Not as well known as Mozart, whose birthday we remembered a few days ago, Franz Schubert was nonetheless one of the most remarkable musicians in Western history.  Immensely productive and profoundly creative, Schubert wrote some of the most ethereal and haunting melodies of all time.  We listen to his music and feel transported, lifted above what is earthly and material, moved into transcendence.  Today, January 31, is Schubert's birthday.

     Schubert's music gives us pause.  If music only told us what we already know, we probably wouldn't get as much out of it as we do.  We do not need to be reminded of what is obvious and normal.  We rather need to be encouraged to ponder what is beyond the apparent, what breaks down the seen, what splits the visible apart.  We want to know what we, at the moment, cannot.

     And this is what Schubert's music does.  Descending into the darkest recesses of his soul, Schubert talks to us about the deepest mysteries of existence, how we walk in a wisp, a gossamer veil stretched between us and the other side of time.  He romanced eternity.
     As do we all.  Every day we balance, balance between presence and absence, perched on a thin line dividing present reality and ultimate destiny.

     Thanks, Franz Schubert, for showing us that life is bigger that life itself.

      Although for some it may have been overshadowed by Mozart's birthday, as I yesterday, January 27 is nonetheless a day of great solemnity:  International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  It is a day that should cause all of us to stop, think, and weep.  How does one begin to grasp the deliberately engineered deaths of over six million people?  How does one connect with a person who lost the sum of his lineage in a concentration camp?  How can we possibly comprehend being the object of such virulent hatred and racism?

    And how can we categorize those who fomented this horror?

     We can't.  And that's the point.  God aside, evil has no explanation.  It has no point, it has no plan.  It is beyond our ability to fully understand.  Yet evil is us.  We think, we make choices, we act.  Many Holocaust scholars insist, and rightly so, that the Holocaust is an event that surpasses the widest and deepest boundaries of our ken and imagination.  It's beyond intelligibility.
     Yet it happened.  Writing to me nearly three decades ago, an American then living in Jerusalem and who had made clear to me that he did not believe in God, allowed that the Holocaust caused even him to acknowledge the reality of the metaphysical.  Why, he reasoned, would anyone with a hatred other than one rooted in the tenebrosity of a twisted notion of the metaphysical--and personal God--engage in such horror?
     Weep for our Jewish brothers and sisters, and pray for those who persecute them. And believe:  at all costs, believe in the ultimacy of God.

     It's a big day:  the birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (it's also International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which we will consider tomorrow).  Around the world, people continue to be astonished by the immense creativity and wonder of this Austrian's music.  Fluent in all genres of classical music, Mozart, though he died, sadly, at the tender age of 34, produced an array of musical expression that most musicologists agree is unmatched.  As a contemporary said of him, "He was like an angel sent to us for a season, only to return to heaven again."  Most of us can only stand mute and marvel at Mozart's immense ability.  How could one person write works of such extraordinary beauty?

    At the same time, we can marvel at the nature of the human being, that we are creatures of such prodigious talents, that we are gifted in a nearly infinite number of ways.  How could such a thing be?

    Maybe our consciousness and sentience really do speak to the fact of a larger presence, a larger point.

    

    Maybe we really are not alone in the universe.

    Thanks, Mozart, for your music and song.  Thanks, too, for showing us, in these things, the evidence of a bigger picture.

     Ludwig Wittgenstein and Kurt Godel, two of the twentieth century's most intriguing thinkers, left us much to ponder.  For Wittgenstein, among many other things he said, it was that logical propositions show logical properties but say [essentially] nothing.  

    The Austrian philosopher had a good point.  A proposition about logic certainly explains the logic it is describing.  But it doesn't tell us anything about what logic is.  We're still bereft of a larger picture.

    Godel's point was similar.  Writing in the tense years of Hitler's rise in Germany, the famous logician observed that although we revere a mathematical proposition for its simplicity and power, we cannot prove it.  That is, we admire the formula two plus two equals four.  And we love that the angles of a triangle always add up to 180 degrees.  But as to why they do, we cannot say.

