cracks.  It's a tough balance.  Compounding this issue is the contention of many religious viewpoints that, in varying ways, insist that any government that does exist does so by the agency or purpose of God.  Even a dictatorship?  Even a totalitarian regime?

     All this underscores what little power, regardless of how much money we have, we in fact have over the bigger visions running through our lives.

     And maybe that's as it should be:  we live, as Paul wrote, in a "riddle."  We only have purpose to the extent that we acknowledge the metaphysical fact and limitations of our humanity.

     Enjoy Tax Day.

      This week marks the birthday of the American playwright Samuel Beckett.  Known for his bleak portrayals of human existence, Beckett wrote some plays intended to cause us to question why we even exist.  They present worlds singularly devoid of meaning.  But that's Beckett's point:  there is no meaning.  It's a dark, cold, and impersonal 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.

     Similarly, in his far more well known "Waiting for Godot," Beckett presents two men sitting on a bench at a bus stop waiting for someone they know only as Godot. As the play moves on, the men continue to talk.  But Godot never comes.  As they take leave of each other, they suppose that perhaps Godot will come tomorrow.  But will it really matter?  They're probably waiting, they finally admit, for something that will never happen.  But that's just life:  we live for nothing that ever comes.

     Besides, in a world absent of point, what else is there to do?

     Herein is Beckett's central admission:  when transcendence is gone, we are, too.

     Ramadan, one of the greatest events in the Muslim calendar, begins this week.  Thirty days of fasting, culminating in the feast of Eid al Fitr, Ramadan is a time for every Muslim to take time to celebrate and reflect on his or her relationship with Allah and the world.  It's a season of hope, wonder, mourning, and contemplation, a slice of the year in which Muslims, like most people of faith, take time to focus more intensely on why they live as they do.

     You may not agree with the tenets of Islam; you may not like the beliefs most Muslims hold; you may be uncomfortable with Islam in general; you may even be frightened of Islam.

     Nonetheless, use the fact of Ramadan to remind yourself that we live this life as a gift, that we spend our days in the aegis of a personal transcendence.  We live in the umbra of a beautiful (and often exasperating) wave of experience, balancing what we see and what we cannot.  Ramadan tells us that we are not alone. It says to us that we live in a vision, an intensely personal vision in which all things find purpose and meaning, the full truth of what is.
     There's much more to believe than what we see.

           What's a muon?  A muon is one of many subatomic particles that physicists have found "running" through the quantum spaces we occupy.  Though a muon behaves in ways similar to an electron, it is many times heavier than they and thus functions differently in the quantum fields that, it seems, comprise the innards of our reality.

     Recently, particle physicists working a the "super collider" at the Fermi Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, made what they consider to be a potentially earth shattering discovery.  After much experimentation, they concluded that a muon "wobbles."  Why is this important?  It is important because, in the view of these physicists, this means that there are other subatomic particles which we have yet to find, particles that affect the movement of muons and, consequently, the workings of the universe.

     Put another way, per these physicists, we may not fully understand the essential structures and governing forces of the universe after all.  We may need to revise our understanding of how the cosmos holds together.

     Once more, we come face to face with our human inadequacy and inexorably finite and limited grasp of what exists--and why it does.  This is in fact a cause for celebration.  We are reminded anew that for all our intelligence, insight, and drive, we may never really comprehend, outside of acknowledging a presence of transcendence, not so much how we got here but, more importantly, why we are even here at all.

      Have you heard of the Golem?  A frequent visitor to much Jewish legend and folklore, the Golem was a figure made entirely of inanimate matter.  But it was inanimate matter that came to life, came to life to engage in any number of activities, some to the material good of those around it, some to their spiritual betterment.  The Golem was a mysterious figure indeed, one whom, in most of the stories in which it appears, constantly eluded any attempts to grasp or understand it.

     Which was the point.  Sitting in a playground on Jerusalem today is a large sculpture of the Golem.  Designed by artist Niki de Saint Phalle, a French artist who passed away earlier this century, it features a Golem with three red tongues protruding from its mouth.  Each protruding tongue is a slide.  Although some have called this a frightening visage, others have remarked that it does, in true Golem fashion, teach lessons about confronting one's fears and trepidations.

