Who was George Frederic Handel?  Born in Germany, Handel spent most of his life in London.  He is perhaps most famous for his Messiah, a glorious paean to the salvific love of God.  We frequently see Messiah performed around Christmas and Easter.  Another of Handel's most well known works is his Water Music, a delightful set of processionals often heard at weddings or graduation commencements.

     As I listened to Messiah's "Hallelujah Chorus" recently, I reflected, again, on its power, spiritual as well as political.  As the story goes, when George II, then the British king, heard its opening strains he stood up.  In an era when people sought to emulate, out of respect, what their king did, the rest of the audience stood up, too.
     Perhaps the king stood out of reverence, perhaps not.  Either way, a tradition was established.  To this day, even the most hardened unbelievers will, if they attend a performance of Messiah, stand up for the Hallelujah Chorus. 
     Given the tragedy currently unfolding in Ukraine, the lengthy span of history which Messiah explicates seems to underscore how little we really know about ourselves and the world.  Day in and day out we challenge our mortality, constantly striving to carve a path through contingency and foundation.  We're always bumping into transcendence.

    So it is that Handel concluded that we will only find clarity if we listen, if we listen to the greater point of the reality in which we live.

    And not just ourselves.

 

     Since the days of Auguste Rodin, sculpture has often occupied a special place in the artistic imagination:  what is it really trying to say?  Much has been made in recent weeks about an exhibit of the works of American sculptor Charles Ray and his unique ability to speak through his creations.  Consider, for instance, his "Archangel."  Even though it is clear that this archangel has little to do with communications from the divine, it nonetheless seems to reflect, or so the critics say, what theologians call an apotheosis:  a transformation into God.

    Huh?  On the other hand, most of us wish, in some way, to be different than we are today.  We may wish for better people skills, increased insight into what life means, greater compassion for our fellow humans, deeper love for our spouses or significant other, and so forth.  Bottom line, we want to find our greater point.  Even if it is a point that only we define.

    And we will do so whether we believe in God or not.  When I consider Ray's "Archangel," I therefore ponder how much it expresses who we are.  Be it people in passage, people in stasis, or some blending of the two, we long to see who and what else we can be.

    After all, we're purposeful creatures in an intentionally purposeful universe.  Otherwise, we would have no claim to aspire to anything.

     I can barely find words to express my anguish over the horror and tragedy of what is going on Ukraine.  As always happens in war, it is the civilians who suffer the brunt of the pain that conflict creates.  When I look at photographs of Ukrainians huddling in bomb shelters, families dealing with power losses, or parents putting their children on buses to ship them out of the country, I weep:  why must these innocents endure such peril?

    Because an insecure dictator feels that he must flex his military muscles in order to prove to the world that his country is still internationally relevant, thousands and thousands of people, people who are, like you and I do each and every day, just trying to live and let live, are suffering, suffering terribly.  It's not right--in every possible moral sense of the word

    Pray for Ukraine.  Pray for Vladimir Putin.  Pray that this awful conflict will end.

      Earlier this month, many of us thought about Groundhog Day.  It's a day buried deep in ancient European belief and lore, a day of reckoning, a day that marks the approximate midway point (otherwise known as Beltane; or, from a Celtic standpoint, Imbolc) between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox.  It is, as those who live through cold and snowy winters, the point at which, maybe, just maybe, things are on the upswing, and that, going forward, the earth is closer to spring than winter.

     Today, we know much more about the weather than our ancestors.  We can predict its trends far more effectively.  Most of the time, this is good.  On the other hand, with each new statistic and predictive instrument we devise and use, we put one more layer between us and our world.  We're perhaps safer and better prepared, yes, but we are not necessarily better off.  We forget what the world is like.  We overlook the beauty of the rhythms with which our planet breathes.

     And maybe we forget that we live in a reality whose meaning does not cconsist in our ability to tame and conquer it, but rather in our willingness to acknowledge its mysteries.  We learn that, finite that we be, we will never fully outwit that which we did not make.

     We open our eyes.

     "It's all emptiness."  These are the words of the Acrobat in Ingmar Bergman's 1957 film "The Seventh Seal."  What is the Acrobat talking about?  Death.  He has already seen one person die without reason, and he has already seen a woman, accused of being a witch, being prepared for burning at the stake.  He has already seen life turned inside out.