    We're still left gaping at the shores of the infinite.  An infinite that we know must be there, but an infinite, short of its making itself tangibly known, we will never see.

    Maybe we really do need a personal transcendence.

     Last week, I got some shocking news.  One of my favorite professors in graduate school, a woman who published a ground breaking book on feminist theology and later became a highly admired university administrator, announced that she had been diagnosed with Alzheimers Disease.  She's not yet seventy years old.

    It's a tragic end to a good life.  Although my mind and heart were running in many directions as I tried to process what I was hearing, one constant was a memory of a verse from the Hebrew book of Ecclesiastes.  Set at the beginning of chapter nine, it reads, "For I have taken this to my heart and explain it that the righteous and and wise and their deeds are in the hand of God.  People do not know whether it will be love or hatred; anything awaits them."

    Life can be the cruelest of bargains.  And God can be the most confounding of mysteries.  Yet we cannot have one without the other to render either one meaningful in the present moment.

    I wish my professor the best.

     Though not as well known as her husband, D. H. Lawrence, the twentieth century American path and genre breaking novelist, Frieda Lawrence nonetheless left us with some rich tales of human angst and intriguing observations about various aspects of the human condition.

    In her autobiography, Not I but the Wind, Lawrence writes, "Like a bottomless pit is truth."  For those who believe that truth is always fixed and unchanging, this statement may cause consternation.  Upon examining Lawrence's assertion more deeply, however, we see a profound insight.  If truth is to mean anything, that is, if it is to be a sustaining standard, of any kind, it must necessarily be something whose depths we cannot fully penetrate.  It must be something so remarkable that we humans do not always understand it completely.  Otherwise, we wouldn't need it.

    Truth is essential, yes, but as Plato and Augustine pointed out many, many centuries ago, to be effectual truth must be grounded in a presence which humans cannot ultimately make.

  

    In the heat of existence, on the days when we are feeling particularly overwhelmed with the exigencies of being alive, we may feel as if we are like people who, as Virginia Woolf observed in her "Lives of the Obscure," are "advancing with lights in the growing gloom," heading toward obscurity, the obscurity of a life lived, a life enjoyed immensely but a life one day to end and be gone, never to return.

      Believing in more than life is hard in the morass of the material present.  We cannot see it, so why put our trust in it?

    Fair enough.  Yet as William Yeats reminds us, "And God stands winding his lonely horn, and time and the world are ever in flight."  Though time wears on and the years drag by, unyielding, sometimes burdensome, ever unchanging, something permanent remains.

    It's hard to see the end of a road at its beginning, yes, but if the world is to have any point, any point at all, there is always a road to follow.  A road rooted in the permanence of the necessarily personal ground of existence.

    What's eternity?  Without trying to answer this question directly, let's consider this quote from the Danish physicist Niels Bohr that, "A part of eternity lies in reach of those capable of staring, unblinking, at the sea's deranging expanses."

    Regardless of how we feel about the notion of eternity, we must admit that Bohrs has a fascinating point.  Living in a finite world, yet gripped daily by an urge to look beyond it, be it physically, culturally, or spiritually, we come to see that the only way we can legitimately do so is to stare down what we do not understand.  To stare it down until it crumbles, and to see in its crumbling clearer glimpses of the grand mysteries behind it.  We must break apart what we know to find what we do not.

    As long as we are creatures of finitude, there seems no other way to even begin to touch that from which it comes.  We step into the deranging expanses of the open seas before us, seeking to become, as it were, "insane."  We affirm the madness implicit in believing that life is only what we presently see.

    Personal transcendence or not, we can only touch eternity when we loose ourselves from the staid, settled, and certain.  And stare unblinkingly into the abyss of knowing.

