Defining spirituality is difficult.  If we attribute it to a god, we miss that many unbelievers attest to having spiritual experiences.  If we assign it to a nebulous immaterial presence, we encounter the problem of making something amorphous and undefinable into something that is physically real.  And if we say that spirituality is thoroughly human, we run into the perennial dilemma of understanding how consciousness can emerge from inert matter.

    

    Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian surrealist painter and whose birthday occurred earlier this month, thought much about spirituality in regard to art.  He did so as a way of explaining how art overwhelmed what he considered to be the spiritual darkness of Marxism.  In art, Kandinsky said, we feel hints of transcendence, intimations of things we cannot easily fathom, emotional insights that we do not experience otherwise.  We look into another world, a world of purer light, real or imagined, a world that eclipses the rigid (and, to him, meaningless) materialism of the Marxist worldview.

    Kandinsky's art reflects his words aptly.  It is highly abstract and difficult to grasp easily, but that's the point:  spirituality isn't supposed to be simple.  If it were, it would be no more than another product of our material human whims.

   

    By the way, Happy New Year!

     

    

       Christmas has come, and now it is gone.  People are taking their ornaments down, stores are offering their after Christmas sales, travelers are going home.  It's over for another year.

     Or is it?  If Christmas means anything, anything at all, it cannot possibly be contained in one day.  If, as a Canadian singer about whom I wrote a few years ago says, "The Creator is here," how can anything--and any of us--ever be the same?  History, and everything in it, including you and me, has irrecoverably changed.

     What has made has come to what it has made.
     Christmas reminds us that we live in a universe of meaning.  And that we could not live otherwise.  Christmas also tells us that this meaning's fullness can only be real if it is birthed in a spoken origination of space and time, a definitive genesis of all that is real and true.  It is only then that it can be.
     Christmas is only the beginning of what we see.

 

     Although Christmas has dominated the holiday news lately, we cannot overlook that the day after Christmas marked the first day of Kwanza.  Although Kwanza is a relatively new holiday, its impetus, in light of the Advent season, speaks to us all:   a celebration of harvest, bounty, and human diversity.  Yes, Jesus was born a Jew in a forgotten town in Palestine, but he made it clear that God loves every human being, every variety of human beingness and expression, every bit of it.  He leaves no one out.
      
     So it is with harvest.  The world is for everyone.  Kwanza lauds the beauty and meaningfulness of this world, its harvest, its bounty, its joy of a year rightly lived.  The happiness of living in a world whose wonder speaks constantly to us, the beauty of the rhythms of the planet:  a call to treasure the immensity of existence.

     Enjoy the munificence of this wondrous creation.

    When I reflect on the recent passing of South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, I recall one incident in particular which, for me, testifies to the consistency with which Tutu expressed his moral convictions.  It was during a rather dark period in the history of South Africa, a time when tensions were very high, a time when significant segments of the newly freed Black populace disagreed over the right way forward.

    Part of this conflict involved the killing of those deemed traitors to the cause.  It was a particularly ghastly form of killing, too:  being burned alive.  When various mobs identified a person, always Black, whom they considered to be a traitor, they cornered him, trapping him in a tire, dousing him and the tire with gasoline, and setting him alight.

    When Tutu once came upon a crowd doing this very thing, he immediately pushed his way into the center of the mob and singlehandedly halted the procedure, allowing the "condemned" to live.  It was a singular act of courage.  Yet it expressed who Tutu really was.  He did the same in his leadership of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, granting amnesty and forgiveness to people who confessed their complicity in the atrocities of apartheid.  Above all, he encouraged love, forgiveness, and reconciliation.  Not retribution.

    Tutu understood the deepest heart of God.

    Most of us have heard the "Christmas story" countless times.  Across the world for thousands of years, people have read and pondered, over and over, Luke's account of Jesus' birth.  One might almost think that there is nothing new to find in it.

    But there always is.  As I was reading it this year, I found myself struck, struck anew by the thought that the first people to hear about Messiah's birth were shepherds.  In the twenty-first century, most of us do not think much about shepherds.  In Jesus' day, however, shepherds were an integral part of the economy of the ancient world.  But there always is.  As I was reading it this year, I found myself struck, struck anew, by the thought that the first people to hear about Messiah's birth were shepherds. 

    Yet shepherds were despised, viewed as the lowest of the low, the modern day equivalent of the Roma of Europe.  Few wished to associate with them.  They spent their days--and nights--largely apart from the rest of the people, living lonely lives in the fields and hillsides of the nations.

