What's grace?  In its purest form, grace is something undeserved, something freely given, freely given quite apart from the recipient’s standing, ability, or merit, something the recipient didn’t expect to receive.  Anyone who has read Victor Hugo's Les Miserables knows one example of grace.  Even though the priest in whose house Jean Valjean spent the previous night is aware that Valjean is taking the household silver, he lets him leave, anyway, without retribution.  We don’t deserve grace, but without grace the world would not be.

     In its richest sense, grace connotes dependency, a dependency on beings with greater power than oneself.  Though we human beings may loathe dependency, we really cannot live without it.  We really cannot live with grace.
     Charlie Fowler was a star mountaineer who put up numerous first ascents across the world, including Alaska, the Himalayas, and Antarctica.  His power was monstrous.  In November of 2006, however, while climbing a new route in the Pakistani Himalayas (with a fellow mountaineer), he was trapped in an avalanche and died.  Some might have said that despite any personal failings Charlie may have had, the mountains had been good and gracious to him, that the mountains had shone upon him for many years, that he was blessed with constitution and circumstance to make astoundingly spectacular ascents.
     All this was definitely true.  In the bigger picture, however, Charlie was dependent upon grace.  He was dependent on his genetic heritage, he was dependent on his abilities, he was dependent on the gracious "behavior" of the mountain.
     In the bigger picture, grace must come from beyond this world, from beyond what we think or see, from beyond what we can know, from beyond what we might think.  It must come from a personality greater than the present, for genuine grace must be able to overpower the present—and the future as well.
     Only then can we live in it.
     Rest in peace, Charlie.  We miss you.

    Have you seen the movie "Alpinist"?  It chronicles the life of Marc Andre LeClerc.  Marc was one of the greatest climbers of his generation.  He put up numerous first ascents throughout the world, many of them during the mountain winters.  He seemed fearless:  nothing stopped him.  His endurance and exploits attained nearly legendary status.

    When Marc tragically perished in an avalanche while climbing in southern Alaska, the climbing world mourned.  Hundreds of well wishers traveled from across the globe for his memorial service.  Not only did Marc impress on the mountain peaks, but in interpersonal relations as well:  everyone liked him.

    When Marc's mother spoke at his memorial service, she noted that, "God gave me Marc."  Quite true.  From Marc's earliest days, his mother observed that he would not pursue a conventional career.  His energy and ambitions were not suited for normality.  To her credit, she let Marc pursue his dreams.  And he did.

    The eleventh chapter of Ecclesiastes urges the young person to follow the impulses/ways of his/her heart and the desires/sights of his/her eyes.  To seek to be all that God created him/her to be.

    Even in a broken world.  The grand tension of our human lives is balancing the enormity of our gifts with the fractured nature of existence.

    And amidst it all, to believe in God.

    In this era of the so-called Robber Barons of the technology industry, one might think of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby.  It's a story of hubris, massive and myopic social hubris driven by an equally blind financial hubris, two currents of a mistaken pride that overturned a life to a point beyond redemption.

     Some of you may work in the technology industry, some of you may hold stock in the technology industry.  All of us benefit from knowing and using it.  Even as I write this blog, I am acutely aware that I would not be able to do so without the help of Google and its parent company Alphabet.  And I wager that many of you order items from Amazon with some degree of regularity, and appreciate its seemingly efficient service.

    Few of us take time to look beneath the surface of the industry.  Neither did Gatsby take time to consider the implications of his financial and social success.  He just lived in them, repercussions and consequences aside.  As do, to a point, many of us.  We do not often take stock of how thoroughly dependent we are on industries that, although they proclaim to be making our lives better, rarely do they allow us to stop and deliberate about what "making our lives better" really means.  As they define it?

    Fitzgerald's enduring masterpiece reminds us that yes, we all appreciate social connections and technological ease, but it also reminds how little we know where they will, in the long run, lead to.  How are we to measure the fruits of worldly "success"?

    Surely not by the success itself.  Because Gatsby valued his world by the values of that world, he fell, badly.  As will, unless we look up from our busy lives, we.

    Ease of living is not the point.  Meaningfulness is bigger than next day delivery.

    "Now is the wind-time, the scattering clattering song-on-the-lawn time early eves and gray days clouds shrouding the traveled ways trees spare and cracked bare slim fingers in the air dry grass in the wind-lash waving waving as the birds pass the sky turns, the wind gusts winter sweeps in it must it must."  (Debra Reinstra, "Autumn")

    It's here:  the autumnal equinox.  It's a good day, a fun time.  Turning leaves and brilliant colors; cool, crisp nights and rich blue skies; the rising of Orion, his three star belt shining resplendently; and light and dark woven with liminality and change:  life displays its glory once more.

