In his new tome, The Enlightenment and the Pursuit of Happiness, author Ritchie Robertson points out that, in the end, for all its focus on the virtues of an intellectual adventure apart from the aegis of God, the Enlightenment was ultimately about developing a new way to find happiness.  When I consider the tremendous upheavals happening around the world today--an earthquake and tropical storm in Haiti, the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, wildfires and flooding around the planet, and much, much more--I realize, more than ever, that when people make happiness the sole object of their existential quest, they will likely never really find it.  The Enlightenment is a case in point:  its quest ended, at the close of the nineteenth century, in despair.

    Only when we frame our desire for happiness in the far more fundamental desire for human wholeness, a wholeness we cannot possibly, on our own, determine, do we find what happiness most is.

    Put another way, as a recent article in the New Yorker opines, rationality, be it about virtue or happiness, is not the primary fuel of human joy and meaning.  Rather, it is agreeing to embrace life as an adventure whose fullness we will never be able to measure, yet an adventure entirely worth pursuing because, and only because, it is an adventure pursued in a meaningful world.

     For unless we grasp life as a pursuit that is given to us, and not the other way around, that we find it--and happiness as well.

    Thank goodness for the intellect, thank goodness for the heart; thanks most, however, for a world we did not make.

    By the way, I'll be traveling yet again (as Scottish naturalist John Muir once said, the "mountains are calling me") for the next week and a bit beyond.  Talk to you in September!

    "To say that a person is a thing is a logical contradiction.  Yet what is impossible in logic becomes true in life and the contradiction lodged in the soul tears it to shreds.  This thing is constantly aspiring to be a man or a woman and never achieving it--here, surely, is death but death strung out over a whole lifetime; here surely is life, but life that death congeals before abolishing.

    "Affliction is different from suffering, for it mutilates a person's whole being.  In affliction, a kind of horror submerges the whole soul."

    So remarked twentieth century mystic Simone Weil.  Setting aside the puzzles of logic that this observation may generate, Weil's point remains:  if a person is not allowed to be all whom she is destined to be, she indeed becomes a thing, a thing that dies even as it lives.  Such is not, as Weil saw it, God's intention for humanity.  We are made as human beings, she noted, and we therefore live to realize the fullness of what this means.

    Otherwise, we're stepping into precisely the opposite of the essence of resurrection, that is, rather than living as we die, we are dying as we live.

    There must be a larger fullness to justify existence.

     Last week, I attended a reunion of some of my closest friends from college.  We met at a summer home one of us owns (it has been in her family for nearly a century) on the coast of Maine.  It was a lovely setting:  ocean waves crashing across the granite coastline, spruce and cedar trees rustling in the wind, sun and clouds sweeping across the sky.  Being together was wonderful, leaving us with memories we will not soon forget.

    When I got home, I sent out an email to everyone who came.  In addition to expressing my gratitude for everyone being in my life and how humbled and privileged their friendship through all these years has made me, I spoke about the final lines of Psalm 90.

    These lines read, "Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and give permanence to the work of our hands; yes, give permanence to the work of our hands.”

    Everyone in this group, I said, has enjoyed many blessings of this existence.  We've all had happy marriages, been able to engage in meaningful work, lived in reasonably pleasant places and, in many small and large ways, have been privileged to contribute to the greater good.

    That's the point.  In a meaningful world, a world that did not emerge randomly or by accident, what we--and, by the way, everyone on this planet--do has meaning.  Profound meaning.  Because God is there, the works of our hands, whatever and however they are and however they may add to the common good, will, in ways that we will likely never fully see, indeed enjoy permanence, a beautiful permanence which will, as long as this earth lasts, endure.

     Even in a finite world, eternality reigns.

    Talk to you late next week.  Thanks for reading!

      At the conclusion of Middlemarch, her classic novel about nineteenth century life in rural England, George Eliot (in truth, Mary Ann Evans), writes, "For the growing good of the world is party dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, to half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

     Rarely does a single sentence hold such profound meaning.  In words rippling with present and eternal verity, Eliot reminds us that however much we may suppose that we construct our lives, we ultimately live in tremendous dependency on events and circumstances beyond our control.  We are born into a world which is the product of those who have traveled before us, and we render our own lives in the shadows of acts and deeds which seem to have no viable origins in whatever we may have done.

     In other words, apart from the fact of a larger presence, we can assign no genuine meaning to our lives:  we're no more than another warp in a vast, vast web of history and time.

     Eliot journeys deeply into her world in Middlemarch, finally finding it only as meaningful as how people make it to be.  And how they do that is, truthfully, the fruit and work of finite imagination.

     And absent infinite mystery, no more.

 "The more that the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.  There is no point to be discovered in nature itself; there is no cosmic plan for us.  We are not actors in a drama that has been written with us playing the starring role.  There are laws--we are discovering those laws--but they are impersonal, they are cold.

"It is not an entirely happy view of human life.  I think it is a tragic view, but that is not new to physicists.  A tragic view of live has been expressed by so many poets--that we are here without purpose, trying to identify something that we care about." 

So said Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg, who died a few weeks ago.  Although those of us who believe in the existence of a God might recoil from such conclusions, we must admit that, in sum, Weinberg is absolutely right.  While life is indeed grand beyond measure, it is, if there is no ultimate meaning, be it God or something else, in truth, pointless.  We live wondrously, we live gloriously, then we die.  Though our legacy may remain, we are forever gone, a mere blip on a massive, massive cosmic screen.  It's a magnificent tragedy.

Such marvel cannot possibly fit into an empty and godless universe.