    Yet he has also encountered great love and affection and joy, a joi de vivre that causes him to treasure every moment of being alive.

    Nonetheless, regardless of what has happened while we live, when we die, as far as the Acrobat is concerned, we encounter only emptiness.  Nothing but a vast and unyielding emptiness.  An eternal emptiness.

    At another point in the film, the Knight asks Death (with whom he engages in a chess match), what will happen when Death finally comes for him.  Having just returned from the Middle East to a Europe in the grip of the Black Death, he cannot fathom the idea of people dying into an unremitting void, emptiness replete.

    "You ask too many questions," Death replies.  Perhaps.  Given the disconnect between his experiences of war and suffering and the joys that he now experiences as civilian life, however, maybe the Knight is right to wonder why.  Why must such joy, and pain, only end in emptiness?

    Because, Death subsequently implies, that's just how it is.  But why do we, like the Knight, nonetheless so fervently long otherwise?  Maybe there really is more to us, and the world, than what we now see.

    "I don't sleep with Satan."  So stated Swedish organist Anna von Hausswolff in an interview in which she responded to a line in one of her songs that states she does exactly that.  Yet as she makes clear in this interview, Hausswolff, whose ethereal organ playing and the surreal lyrics with which she surrounds it seem to nod to the factuality of the lord of the other side, does not consider herself an aficionado of traditional religion.  Satan is not the issue for her.     Her music, however, resounds with otherworldliness.

    Performed in a darkened auditorium or cathedral, it  comes upon the listener as a voice from the beyond, as a harbinger of mysteries outside of normal human ken.  It urges us to open our eyes and heart to what might lie between the lines of material existence, a realm of activity which we may long to understand, but can never seem to grasp fully.  It's a bit like Rudolph Otto's picture of holiness, a presence that at once fascinates and frightens us, yet a presence which we do not think we can do without:  dread and awe.

    Maybe that's Hausswolff's point.  We can dispute the veracity of her response, we can reject her seeming pointers to another world, we can dismiss Otto's framework. We can set all our thoughts and aspirations in a totally material box.  And never look outside it.

    Perhaps.  Yet why do we keep looking?

    Did you watch the Super Bowl?  I watched the first half, Rhianna's half time show, and the closing moments of the game.  Millions of other people, however, watched the entire game, all four+ hours of it.

    I often wonder what our many animal friends think about the sight of that many people glued to their television sets for over four hours, eating, talking, laughing.  Whatever are those human beings doing?

    Simply being, I guess, human beings, magnificent, glorious, frail, intelligent, self-conscious and incomplete sentient beings availing themselves of the only existence they will ever have on this planet.

    Therein lies the puzzle.  Where else will we find such an intriguing combination of will, tenuousness, folly, and determination?  Is this God's intention or is this evolution's result?  Either way, it's nothing anyone could have predicted:  life's essence eludes us unless we understand why it is.

    And to deny that we need to know why life is, is, it seems to me, as big a crutch as an unbeliever might say about the nature of faith.  We will never escape our need to know.  So did British philosopher Iris Murdoch observe that, "It is a task to come to see the world as it is."

    Although in many ways Valentine's Day, which we remember today, has become (or, I might say, degenerated into) a Hallmark holiday, it actually has a measure of legitimate historical origin.  Its name comes from St. Valentine, one of many martyrs in the early years of the Christian Church.  Valentine gave his life for what he believed to be the greater good of the gospel and the primacy of God.

    Subsequently, however, as the early Church faded into history, the name Valentine morphed into a day associated with earthly love and romance.  It still is.  On the other hand, despite the way that various retailers use Valentine's Day to increase sales, doing their best to entice lovers, particularly men, to spend more disposable income than they would otherwise to please their loved one, it's still a good day.  What harm can come from thinking about love?

    

    Years ago, the Beatles sang that, "All you need is love."  In more ways than the Fab Four likely thought at the time, this is one of the truest statements in all the world.  In an impersonal universe, a beautiful but empty cosmos, love remains the greatest thing.

    

    But wait:  how can love exist in a universe without meaning and therefore no words for it?

    Maybe that's why Valentine was willing to die:  he knew that, ultimately, love needs the fact of God.

     In 2015, Nepalese mountaineer Nimal Purja set out to do what many thought impossible:  scale the world's fourteen highest peaks in less than a year.  So eager was Purja to counteract the skeptics that he labeled his project Mission Possible.

