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.