Has society evolved to the point where it no longer needs God?  This was the question which a video I watched at the most recent meeting of my atheist discussion group posed to us.  While I am of course biased toward the negative of this question, and even though I found some credibility in the arguments for affirming the statement, I realized afterwards that maybe we're asking the wrong question.  Maybe it's not a question of whether society has evolved (and by society we are, in rather arrogant fashion, assuming the West) beyond God, but a question of whether we are wise enough to determine whether we have indeed evolved.  Evolved into what?  And how do we know it is a better state?

    For if we, we ourselves, have decided that it we have evolved, we've backed ourselves into a wall.  Where will we now go except into the unfulfilled desires and dissatisfactions of our inner selves?  Maybe this is brave, maybe it is foolish.  But it only makes sense if we know what all this means.  And how do we know if all we have is ourselves?

     It seems fitting that on the cusp of Holocaust Remembrance Day (April 27-28, evening to morning on the Jewish calendar in the month of Nisan, the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising), we also think about a woman named Gerda Weissmann Klein.  As a Polish woman one who survived the horrors of the Holocaust in her home country, Mrs. Klein did much to tell the world about the unspeakable weight of memory the Holocaust has placed upon the planet.  After narrowly escaping being sent to an extermination camp when the Nazis liquidated the Polish "ghettos," Mrs. Klein met her future husband and, eventually, moved to the United States.  She subsequently became an American citizen.  The Academy award winning film "One Survivor Remembers," is based on her autobiography All but My Life.  The book is well worth reading, reminiscent of Primo Levi's If This Is A Man, another powerful account of Holocaust survival.

    From her new home in the States, Mrs. Klein devoted the remainder of her life to advocating for Holocaust education and human rights around the world.  Because of her life story, she was uniquely qualified to talk about both, ably communicating the immensity of the Holocaust and its effect on the human imagination.  Although the Holocaust is well in the past, its effects are anything but:  even after all of its survivors are gone, the Holocaust will remain.  It is a singularly incisive event of horror and memory.  We remember it to remember.  To remember the depths to which we are capable of plunging, yes, but to also remember the heights to which we can soar when we recognize the enormous responsibility of being human.

     "Man is mortal.  That is his fate.  Man pretends to not be immortal.  That is his sin."  Such was the conclusion of prominent theologian and cultural critic Reinhold Niebuhr, who died in 1971.  What does he mean?

    Niebuhr is saying that even though physical death is the lot of every human being, it is not the end of the human being.  Because, he says, humans are spiritual and moral beings, and have been made to enjoy a spiritual existence, they cannot pretend that, in some form, this existence is the only one they will experience.  Dust and ashes are their end, but only on this planet.  To think otherwise is to ignore the obvious:  people always seek beyond themselves.

    As Friedrich Nietzsche, no friend of spirituality or God, once noted, "A human is the sick animal because he is provided with everything and yet is infected with an insatiable need for the metaphysical that can never [if earth is our reality] be assuaged."

    We cannot ignore whom we most are.

    Are you familiar with Alexei Navalny?  A thorn in the Russian Kremlin's side for many, many years, Navalny has fearlessly challenged the authorities in Russia over their autocratic and corrupt ways with speeches, videos, and more.  Last year, when he fell ill on a flight in Siberia and was subsequently flown to Germany for treatment, the world learned that he had been deliberately poisoned, likely on the orders of Vladimir Putin.  Yet after recovering from this near death experience, Navalny packed up himself and his family and returned to Russia.  He was arrested almost immediately after landing.  Last month, he was sentenced to nine years in prison.

    As far as anyone can tell, however, Navalny continues to challenge.  Recently, I was happy and fortunate to see the documentary film made about him.  It was powerful and moving.  Although Navalny is only one person, he has succeeded in building up a potent organization of dissent in Russia, one that, despite the imprisonment of its leader, works daily to undermine the corrupting authority it believes the current Russia leaders to be.

    Navalny is a brave individual.  Those of us who live in the West and its generally tolerant attitudes toward dissent cannot know what it is like to be arrested for criticizing our government. (Although cases can be made that, at times, this happens in the West, too.  But not on the scale as it occurs in Russia.)  We owe Navalny a great deal of debt and admiration.  And our prayers.

    For even though some counsel gently accepting one's lot as the appropriate response to systematic oppression, it yet seems as if there's another side to the story:  no deserving person should have to live without freedom.

    God didn't make us to live in chains.

    

     Today is Earth Day!  Established in 1970, Earth Day is a day on which we think anew about the wonder and fragility of the tiny globe on which we spin through this vast, vast cosmos. Earth Day is a call to attend to the ecological balance of the world.