    In the ancient near east, the land of Egypt, Assyria, Sumer, and Babylon, the autumn was a significant moment.  It marks the time of harvest, of thanksgiving, a season of expectation--the life giving autumnal rains were imminent--and days of ingathering and celebration.

    So it can be for us.  Amidst our technology and worldly disenchantment, we can learn from our long ago brethren, our many ancestors who placed such faith in the certainty of the seasons, ordained, as they saw it, by the gods.  It's good to reach ends, and it's equally good to meditate on beginnings; it's good to remember the ceaselessness of unceasing rhythms that ripple through the cosmos.  It's good to think about the certitude still embedded in a mercurial and capricious world.

    In autumn's transforming predictability, we also catch a deeper glimpse of the creator God.  In a finite and fractured, change, some good, some bad, is inevitable. Certainty, however, remains.  Amidst our many seasons of life, these days of malleability and shifting sands, God's love, guidance, and presence reign firm.  Take heart in autumn's changes, and realize, once more, the face and necessity of an eternal God.

     Have you read Elie Weisel's Night?  If you have not, please take a moment to find it and read it.  Carefully.  It's the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner's memoir of his time at Auschwitz.  Although I find many of its passages singularly disturbing, perhaps one of the most painful is one that describes Weisel's reaction to the hanging of a fifteen year old Dutch boy who had been caught collaborating with the Resistance.

    Before the entire camp, the German overlords of Auschwitz hanged this unfortunate young man.  Everyone had to watch.  As he did so, Weisel recounts hearing one of the onlookers say, "Where is God?  Where is He?" Then, Weisel remembers, "For more than half an hour the child stayed there struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes.  And we had to look him full in the face . . . Behind me I heard the same man asking, 'Where is God now?'  And I heard a voice within me answer him, 'Where is He? Here He is--He is hanging here on this gallows.'"

    Weisel's account might push some us of faith to the very brink of that faith.  If God is hanging on the gallows, of what use can he possibly be to us?  What is God really doing?

    Such questions I cannot answer easily.  In this existence, absolute clarity will always elude us.  Faith is difficult.  Later in his life, Weisel wrote his autobiography.  He titled it All the Rivers Run into the Sea (drawn from a verse in the first chapter of Ecclesiastes).  I believe this captures our struggle well.  Maybe God seems to make little sense in this situation.  Absent him, however, there's no sense at all:  our lives are simply running into an endless sea.

         Creator of the novel Frankenstein (when she was but in her early twenties), Mary Shelley led a highly fascinating and somewhat tragic life.  Her father was the anarchist author William Godwin, her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women (and who died giving birth to Mary).  She was also married to the outspoken atheistic poet Percy Shelley until he tragically died in the Bay of Spiza in Italy in 1822.

    Although most people believe Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein to critique the Industrial Revolution's focus on the life of the mind while overlooking the supremely important place of the heart, and she did, there might be more to the story.  More precisely, Frankenstein is a parable about the limits of humanness.  In the person of the "monster" (who turns out to be far more intelligent than the 1931 Hollywood movie makes him out to be), Shelley provides an incisive narration of the ultimate emptiness of the human condition.  She powerfully demonstrates that for all of its magnificence, humanity is finally as confused and shallow as the world over which it purports to rule.

    Dr. Frankensteins words, in the movie, upon seeing the "monster" move its hands, exclaims, "Now I know what it feels to be God!" speaks volumes about Shelley's vision.  What would we do, really, if we were God?  Would we create the world as it is, or would we do something entirely different?  And how would we know either way?

      Can any of us bear the burden?

    Over the weekend my wife and I attended a wedding in Houston.  The groom was my nephew, one of my brother's three boys.  He and his bride had known each other for ten years; they actually met the first week they both started at the University of Michigan.

    As with most weddings, all was happiness and good cheer.  Although my nephew asked a friend to officiate, he invited me to do a reading from chapter four of the book of Ecclesiastes.  I was delighted.  I read verses nine to twelve.  These verses extol the virtue and benefit of mutual support in a relationship, that having two people in any situation of peril almost always makes for a better outcome.  It concludes by noting that, "A cord of three strands is not quickly torn apart."

    Put another way, while the mutual support of a husband and wife are crucial to the success of a marriage, the ideal marriage is that which finds support in a network of other people, a community, as it were, who care about them.