   But the shepherds were the first to know.  They were the first to be told.  Before anyone else knew, the shepherds knew about the birth of Messiah.

    God remembered those whom the world had forgotten.

    Christmas reminds us that when all is said and done, we should understand that God, the vastness of personal transcendence, is not about greatness.  He's about humility.  Humble thankfulness for the fact of existence.  Christmas calls us to consider the joy of humility, the humility of being alive, of the opportunity, one we did not create, to partake in the wondrous sentience we all share.

         In the humility of the Christ child, the baby born in a manger, his birth announced to marginalized shepherds, we see the true nature of God:  love.  Love of gratitude, love of humility.  Love for a humanity who had dismissed and fogotten about him.

     Merry Christmas!

      Who are the Funhogs?  The Funhogs were a group of men, now in their seventies and eighties who, many decades ago, spent their days roaming across the planet in search of adventure.  Some of their names may be familiar to you.  They include people like Yvon Chouinard, founder of the outdoor clothing manufacturer Patagonia; Doug Thompkins, founder of the outdoor equipment company The North Face; and others who are not as well known:  Dick Dorworth, once a prominent skier, Chris Jones, and Lito Tejada-Flores.

     The Funhogs are perhaps most famous for their epic 1968 driving journey from California to the tip of the Americas, where they successfully summited the formidable Fitz Roy in, of course, Patagonia.  They reached the top on Christmas Day.

     1968 is a long time ago, yet the Funhogs still look back on that year as one of the highlights of their lives.  As Thompkins later wrote, "So I give thanks, as I look back, that fate played its mysterious hand guiding me along a wonderful path, in a life with never a single moment of regret.  If I could play it over, I would let it go just as it has, with all the minor bumps that came with it.  Just like those bumps along the last 900 miles from Bariloche to the Fitz Roy valley--sometimes a bit uncomfortable, but still very enjoyable all the way."
     Thompkins's words surely underscore the joy and marvel of life, whose twists and turns he attributes to fate and its mysterious hand.  Don't we all wonder why life goes the way it does?  Do not we all occasionally sit back and ask ourselves how it is that we ended up where we are today?
     Or maybe we do what the Funhogs did:  as long as we are here, we ought to go ahead and embrace everything we can.  After all, when it's over, it's over.  If death is a blank wall, well, the Funhogs have done great.  They've lived to the max.  If death is otherwise, however, we wonder, too, yet in a different way:  what does it mean?
     The abyss between these positions is profoundly deep.  It is in fact unbridgeable.  It all comes to what we know and, significantly, what we believe about what we know.  So we therefore ask, if Jesus, God in human flesh, has come, and every evidence indicates he did, what will we do about it?  Everything, absolutely everything about us, our life, and our world, hinges on how we answer this question.

    As many of us enjoy our Christmas season amidst our varying degrees of affluence, we must not overlook those among us who, in what for most is one of the happiest times of the year, are suffering.  In countless ways.  In particular, I am thinking about one, the thousands of people who are dealing with the aftermath of the tornadoes that swept through an incredibly large swatch of the American South and Midwest.  On a daily basis, natural disasters afflict humans all over the world, yes, and each instance is, for those touched by them, horrific.  Nonetheless, the devastation left by these windstorms is nearly beyond comprehension.

    Two, I think about the Afghanis who, lured by hollow promises of the Belarusian  government to come to its country and subsequently migrate to Europe, are doing nothing of the kind.  Prohibited from moving over the border to Poland, they are living in the snow filled forests without shelter, with no relief in sight.

    Three, I remember one of our neighbors whose mother is slowly dying, fracturing the joy of the season.  Christmas will be unspeakably different for her and her family this year.

    And then I wonder, given the innately divine goodness and purposefulness of the world, how to put it all together.  Advent's particularly potent expression of God's light therefore reminds us of how much we, walking as "in a riddle," need to believe in it.

    And, in the biggest picture, very little more.

     If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you may know that today, December 21, is the winter solstice.  The "shortest" day of the year.  Or as Robert Frost puts it in his "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "the darkest night."  Happily, although it may not seem like it, the winter solstice is actually the grand turning point of the year, the day and night in which time and light begin to grow.  It's the end of the light, yes, but its genesis, too.  We lose, yet we win, moving, ever so slightly, toward the greater light to come. 