    Many, however, deride Earth Day.  The reasons for their rejection are various:  religious, political, and economic.  And more.

     

    Perhaps Earth Day opponents should learn from the Greek mythological character Narcissus. So obsessed was Narcissus with his own image reflected in a stream, he bent down to look.  Enraptured, he continued to look, getting closer and closer until he put his head in the water and drowned.
    

    We are living in a world which we in no way made and in which we will in no way control fully.  We are only human.  If we think otherwise, the world will drown us, metaphorically for sure, in actuality perhaps, in the effects of our ecological follies.  We will lose everything God has given to us.
    

    As the psalmist writes, "The earth is the Lord's and all within it" (Psalm 24:1).  Let's use our gift responsibly.

     "The mountains are calling me," said the Scottish born American naturalist John Muir, "and to the mountains I must go."

    Today is John Muir's birthday.  We have much for which to be grateful to Muir.  Because of his work with president Theodore Roosevelt, we can enjoy hundreds of national parks, each one a unique expression of the wonder of the creation.  Deep in the Sierra  Nevada mountains of California is a 210 mile long trail named after him.  It is spectacular, a weeks long trek along the 12,000 foot Sierra Crest.  Many decades ago I hiked it:  it changed my life.

    Whether the mountains are calling you or not, listen to what the creation is saying to you.  Listen to the presence of the transcendent meaning it bequeaths.

       This month marks the birthday of the American playwright Samuel Beckett.  Known for his bleak portrayals of human existence, Beckett wrote some plays intended to cause us to question why we are even here, plays that present worlds singularly devoid of meaning.  But that's Beckett's point:  there is no meaning.  It's a dark, cold, and impersonal world.

     Is this true?  Emotionally, it can certainly seem that way at times.  If there is no reason for this world to exist, if there is no reason why we are here, then however grand our life might be, it ultimately means very little.

     For Beckett, this didn't seem to matter.  In his "Happy Days," Beckett presents only two characters, Winnie and Willie.  Winnie is buried in dirt up to her waist; Willie crawls around on all fours.  As the play proceeds, Winnie talks, talks nearly constantly, to Willie.  She talks of everyday things and how blessed she feels to be alive:  she has Willie.  Willie rarely responds.

     By the end of the play, Winnie is buried in dirt up to her neck.  Willie is still only able to crawl.  Yet she continues to insist that these are happy days.  And we, the audience, are left to wonder why.

     Similarly, in his far more well known "Waiting for Godot," Beckett presents two men sitting on a bench at a bus stop waiting for someone they know only as Godot. As the play moves on, the men continue to talk.  But Godot never comes.  As they take leave of each other, they suppose that perhaps Godot will come tomorrow.  But will it really matter?  They're probably waiting, they finally admit, for something that will never happen.  But that's life:  living for something that never comes.

     Besides, in a world absent of point, what else is there to do?

     Herein is Beckett's central admission:  when transcendence is gone, we are, too.

    Indeed.  Apart from the resurrection, Beckett's point is all too true.  Life is here, life is nowhere.  Then it's gone.

      Today, Easter morning, my wife and I took a walk through a nearby forest preserve.  When we arrived at the high point of the trail, we stopped and looked.  We watched the sky, a budding crimson, hanging over the forest, its trees still naked and bare, the land barely green.  Then, precisely when we expected it to do so, the sun peeked over the hills and began spreading its rays across the water.  The geese continued to fly, the cranes continued to nest.  Squirrels scampered about.  And why not?  The night was over.  The day had begun.

    For many, and I think in particular about the people of Ukraine, the day seems very, very distant.  Night is everywhere.

    But in the end, the day will have its way.  Light will triumph over darkness.  What we will always find confounding--and glorious--about resurrection is the profound physicality of the deed:  that God, the living God, really did die.  As will we.  Yet God, the living God, really did rise from the dead. As will we.  It's nonsensical, it's unbelievable, it's unfathomable.

    But how can life, ever be the same?

     "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends."  So said Jesus, Jewish Messiah and, as he constantly made clear, the son of God, on the eve of his crucifixion.

    How many of us actually have opportunity to live out these words?  Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish priest who was imprisoned at the German concentration camp Auschwitz.  One day, Kolbe willingly came forward to serve the death sentence of another prisoner, one Franciszek Gajowniczek, whom he had not even met.  After two weeks of slow dehydration and starvation, Kolbe finally died when the guards injected him with carbolic acid.  Gajowniczek, who died in 1995, devoted the rest of his life to telling the world about Kolbe's incredible sacrifice.