    While my nephew and his new wife are, by their own admission, not very religious, they nonetheless found meaning in this passage from this enigmatic book from the Hebrew wisdom literature.  And why not?  As beings created by a relational God, we are made to love and relate to one another and to hold each other up in our journeys across the planet.  To remind each other that we are never completely alone.

    And never absent our creator.

 

     Think about our Jewish brothers and sisters today.  At sundown last night, Jews around the world entered into the final experience of one of the most sacred times of their year:  the high holy days, the Days of Awe.  Beginning with Rosh Hashana (the New Year) and culminating in Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement, which began at sundown yesterday), these days give every Jew opportunity to reflect on the past and prepare for the future.  They're marked by repentance, discipline, singing, gathering, reading, and meditation, moments of intense inwardness--always in community--regarding one's relationship with his/her fellow human beings and God.

     All of us can learn from the Days of Awe.  All of us can profit from taking time to think, to really think about what and how we are doing with our life, about where we have been, spiritually, vocationally, and personally, and where we want to go, come tomorrow.  In this often shallow, media driven age, we all can benefit from setting ourselves apart to ponder deeper things, to contemplating the greater meaning and realities in which we move.

     Although we may not believe we move in a bigger picture, we fool ourselves if we think we can live meaningfully without accepting the fact of its presence.  We are born for transcendence, we are made to look beyond the immediate and present.  In these Days of Awe, our Jewish brethren remind us that we are more than material concoctions, more than nexuses of chemical exchange.  They tell us that we are creatures of this earth, yes, but simultaneously, to borrow the name of an REM song, creatures of the "Great Beyond."
     Enjoy your pondering.

    Unless you followed Latin American politics in the mid-nineties, you may not recognize his name:  Abimael Guzman.  Guzman, who passed away last week at the age of 86, was the leader of the Shining Path, a Maoist revolutionary group that, beginning in 1980, terrorized the nation of Peru in its efforts to gain power and turn the country into an agrarian communist state.  Its history is a ugly one, yet one that, like most modern communist revolutionary movements, found impetus in the enormous social and economic inequities of many Latin American societies and the seeming inability of the democratic process to remedy them.

    Yes, Shining Path was extraordinarily violent.  It's difficult to say anything positive about its methods.  Shining Path brought death and destruction to thousands of innocent people in its fevered quest for power.  No one misses it, really.  In this, Guzman is a puzzle.  Educated at a Roman Catholic High School and, for a time, a professor of law at a Peruvian university, he nonetheless eventually developed a deep rooted penchant for bloody revolution.  One strives in vain to know his real heart.

    After Guzman's life sentence for terrorism was affirmed at a 2018 trial in civilian court, he left the courtroom shouting these words, "Long live the Communist Party of Peru!  Glory to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!  Glory to the Peruvian people!  Long live the heroes of the people's war!"

    Balancing our desire for justice with our commitment to our spiritual and social roots and circumstances is never an easy thing.  Unless we can find a way to fuse them into a single teleological framework:  the fact of God.

    May the world find justice rightly.

     I recently had opportunity to watch a polo match.  Though I've never been a particular fan of the sport, an associate of mine invited me to spend an afternoon as a spectator at a few matches.  I learned a lot about polo and the people and horses that play it.

    One, the matches are very short:  four 7 1/2 minute periods.  Two, the horses are not always conventionally sized horses; they're bred specifically for playing polo.  Three, a polo field is 300 yards long, three times the length of a football (American football) field.  Four, although many very wealthy people play polo, many people of more limited means play it, too.  And so on.

    After a day on the "green," watching people play the game and observing the people who watch them playing, I was torn.  It's great that so many people find pleasure in this sport.  It's also wonderful that many people find fellowship and camaraderie in doing so.  Moreover, it's lovely that these 300 yards are not filled with more McMansions.

    On the other hand, I wished that a raffle being held at the event was held to raise money for outside charities and other organizations aiming to help the underprivileged and poorly resourced instead of the sponsoring polo club itself.  We've made it.  Let's help others do the same.

    Some of the most successful businesses I've seen are those that regularly allocate ten percent of their profits to charity.  That look beyond their own world.  That see a bigger picture to reality.

    Play on.

       Innocence, hope, and redemption.  That were the words comprising the title of a symphonic piece I heard this morning.  The announcer played it because he thought that, on the anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001, such words would be appropriate.