    I love the winter.  I love how it masks and shrouds, I love how it engages reflection, I love how it sends us into places we would not otherwise go.  And I love how winter helps us "see" what sight can be.  As we trek through these darker days, we come to understand that light is not illumination only.  Light is rather the underlying rhythm of all creation, a continuity of divine favor, a favor that speaks in gloom as well as joy, a favor that underscores the fact of a purposeful planet:  "The Light of the world."

      

     

    Step into the darkness, treasure the light.  Enjoy the marvel of a remarkably consistent--and persistent--personal creation.

      As we remember the fourth and final Sunday of Advent and look towards its culminating event, Christmas and formal remembrance of the incarnation, God's appearance in human flesh, I think frequently about its origins.  As the gospel accounts make clear, Jesus was born in Bethlehem (literally, "house of bread"), a town that we might today call a hole in the wall, a little village largely forgotten by the rest of the world.  Few people cared what happened in Bethlehem.

     Nor did few people care when, after God told Joseph to take Mary and Jesus and flee the country to avoid King Herod's deadly predations, Jesus lived for a time in Egypt.  Mary and Joseph were likely viewed as just one more set of refugees, one more group of aliens moving through the flotsam of the Empire, their lives a mirror of countless migrations before:  no big deal.

     But this is precisely the point.  Though Jesus was an alien and refugee, born in obscurity and forgotten and overlooked by the rest of the world, he was the one in whom God chose to make himself known to all humanity.  Jesus was the one whom God would use to manifest and reconcile himself to his human creation, the one whom God would use to draw all people to himself.  In Jesus, the poor and forgotten refugee, resided the greatest hope of all time.  It's the ultimate irony, the greatest surprise.  It's God's way of demonstrating to us that just when we think we have everything figured out, be it our views about immigration, aliens, refugees, or anything else, we really do not.
     But isn't that what God is all about?

      "The greatest poverty," wrote poet Wallace Stevens, "is not to live in a physical world."  Fair enough.  On the other hand, physicality without a larger framework renders it incomprehensible.  Moreover, it seems that unless we can grasp that larger framework, we would still know very little about who we are.

     

    As spiritual beings, we humans tread a tenuous path.  We love our physicality and the fruits of living in a physical world, and we should.  Yet we are also acutely aware that we are more than our physicality.  We all experience feelings of transcendence, whether we believe them to originate in immanency or something beyond it.  We daily encounter the limits of physical category.

    Maybe that's the logic of the incarnation.  As we continue walking through the Advent season, we have time yet again to ponder that investing in only materiality leaves us wondering what everything earthly really means, a life spent looking for what it can never know.  Yet denying materiality in favor of transcendence, and only transcendence, forces us to construct meaning on a bed of sinking sand, drowning us in what we cannot see.
    

    Only when immanence and transcendence are fused can we see what meaning, and God, really mean.  Only in Advent's coalescing of time and eternity can we see what life can ultimately be.

      Today is      Beethoven's birthday:  his 251st.  What can we say about Ludwig von Beethoven?  This famous portrait of him captures how many of us see him:  a brooding, brilliant composer.  Beethoven's music overwhelms us with its passion.  It comes to us as a force of nature, barreling and twisting its way into our hearts, breaking our souls apart, forcing us to grapple with and contemplate the deeper forces that drive human existence.  We swoon over the viscerally of Beethoven's melodies, we wonder about the power of the humanness and universe which his songs describe.  A Romantic in the purest sense, Beethoven reminds us of other worlds and other things, of the presence and possibilities of transcendence.

    I thank God for Beethoven.  I thank him for giving him to us, for giving him to show us as we are, beings of mind as much as creatures of heart, living, personal, dynamic entities made to step bravely and meaningfully into the weighty potential and contingencies of life, to take hold of everything that is before us.  Given the many stories and legends that surround his life, we may never know exactly what Beethoven thought about God.  Regardless, he makes us think of him.  Beethoven drives us to wonder about the mystery of life and the mind of its creator.

     I thank God for using Beethoven to open and unfold for us glimpses of what we, life, and God, can be.

     Have you seen Edward Munch's The Scream?  A piece that has puzzled and cajoled people for decades, The Scream seems to exemplify the alienation that so often characterizes the inhabitants of the West.  Overwhelmed by a world that offers them everything but meaning, countless people in the developing world cry out for help, some help in making sense of what seems to be a pointless reality.