    After attracting sufficient sponsorship and assembling a team of crack mountaineers (all of whom were his closest friends) to assist him, Purja set out.  Quickly, so quickly he scaled the peaks, one by one, one after the other.  His drive was astounding, his stamina superhuman:  whether it was a winter storm or tending to his mother when she was gravely ill, nothing seemed to stop him.  Soon, mountaineers all over the world were pulling for him, sending him numerous notes and texts of encouragement to keep him going.

    In slightly more than six months, Purja accomplished his goal.  It was incredible.  Most incredible perhaps was that as a Nepali man, Purja did not have access to the lucrative sponsorships to which Western mountaineers are privy.  He had to work even harder to raise the necessary funds.  Yet in the end, how appropriate it was that a Nepali set the new record.  After all, it is in the mountains in and around Nepal that these peaks are located.

    Above all, Purja demonstrated the remarkable power of the human mind and spirit to conquer almost anything.  Gifted and determined, Purja reflected the power of the one in whose image he had been made and in so doing, announcing, once again, the marvel of the intentionally fashioned human being.

     I read of the recent passing of former Sixties activist turned prominent social critic and university professor Todd Gitlin with great sadness.  Though I didn't know Todd personally, I worked with many people who, during that tumultuous era in America, worked with and knew him.  In terms of goals for the country, he and I were of essentially one mind.

    Unfortunately, along the way, one by one, it seems, some of the Sixties's most well known protagonists have left our world, never to return.  So it is that when I consider Gitlin's time on this planet, from his youthful fervor and idealism to his subsequent career as incisive social observer and commentator, I see that he had, like all of us, evolved and changed.  Setting aside his more aggressive revolutionary ambitions, Todd generated an enormous amount of thoughtful insights on the nature of American society as it moved from the Sixties to the present day.  Yet he never lost sight of his original vision:  to create a more just America.

    Cast against the movements of transcendence and eternity, this vision may seem trivial and small.  But it's not.  How can things such as freedom, equity, and justice, rightly framed and understood, be anything but prime in the lens of ultimate destiny?

    Thanks, Todd.

     Marcel Duchamp, creator of the "Fountain," a sculpture of a restroom urinal, insisted that art is ultimately conceptual.  Tradition is less important, he says, than the ability of the artist to produce work that is uniquely his or her own.  Hence, art does not so much reflect the patterns of the past, the aesthetic patterns in which artists have traveled to this point, but rather the judgment of the individual artist, standing, rather like Nietzsche's Uberman, alone and apart, braving whatever currents of creative expression are running through his or her mind.  A world all its own.

    No real argument here.  By its nature, art is interpretation, the artist's interpretation of how he or she views the world.  On the other hand, to say that one is forging one's own aesthetic path quite apart from all that preceded it is a stretch:  every work of art builds on what came before it.  Yet Duchamp has a good point:  why should art not be a concept, a concept from which the viewer can wonder and wander?

    It reminds me of the coherence theory of truth:  we construct truth on the basis of everything that, at this particular point, we know and experience.  Transcendent standards are therefore meaningless.  The present concept is the only thing.

    Fair enough.  But we really live with a fractured reality?

      

    Many years ago I had a conversation with a young man on his way to the Burning Man Festival in the desert of Nevada.  At the time, I happened to be in South Dakota, working on an Indian reservation.  As we talked, it became clear to me that even though this young man didn’t appear to have any use for conventional religion, he had decided to journey to the Festival because he had “to find my spiritual roots.”  Although he wasn’t sure what those roots were, he was pretty much convinced that the Festival was the place to look for them.  He was persuaded that amidst the cacophony of cultural expressions he would see there, he would eventually step into a place, a place of spirit, however he defined it, he had not been before.

    Spirituality, he said, has no boundaries.  Fair enough.  If an infinite God is there, then, yes, spirituality has no boundaries.  On the other hand, if an infinite God is there, it seems as if whatever spirituality we encounter will be grounded ultimately in him.  And how will we know either way?

    We will only know if God makes himself known in ways we understand.  And he has.

    I wished the young man the best.

     Reinhold Messner is one of the most famous mountaineers of all time.  The Italian born Messner (he was born in the German speaking region of Italy) was the first person to solo climb Mt. Everest as well as the first person to climb all fourteen of the 8,000 meter peaks, the world's highest, without supplemental oxygen.  He is admired, even revered, among his fellow mountaineers for his legendary exploits.