    Life's connections can be incredibly complex.  Last week, Ronnie Spector, best known as the lead singer of the Sixties "girl" band the Ronettes, died at the age of 78.  A powerful and sultry singer, Ronnie sang some of the most memorable tunes of the decades, songs such as "Be My Baby" and "Baby, I Love You."  Once married to and later divorced from Phil Spector, creator of the so-called "Wall of Sound, in her later years, long after her initial stardom had faded, Ms. Spector continued to sing.  She was, she said in a 2007 interview, "Just a girl from the ghetto who wanted to sing."

    Phil Spector who, according to Ms. Spector's memoir, was very abusive toward her, died in a California prison of Covid-19 last January.  He was serving a very long sentence for shooting and killing a woman in the entry room of his palatial home in the Hollywood Hills.  Brilliant musical producer, badly bent human being.

    As I reflect on these two passings roughly one year apart and the ways in which their lives wove themselves together in our cultural tapestry and social imagination, I wonder about the bigger picture.  On the one hand, I see a very talented producer and gifted singer collaborating to produce tuneful music that we remember even to this day.  On the other hand, I see two flawed (as we all are) image bearers who, like all of us, simply wanted to be loved and appreciated and have opportunity to live out their given capacities to the fullest.

    And to what end?  Surely, not merely to live and then die.  I am therefore grateful that mortality is but a measure of its greater and defining moment.

    Take some time to listen to "Be My Baby."  Then wonder aloud at the grand puzzle of an open-ended finite existence.

      As many of you may know, today the U.S. remembers the birthday of civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr.  Central to this commemoration is King's belief, a belief he shared with millions of others, that freedom, the ability to do what one chooses, when one chooses to do it, is one of humanity's greatest privileges and blessings.  We all deserve to be free.

     For this is what God wants.  He made us to be free, to free to choose, to be free to do.  To be free to live as we like.

     Freedom is wonderful, and freedom is intoxicating.  But freedom can be frightening.  We often do not know what to do with it.  We frequently do not know what its fullness really means.  We frequently miss the point.  We abuse it terribly.
     Maybe that's why, as John records it in chapter eight of his gospel, Jesus told his audience that, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."  True freedom is to know the truth:  the truth of the fact of God.  King knew this well, and steadfastly centered his call for freedom in the presence of God.  He knew that freedom is only meaningful if it is grounded in something bigger than itself.

     He knew that freedom is more than a release from physical bondage, a slip of one material experience to another. 
     As we remember King's birthday, we also remember that the freedom he preached is ultimately, as Gandhi observed in his explication of satyagraha, self-discovery in truth.  We are not free in an accidental universe, a cosmos without definition; we are free in a universe made real by truth itself.

    Woodstock!  Do you remember Woodstock, the August 1969 three day outburst of counterculture bacchanalian song and bliss on Max Yasgur's farm in upstate New York?  Those of us who lived through Woodstock remember it as a signal moment, the pinnacle of a movement whose day had finally come:  the dawn of a tremendously new day.

    Of course that isn't what actually happened.  We all know that.  Nonetheless, as theologian Francis Schaeffer once observed, "The Sixties counterculture understood the problem [a pervasive lack of personal meaning]; they just had the wrong solution."  True enough.  Yet in the decade after Woodstock what is now called the "Jesus Freak" movement swept through the country, causing millions of political and culturally disaffected youths (including me) to place their trust in the God of Christianity.

    I mention Woodstock because last week one of its principal organizers, Michael Lang, passed away at the age of 77.  Only 24 at the time he brought the rock festival together, Lang certainly made his mark, and an indelible one at that, on the psyche of the nation.  Though we can argue almost ad infinitum about the relative virtue and worth of Woodstock, we cannot dispute the far flung ramifications of its effects.  While in many ways the Sixties counterculture left considerable darkness in its wake, it also laid the groundwork for a profound resurgence of belief in the value and worth of a personal and infinite God.

    Marvel at the purposes embedded in who and what we cannot see.