     I agree.  Before that September 11, before international terrorism made itself known in the nation with such striking effect, America was, to an extent, akin to how it felt prior to the attack of Pearl Harbor:  innocent.  Set astride a vast continent, separated from the world by two wide oceans, the nation sat, comforted by its wealth and power, soothed by its ability to remain aloof from the troubles of the rest of the world.

    No more.  Sometimes, however, darkness harbors the deepest hope. Sometimes the coldest and bleakest night creates the brightest of dawns.  Life renews.

     And redeems.  To redeem is to set free.  Perhaps America was, in a peculiar way, redeemed by the events of that fateful September day.  Perhaps America was set free from the complacency it had nurtured over the decades, its blindness to the way that some of its foreign policies had contributed to the attack, its penchant to consider itself exceptional.  Perhaps 9/11 set America free to realize that it, and the watching world, could be more than the sum of its parts.  Perhaps the terror of the day planted the seeds of a better world.  

    Yes.  Memory is a powerful thing.  As we continue to mourn the memory of the thousands who lost their lives that fateful morning, we once again grasp an irrefutable truth about the necessity of transcendence:  there really is something more to life and existence than simply living them.

     "Now a' [all] is done that men can do, and a' [all] is done in vain."  From a song by Scottish poet Robert Burns, these words express his feelings about the eighteenth century of Battle of Culloden, which took place in the Scottish Highlands in 1746.  It was a battle fought for Scottish independence.  Though it began well for the Highlanders, it ended in tragedy as the British troops overpowered the outmatched Scots and massacred thousands of men on the battlefield.  It is the source of much Scottish resentment toward England even to this day.

    Burns's words capture the scene well.  Valiant though the Scottish drive for independence was (if you saw the movie "Braveheart," you got another window into the Scottish drive for independence), in the aftermath of this ugly battle, it seemed as if all had been for nought.  Broadly speaking, it had been done in vain: nothing really changed.

    The author of Ecclesiastes makes similar observations in his assessment of human existence.  "All is futility," he writes, "all is futility."  However bleak we may find his perspective, if we look at life through our time on this planet and that time only, we cannot help but agree.  Although we may have done "all we can do," in the end, we pass on, never to return.

    Depressing?  Yes.  Reality?  Yes, too.  To a point.  But it shows us that it's insuperably difficult to live with a reality of our own making.

     It's a very happy piece.  I speak of Johann Pachabel's famous "Canon in D."  Perhaps you've heard it at a wedding.  Or somewhere else.  The seventeenth century composer's deft blending of melody and rhythm has captivated humanity repeatedly.  It's hard to listen to it without feeling at least a lilt of joy.

    The Center for Faith and Culture at Yale University has devoted decades to understanding the nature of joy and human flourishing.  Although its researchers recognize that theirs is a work that will always be one in progress, they have come to agree on a few things, which they have encapsulated in the Center's goal:  "We seek a world in which every person can wrestle with life's most important questions and take hold of a life worthy of our humanity."

    Put another way, to be able to contemplate existence and to find a meaningful life is central to being a human being.  In this, the Center suggests, is true joy:  to understand and flourish as we are intended to be.

    But why?  Because, the Center insists, we are made in the image of God.  While we all love "Canon in D," we should try to step back from its alluring melody to realize that, absent the presence of divine and divine image in this world, we probably do not know what our joy fully is.

    And then we die.

       Earlier this week, America (and Canada) celebrated Labor Day.  It's a good day.  It's a day to take time to think about and honor those who, like most of us, work, those who, day after day after day, engage in some type of vocational occupation.

     Most of us accept work as an inevitable fact of existence.  In many respects, it is. However, not all of us enjoy getting up for work each day. Nonetheless, to work is to be human, and to be human is to work.  Working enables us to discover our humanness most fully.  Ideally, work challenges us, involves us, equips us, fills us.  Working gives us a more complete grasp of who we are in our world.

     

    More broadly speaking, work has a point.  When we work, however enthusiastically, imperfectly, or apathetically we do so, we affirm our meaningfulness.  Whether we know it or not, when we work, we are contributing and communicating.  We are contributing to the greater good of the planet, we are communicating the presence of a meaningful world.  We are underscoring that life has a meaning greater than merely living day to day.  We are stating that although, yes, we must in most instances work to survive, we nevertheless see hope and meaning beyond it.  We affirm that we are made with purpose.

    Oddly enough, work, whatever it may be, testifies to the fact of a meaningful universe, a therefore personal universe, a universe which, therefore in turn, is made by a personal God.

    Have a good day.