    Messner will be seventy-nine this year.  Yet one often wonders exactly what, amidst his many alpine adventures, Messner found.  In a recent interview, Messner remarked that, "Life is absurd, but you can fill it with ideas, enthusiasm, and joy."  Here is a person who, perhaps more than most, filled his days with immensely impressive physical and mental achievements.  Yet he insists that life, the life with which he has filled with much enthusiasm and joy, along with a plethora of ideas, is absurd.

     I struggle to reconcile such talk with what appears to be a clear zeal for existence.  And I marvel, once again, at how much this extraordinary paradox says about the necessity of a personal transcendence in grounding our picture of reality.

       In the U.S., February is Black History Month.  In truth, one finds it rather odd that we must set aside a month to celebrate a history of a people whose lineage is considerably longer than that of the more dominant race in the world today, that is, white people.  In fact, as Nell Irvin Painter points out in her 2011 The History of White People, it is the white skin color that, from a genetic standpoint, is the more "aberrant" of human skin colors.  Moreover, whether we believe that humanity began in southern Iraq vis a vis the Garden of Eden, the savannah and gorges of central and southern Africa, or some combination of the two, we must admit that our earliest ancestors were anything but lily white.

     Due to racist behavior perpetrated by other races and ethnicities in the course of human history, the virtues of Black culture have often been ignored, suppressed or, worse, abused and destroyed.  This has been at our peril.  We can only enjoy and appreciate humanity when we can explore and experience all of its manifestations.  That we realize that, over and above us all, is a God who has created us to be, in the world he has made, together.
     I'll always be white, I'll always be a part of a traditional Western "elite."  Yet I also realize that, as the apostle Paul wrote many centuries ago, that there is, "neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28):  immense diversity, enormously one.
     This month, and every month, celebrate the marvel of our amazing manifold humanness.

      From Mozart to Schubert to Mendelssohn:  these last few weeks have been filled with numerous musician birthdays.  Their contributions to music and the enriching of the human adventure have been singular and vast.  Born into a Jewish family (although his father separated himself from Judaism before Felix was born) and later baptized as a Christian, Felix Mendelssohn composed in a wide range of genres, choral to orchestral to chamber to operatic, each work distinguished by its melody, passion, and attention to detail.  Some of his most famous, and most recognizable, works include "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing," 

"Overture to a Midsummer Night's Dream," and the "Wedding March."  He was acknowledged as a prodigy early in his life, most notably by Goethe, writer of the timeless story of Faust.  People found his music uniquely captivating.
     As I think about Mendelssohn, I realize, again, the remarkable fact of music in this adventure we call life.  To form sound, to frame melody, to write song:  there is nothing quite like these in all the cosmos.  Our ability to visualize (as former Beatle Paul McCartney once said, "I see the music in my head") and compose music mirrors, mirrors as both reflection and extension of the marvel of existence, the capacity of the universe, through us, to express itself in sound.  Unbidden, unsought, the universe, in us, speaks to us every moment of every day.  It's never totally silent.
     Before composers like Mendlessohn, we can therefore only weep in amazement, astonished that we understand the fact of melody and sound, and that we can emulate, albeit in shattered form, the timeless and ageless marvel of that which empowers and expresses what is.

     By most accounts, Boris Savinkov, one of the leading exponents of terrorism in the last century, lived, nearly as a matter of life and breath, to engage in terror.  Indeed, from what we can tell, Savinkov terrorized for the "sheer pleasure" of it.

     Not that Savinkov, living as he did in the waning days of tsarist Russia and the ensuing Bolshevik Revolution, did not have ample reason to wage terror on the established order.  Whether it was the Tsar or the Bolsheviks, the Russian government did not view its people kindly.  There was much to protest.  Of course, this doesn't justify Savinkov's callous disregard for human life in the service of what he considered to be a greater good.  Absolutely not.  It does, however, demonstrate the lengths to which people go to secure the freedom to build the type of authority best suited for them.

    But the latter belies the point.  To live to contest and destroy authority when one's objective is to simply institute a new type of the same does little to enlarge the social imaginary or the common good.  If methodology is all, meaning immediately falls by the wayside:  principles without principle collapse quickly.

    Live to question, yes, but always question a life intended to destroy itself.