     How curious, and fascinating, it is that, for some unbelievers (or disbelievers), although God does not exist, he in fact, after a fashion, does.  The other night, in my atheist discussion group, after a few years away from doing so, we took time to share our "spiritual" journeys, relating the events and thoughts that had brought us to our current epistemological framework.

    I found one person's observations striking.  After laying out his present point of disbelief in God, he added that, given the presently unresolvable questions about what preceded the Big Bang, he would be willing, given the right circumstances, to describe whatever did precede it as, broadly speaking, God.

    However we frame the world, we need a starting point.  Maybe the twelfth century prelate Anselm was actually onto something.  Perhaps God really is that which we cannot conceive anything greater to be.

    We cannot pretend that we do not need to begin.

    In her newest book, In the Eye of the Wild, Nastassja Martin recounts the aftermath of being attacked by a grizzly bear while she was engaged in anthropological work on Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula.  She writes eloquently and insightfully about her feelings, the way of the landscape, and the joy, and challenge, of venturing into the unknown.  Along the way, she makes this observation:  "I say there is something invisible that impels our lives towards the unexpected."

    Although we could take this thought in any number of ways, from affirming the natural ebb and flow of the rhythms of the universe to positing the presence and activity of a personal God, broadly speaking, we can nonetheless draw out this much.  We live in a universe whose depths we do not fully understand.  We are very small creatures in an immense cosmos.  We have very little ultimate control over our lives, and certainly no say over the day of our passing.  We live in the grip of forces, perhaps even presences, which elude ready definition and comprehension.

    Whether or not we call these forces or presences God is not the point.  It is rather that we fool ourselves if we suppose that we will, one day, know all things.  Or that we can predict or establish everything that will happen.

    Human understanding is only as certain as that through which we see it.

    

    You no doubt are familiar with the Vikings.  Although the Vikings have been traditionally viewed as rapacious pillagers of the monasteries and villages of the Middle Ages, and they were, the Vikings were also instrumental in connecting many parts of Western and Central Asia to the cultural values of medieval Europe.  It was a Viking tribe that established the nation of Russia; it was a Viking tribe that linked, through trade and exchange, Northern Europe with the fledgling nations of the southern Mediterranean.  And so on.

    Beyond this, the Vikings had a rather curious way of viewing death.  They laughed at it.  To view death with levity, they believed, was to die bravely.  It was to pass out of this world in distinguished fashion.  Without fear, without hesitation, but rather grasping boldly the fullness of this new adventure.

    So did a Viking king once say, "The Gods will invite me in, in death there is no sighing . . . the hours of life have passed, laughing shall I die."

    When given a choice, most of us would not necessarily welcome death, much less laugh about it.  From an earthly vantage point, death is so frightfully final.  That's this Viking's point:  all the more incumbent upon a person to enter into it with mirth.  If, as this Viking observes, the "Gods" have invited us into this finale of life destinies, laughing can we we indeed die.

    For absent any material vision of the afterlife, laughing, heartily, demonstratively, and clearly, at what comes next is indeed the most human way to know it.

    Faith rarely understands, fully, what it now sees.

     "A wunderkind of twentieth century physics, Kurt Schwarzschild is perhaps most famous for solving Albert Einstein's field equations (the nuts and bolts) of his theory of General Relativity.  Moreover, in so doing, Schwarzschild developed what is called the Schwarzschild radius, which physicists today use to determine the "event horizon" of a black hole.

    From this "event horizon" has come the conclusion that nothing, not even light, not even gravity, can escape from a black hole (a dead star).  It is a universe collapsed on itself.

    So it was that Schwarzschild once wondered, "Is there anything that is truly at rest, something stationary around which the universe revolves, or is there nothing at all to hold on to amid this endless chain of movements in which every single thing seems bound?"  In other words, what is a universe if it has nothing holding it together, if space and time are so relative that everything else is, too?

    And there would therefore be no real point.  Other than that there is no point.

    Oh, for the transcendent!