    Kolbe surely exemplified Jesus' words.  As world remembers Good Friday today, that darkest yet most sacred of days, the day on which Jesus, God in the flesh, sacrificed himself, giving everything he was for the world that he had made, all of us should therefore ask, with joy, gratitude, and astonishment:  what kind of a God would do such a thing?

    The answer is very simple:  a God who loves us.

      There is an old Swedish fable that tells the story of a family that has been told to expect, at a certain hour, the arrival of someone whose presence will change their lives forever.  As the narrative moves along, the family waits and waits, glancing often at the clock, wondering if this person will really come.

     Then the hour comes.  But the person does not appear.  After thinking about this for a few moments, the father remarks, "The hour has come, but not the man."

     So is history, humanity's as well as our own.  How many times has an opportune moment arrived in the global narrative, a moment, a kairos, that could change life forever, and no one is there to seize it?  Oddly, we will never know.  We will never know because if we did, we would have stepped into it ourselves.  We rarely discern a transforming kairos until after it has happened.  All we do is try to keep moving forward.

     For instance, did Albert Einstein know that when he published his Theory of Relativity he was inaugurating a seminal moment in science?  Did Leonardo da Vinci know that when he developed the theory of perspective in art he was changing fhow we do painting?  Did Abraham know when he ventured forth from Haran into Canaan that he was unleashing a torrent of political machinations that endures to this day?  Did Buddha know that his ideas would transform thinking across enormous stretches of Asia?  Did Mary Woolstonecraft (mother of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein) know that her writings on female freedom would help birth the feminist movement of the nineteenth century?

     In this time, a time in which the three Abrahamic religions are celebrating some of their most sacred moments, we do well to look for the kairos.  After all, who knows what we will see?

      As we enter into the final days of Lent, we think about service.  Throughout his earthly life, Jesus told people that he had come as a servant.  He had not come to judge, he had not come to condemn; he had come to serve.  Jesus had come to serve his creation.  At the Last Supper (the event which Maundy Thursday commemorates), Jesus made clear that he was readying himself to give himself, to give his body, heart, and soul for the good of those whom he had made.  Even as the final hours of his life loomed, Jesus emphasized that he had come to serve.  His welfare was the last thing on his mind.

     Whether we believe in Jesus or not, we can learn from his example.  The world hardly needs more arrogant leaders.  The planet will do just fine without its rulers constantly striving to dominate one another.  When we, literally or metaphorically, wash one another's feet, as Jesus did at the Last Supper, we affirm the value of our fellow human beings.  We tell our fellow travelers that we regard them as more important than ourselves.  We state to the world that working to sustain everyone is greater than working to sustain oneself only.

     We let go of what we want for the good of others.

     Consider what you have, ponder what you have been given.  And sacrifice.  Give up your wonder, let go of your grace in order to create more for your neighbor. Make him/her more important than you.

     And see how you--and the world--changes.

"All is futility," Ecclesiastes often observes, "all is futility."  I thought of this phrase anew a couple of years ago when I was privileged to take in an exhibition of the famous Terracota Warriors of Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang.  Ordered by the emperor to guard him in his afterlife, these 7,000 soldiers--infantry, charioteers, generals, and more--have stood silently for thousands of years, protecting a monarch long since gone.  Until a farmer, preparing the soil for his summer crop, stumbled upon them in 1974, no one living was aware of their existence.

     

     We marvel at the pyramids of Egypt, their power and majesty; we swoon over the beauty of the Taj Mahal; we find astonishment in the massive crypt of Halicarnassus; and we wonder:  why?  Sure, we do well to remember the departed, and yes, we are grateful to recall their presence in their lives, and yet we are also aware that once they are gone, they are gone.  Qin Shi Huang, the Egyptian pharaohs, and countless other royalty have gone to tremendous lengths to ensure a meaningful afterlife.
         Why?  Because it's so very hard to let go of what we see for what we cannot.  Death hovers before us as a engimatic abyss.  We cannot stop it, we cannot halt it.  It's always with us.    As are we ourselves.  Then why futility?

    It's Holy Week.  Holy Week is about suffering, helplessness, and pain.  It's also about joy, pure and holy joy.  Holy Week takes us into the deepest of darknesses, yes, but it also takes us into the most profound of all light.

    Holy Week tells us that the end of the story is that on which we must focus most.  Indeed, pain is part and parcel of our lives.  But only part.  In Jesus' suffering, we see ourselves.  And he us.  But it is in Jesus' resurrection that we ought to see ourselves even more.  It is in that pivotal moment, that epochal moment in which God conquered death that we must look.  For it is in it that we see our future best.