     I hope you are thinking about the thousands of people who, as I write these words, continue to suffer the effects of climate change.  Homes and towns flooded, wildfires destroying acres and acres of forest and prairie, food and water shortages and consequent rises in crime, governments and corporations arguing over the obvious while missing the larger point, and more:  it's a bleak picture of the human condition.  And that of the planet.

    Although we might dispute over causes, we cannot dispute over effects:  they are enormously real.  And affect real people.  Real human beings.  If you are safe, be grateful.  And give of your time and resources to help those who are not.  If you are in the midst of pain and loss, I'm sorry, so very sorry that you are having to endure these things.  In many ways, these didn't need to happen.

    Scientists have been warning of the coming of these titanic shifts in planetary patterns of heat, cold, rain, and drought for decades.  Some of us heeded them, some of us did not.  Some still do not.  But the suffering they have spawned is directly present before us.

    Pray that human myopia does not overcome human and global pain.  We're all in this together.  Talk of inhabiting Mars notwithstanding, we only have one Earth on which to live.

    And, happily, a God who still loves it--and us.  If we believe it.

    Perhaps you know the story of Antony and Cleopatra, the tale of two lovers caught in a web of politics and culture beyond their ability to master.  I mention Antony and Cleopatra today in terms of the play that William Shakespeare wrote about them.  If you have a chance, read it.  When you do, you will see there portrayed the inevitable result of emotions mixing with politics to generally ill effect.  Without giving too much of the plot away, I observe that it is an apt picture of what all of us should, but never will, avoid when participating in a given political process.  That is, letting our emotions be the ultimate arbiter of our politics and political decisions.

    Granted, none of us can excise emotions completely from our political decisions.  Nor should we.  On the other hand, letting our personal affections for one way or another become the sole determinant of how we act politically almost always results in some degree of tragedy.  Or at least an unfortunate misunderstanding.

    We humans are inherently political animals.  And we are inherently emotional animals.  Our challenge is to take what we, image bearers of a God who is intrinsically personal, have been given and use it to the greater betterment of the society in which we live.  And not our own aggrandizement.  As we note the countless efforts being made as we speak to balance rationality, emotion, and religion in formulating a viable political state, I pray that those doing so will remember who, according to sociologist Christian Smith, they are:  moral and believing beings.

    And be acutely aware of their human fragility.

     Have you read Howl?  You'd know if you had:  it's a singularly unforgettable piece of literature.  Written by Allen Ginsburg, one of the so-called Beats of the American Fifties, Howl represents a coming out of the American culture, an honesty about feelings and viewpoints that had rarely heretofore been expressed.

    While some have called Howl obscene, and from standpoints it is, others have lauded it as one of the most authentic manifestations in literature.  Both conclusions are probably true.  Moreover, although many may rue its publication, and perhaps many more find its impact troubling, none can deny that, on balance, Howl unmasked cultural forces that probably needed to be made so.  It shook up the staid world of the affluent and lily white American Fifties, reminding those who would listen that, although God indeed exists, a personal and pervasive presence of love and purpose, humanity must always strive to interpret, and re-interpret, this love and purpose for changing and particular moments of passage and time.  While God does not change, humanity does.

    The challenge is understanding the balance:  the infinite in a finite world or the finite in a finite world.

    In Idea of the Holy, a book published early the last century, author Rudolf Otto, a German philosopher of phenomenology, made some observations about what he termed the "holy."  By holy, Otto was thinking of what we might call the "noumenal" or "non-rational," a realm beyond normal sensibilities.  Put another way, the holy is a name given to a "somethingness" that we believe is there but which we cannot necessarily prove, empirically, anyway, actually is.  It is, to use a perhaps overworked term these days, an "oceanic" feeling, a feeling that transcends all others.  And it's real.

     Otto went on to say that, in general, this "holy" provokes two general responses.     One, fascination.  Two, dread.  We are fascinated by the holy.  We are fascinated by its mystery, its intimation of power that we cannot fully conceive or control, its ability to capture our imagination as nothing else can.  Conversely, such intense fascination evokes a profound sense of dread.  Though we are drawn to the holy, we are also in awe of it.  We cower before it.  We do not understand it fully.  It's frightening.

    Ironically, as Otto pointed out, it is the holy's dread that is its fascination.  We are drawn to it precisely because it frightens us.  It's a fright of compulsion, a fascination of fear:  an urgency of need.

    In other words, if we are to believe in a factual supernatural, we must accept paradox:  that which is most compelling is also that which is most frightening. Otherwise, it would be neither.