     Again, that's the point.  We cannot learn about existence without confronting those things about it that we may never overcome or understand fully.  The Golem reminds us that, in the end, we are only as secure in existence as the extent to which we acknowledge that we will never completely understand it.

     Mysteries bigger than us always remain.

      Born in France in 1902, Alexandre Kojeve, a philosopher of relative obscurity, once made an intriguing point.  History, he said, is over.  It's over because no longer will people see themselves as the "other," but rather as another individual equal to them.  Previously, as Kojeve saw it, history was the story of Masters and Slaves, the former continuously dominating the latter ad infinitum.  No more:  individuality now reigned supreme.  Each person would see every other person in the exactly the same way:  a fellow human being.

     This insight was of course not extraordinarily new:  most religions and even some political philosophies had long insisted on the value of the same thing.  What makes Kojeve's point somewhat unique is that he did not frame it in the context of any religious perspective.  He was in fact an atheist.  However, he insisted that a spiritual drive was innate in every human being:  we daily tangle, he said, with death.  We are constantly balancing life with its end.  We do so not because we are spiritual beings, but because we seek something greater than who we, at the moment, are.

     In other words, the present is not enough.  On this, I believe almost everyone can agree:  we humans are bent to seek more than what is before us.  Even if it is something as mundane as desiring to eat a meal.  As Kojeve's critics have pointed out, however, if humans are seeking more in themselves and themselves only, they miss a crucial point:  we did not make ourselves to be human beings.

     Above all, we remain the recipients of a life we will never understand apart from acknowledging that which gives life its ultimate point.

     Put another way:  God.

      As we prepare for the descent into the nothingness of Good Friday, the day on which darkness overwhelmed even the creator himself, we cannot help but think about light:  when will it come?  So it is that we anticipate Easter, the day on which we see light as it was most meant to be:  the total and absolute witness of God's love for what he made.

"Resurrection" by El Greco

     In the absolute darkness and nothingness of Jesus' death, the Son of God abandoned by his Father, all light is gone.  Yet out of this abject blackness, the greatest of all light arose.  A light that eclipses and encompasses all others, it is a light that changed history, bent space and gravity, and permanently altered all our notions of meaning and time.
     The resurrection is the greatest of light because it brought, from the fiercest and vilest nothingness of all deaths, a life that will never end.  It's nonsensical, its unbelievable, it's unfathomable, but it is entirely true.
The resurrection tells us that life has meaning, meaning that exceeds our greatest imagination.  It tells us that though we die, we will live again, forever.

     Indeed:  there is no darkness without light.
     How can life ever be the same?

 

     Today is Maundy Thursday, the remembrance of the Last Supper, the final Passover Jesus celebrated before he died.  Imagine his state of mind:  he knew that before another night had passed, he'd be dead, gone from this world.  Yet he rejoiced the beauty of the Passover moment.

     Today is also April 1:  April Fools Day.

     But it's more.  Today is the birthday of one of the greatest of the Romantic pianists:  Sergei Rachmaninoff.  Born in Russia, eventually emigrating to America and, shortly before his death in 1943, becoming an American citizen, Rachmaninoff (my wife's favorite musician) composed some of the richest music ever written for the piano. His work blends intense and mournful melody with powerful and intricate chords and keyboard movements, beautifully capturing the deepest spirit of the Romantics.  Rachmaninoff's musician gives us a poignant window into our perennial struggle with the vast and unyielding import of sentient existence.  It shows us that however intellectual we may suppose ourselves to be, we are, in the end, creatures of heart and imagination.

     Rachmaninoff's music is therefore more than appropriate for Maundy Thursday:  it speaks to the center of who we are.  In his music, we realize, again, that although reason is an essential part of who we are, we make our biggest decisions with our heart.  We are also reminded that while we may well live for the moment, we flourish ultimately when we accede to the presence of the eternal.

     For as Maundy Thursday and Rachmaninoff's music remind us, in the end, we find our true self when we submit to the fact of things we cannot see--but things whose power over us we cannot deny.

     After all, we are only who we are.