    Today is Epiphany, the "last gasp" of the Christmas season, Epiphany (a word meaning, literally, the manifestation of a divine being), reminds us of the faith of a group of travelers from Persia in the Zoroastrian and biblical prophecies which they had encountered in their studies.

    After much examination of these texts, these magi ("wise" men) concluded that the world was on the precipice of a momentous event:  the birth of a new king.  And, they understood, this king would be unlike any other.  In contrast to other royalty, this king would emerge from humble circumstances, a stable outside Bethlehem, a tiny and forgettable village in southern Palestine.

    

    This king would be, these scholars realized, human and divine.  In him, the magi saw, God would really come to earth.  Small wonder that they made the arduous journey over the Zagros Mountains, across the arid expanse of Arabia, and onto the international trade routes that coursed through the Levant.  Who would have imagined such a thing?
    

    And that's the point:  who would have imagined God would be born as a human being?
    

    Epiphany demonstrates that only when we allow inklings of the divine into our hearts will we understand what the world is really all about.

    

    For all these reasons, it is singularly unfortunate that on this day we must also remember, with profound regret, the first anniversary of the insurrection and attack on the U.S. capitol building in Washington, D.C.  And how even more unfortunate it is that this attack was, in part, planned by people who fervently believed that this was what God was calling them to do.

    God is there, yes, but we are fallen human beings.

    Thank goodness for Advent.

      "Not all who wander," observed Lord of the Rings author J. R. R. Tolkien, "are lost."  Isn't this like the human being?  When we wander, we let go.  We let go of our plans and intentions, set aside our immediate ambitions.  We step away from the past, cast aside the future.  We don't plan, we don't frame.  We don't set a time.

     But are we lost?  Over twenty years ago, I read an interview with a person I'll call James, a prisoner on death row in the state of Texas.  Earlier in his life, many years before, in fact, James murdered another human being.  In a week, he was to be executed for his crime.  All his life, James had, by his own account, wandered.  He never thought about what his life meant, never thought about where it began or where it was going.  He only did what was immediately before him.


     By his own account, James was lost.

     At some point in his imprisonment, however, James embraced Christianity.  He gave his heart to Jesus.  Everything changed.  Though he continued to wander, to wander through the permutations of the appeals processes of death row, to wander through the many doors he found in his new life with Jesus, he no longer felt lost.  He knew, ultimately, where he was going.  As he put it in the interview, "All my life, I never had a home.  Now I'm going to have one."

     Sometimes we wander, sometimes we make plans.  Still other times, we have no clue about either one.  Perhaps it is when we are the most lost that we are the most found.

     It was an adventure of the early nineteenth century, largely forgotten today.  But it remains a remarkable story of survival.  I speak of the fate of a crew of American soldiers whose ship, due to a navigational error, ran aground on the shores of West Africa, far, far from help and home.  Barely had the crew emerged from the ocean, more or less alive, when various Bedouins and desert tribes captured and enslaved them.  In a curious reversal of the prevailing triangular trade that consigned Africans to slavery in the Americas, these Americans were subjected to slavery in Africa.

    For some, their enslavement lasted two months.  For others, it was a lifetime.  As members of the crew were split up among the captors and taken into a range of situations, only a few managed to eventually escape.  The others never left the desert, spending the remainder of their lives toiling in the unspeakably hot and sandy wastes of the Sahara.  They died without ever seeing their families again.

    It only through prevarication and subterfuge that one part of the crew managed to get to the British consul in Morocco and eventual freedom.  William Riley, the ship's captain and part of this group, wrestled highly with the ethics of his choice.  Should he lie to gain his freedom?  Should anyone?

    This ethical dilemma reminds us of the choice that American rock climber Tommy Caldwell made to free himself and three other climbers who had been captured by Kyrgyz rebels in 2000.  When only one rebel was guarding the group, Caldwell pushed him off a cliff and the four escaped to freedom. (Happily, they later learned that the rebel had survived.)

    Life long slavery, life long imprisonment.  Killing and lying.  What would you do?