     Affluence reigns, yes, but without any foundation other than the assumption that life is worth it, and this only because those who decide this have nowhere else to go.  If the world is a closed system and we are therefore born only to die, then life, however wonderful it may be, ends before it begins.  So we scream:  why must this be?

     As we consider Munch's birthday, which fell earlier this week, as we look toward Christmas and the New Year, as we continue to do what we can to live a good life, we realize that the world is not closed, that it is in fact entirely transparent and open, open and streaming into a web of reality vastly larger than we can imagine.  Life is meaningful because it is grounded in a transcendence that has spoken, a transcendence that has made itself known.  Life is more than itself.  And we are more than who we are.  Love is present, ascendant and true.

     Hence, in contrast to Munch's bleak perspective, we scream not why must this be, but rather how can such wonder be?

 

     "For the people who walk in darkness," wrote the prophet Isaiah, "will see a great light (Isaiah 9:1)."  Isaiah speaks of Messiah, the one who would come to illuminate an Israel darkened by disappointment, abandonment, and sin.  He speaks of the one who would open the eyes of all those who longed for a bigger picture of reality, who sought to see a greater light,  Who believed in more.
     On the third Sunday of Advent, we remember this fact of Messiah's light.  We remember how, like the sun exploding over a frigid mountain ridge, Messiah--Jesus--has brought us light, the light of enlightenment, the light of hope and meaning that shines through the cold of an often disparate existence.  It is a light that, if we embrace its rising, embrace it fervently and without reservation, will change our lives forever.
     Though we may struggle with the idea of eternality, though we may question the presence of God, we all long for light. We all long for hope and meaning.  We all long for a window into a richer existence.
     In an accidental universe, however, richness is impossible, for value and morality cannot be measured or even be.  Only in a personal cosmos, a cosmos in which an enlightening transcendence is possible, can hope and purpose be, infused with meaningful light.
     The light of the world.

 

    So many times did I read over Thanksgiving weekend one of the closing verses in Ecclesiastes, "Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.  'Vanity of vanity,' says the Preacher, 'all is vanity'!"  It doesn't seem appropriate for a day of giving thanks, does it?
    It was on Thanksgiving a few years ago that I received word that my ninety-one year old aunt, the last living member of my parents' generation, had been admitted to a hospital with pneumonia.  Her prognosis was not good.  In fact, I learned the next day, Aunt Patty was dying.
    Sunday morning, Patty did die, passing out of this world, this life, forever.  I'll never see her, in this life, again.  It's very final.  And yes, despite the best efforts of the morticians, not too many months will pass before she is, well, dust.
    In a book, He Held Radical Light, which he published a few years ago, poet Christian Wiman writes of our deep desire to "reconcile a deep intuition of otherness with the adamantine materialism that both science and our clock-logic lives seem to confirm."  We instinctively know life is more than what it is, yet we just as strongly want to believe it is not.
    Put another way, the fact of otherness demands that truth and belief becomes one and the same.
    It also enables us to know life as it is most meant to be.

    By the way, next week I'll be traveling in the American West.  I'll catch up with you in a couple of weeks.  Thanks for reading!

      Well, it seems that the Christmas season is upon us.  By all counts, spending should set a new record:  Americans will spend, surveys tell us, nearly two billion dollars on Christmas gifts this year.

     Should we be happy?  I'm happy for the people these sales will employ.  I'm happy for the people who will enjoy the gifts they receive.  I'm happy for the joy many people feel in this season.

     I'm most happy, however, at how the Christmas season should cause us to examine what we are doing with our money.  In the end, it's all about giving, giving, that is, to others rather than ourselves.

     

    Thinking about the congregations in Macedonia many years ago, the apostle Paul observed that, "According to their ability, and beyond their ability, they gave of their own accord, begging us with much urging for the favor of participating in the support of their brethren" (2 Corinthians 8:3-4).  Consider:  these people didn't wait to be asked to give; they instead begged for the opportunity to give. Moreover, they gave beyond what anyone thought they could give.  They understood that, "God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that always having all sufficiency in everything, you may have an abundance for every good deed" (9:8).

     If God is there--and he is--we can never give enough.

     Let the retailers worry about what we should get.  What do they know?  Let us concern ourselves with what we can give.  As you go forth to "conquer" the stores before you, realize that it's no challenge to "get."  We can always do that.  The far greater challenge is to give.

     Life is a gift; give of it freely.