    Consider the Modern Museum of Art's description of the painting to your left:  "The Disaster Paintings eternalize the real-life modern events we are faced with daily in contemporary society yet quickly forget when the next catastrophe occurs."
    

    Maybe, however, we're focusing on the wrong thing.  Jesus' death presents a God who is bigger than disaster, a God who is bigger than the very darkest of pain.  Jesus died, yes, Messiah slain, but God lives.  And Jesus rose.
     And God is God.  Though disaster fills this world, God's power fills it even more.

   
    In his Clouds and Storm, the French mountain guide Gaston Rebuffat, one of the most famous of all the guides of the Alps, writes eloquently of his affection for the heights and his love for all things remote and wild.  He offers poignant thoughts and insights into living life with mountains, and not.

    As he closes his book, Rebuffat writes, "It is raining in Paris, and I am dreaming of high hills."  He cannot wait to get back to his beloved mountains.  He knows that in the mountains he--we--encounter a deeper awareness of life, an awareness we cannot experience in the land below. He realizes, as did the famous American naturalist John Muir, that a day in the mountains, treading in the light of their heights, is like a day that we would have nowhere else.

    It is this sense of transcendence, this feeling of lilting and otherworldly beauty that draws people, including me, to the mountains.  The mountains, the lofty landscapes of tundra and rock that roam about the planet, speak to us powerfully about the promise of our human condition.  We all dream of better and higher things.

    

    Though mountains are indeed remarkable and amazing, if they are our only source of transcendence, we miss the point of what transcendence is all about.

    Is spirituality really emergent?

     Do you like food?  Most of us do, at least for a while.  I ask because when we hosted some friends for dinner recently, they mentioned that the next night they planned to attend a presentation, in a theater, by a professional "foodie," who would display his cooking acumen and culinary skills.  I suspect the wife was much more enthusiastic about the prospect than her husband!

    Not that I would tell anyone to avoid attending such things.  When the next morning I opened the newspaper to read, again, however, about the hunger rippling through sub-Saharan Africa in the wake of the breakdown in wheat imports from Russia and Ukraine, I nearly wept.  I nearly wept at the plight of these poor and unfortunate souls, and I nearly wept at the heartbreaking disparity between our lot and theirs.  Very few of us know people who go hungry, night after night after night.  Very few of us know people for whom finding food is a major, even all day, event.

    But millions and millions of people experience hunger.  Constantly.  What can we do?  Give.  Give money to organizations feeding the hungry.  Give time to organizations feeding the hungry.  Give moments to prayer, prayer for those suffering, prayer for those helping them.

    And don't blame.  Believe.  Believe in the fundamental worth of the human being.  We live in a transcendently loved world.

    For those of us who follow college basketball, you know that two nights ago marked the NCAA men's basketball championship.  The culmination of several weeks of what many people call "March Madness," the game is, for many sports fans, one of the highlights of the year.

    Though I am happy for the players who won the championship, and while I am delighted for the joy and excitement that marked the many games that led up to the final game, I also think that, well, such things are ultimately contests between fit and well-fed American college students amidst a world torn with suffering.

    This was brought home to me with fresh force as I was reading through Ecclesiastes this morning.  "All is futility," the writer says, "all is futility."  Although the writer counsels elsewhere to "enjoy life," he recognizes acutely that, in the end, life is finite.  It will not last.  One day, all who live will be gone.

    Like basketball, like a basketball championship.  Life is deeply meaningful and unarguably profound, yes, but it is so frightfully transient.

    Does it need more?

     Although it being awarded a Pulitzer Prize occurred many years ago, Toni Morrison's Beloved was, for a long time, not a book I had ever read.  I'm very familiar with Morrison's work, having read any number of reviews of it, but had not sat down to read one of the novels all the way through.

    I will say up front that Beloved is not an easy novel to read.  Set in an American South in the years immediately following the end of the Civil War, Beloved paints indelible, and very painful, pictures of lives torn apart by slavery.  Its descriptions are graphic, its emotions are expressed without varnish, and its plot, containing at once natural as well as supernatural elements, complex.  To read through Beloved is to take a harrowing journey through one of the darkest undersides of the so-called American dream.

    Yet Beloved is also a novel of balance, an account of desperate attempts to balance maternal love with what seems to be the lot into which one's child will inevitably fall.  It portrays people caught in a vicious paroxysm of fealty, love, and suffering, people trying valiantly to find their way out of an essentially helpless situation.  A situation in which any decision is fraught with immense heartache and pain.  Beloved forces us to consider very carefully the foundations of our moral inclinations and sensibilities. From where, really, do we derive our notion of the good?  And what does it mean?

    Don't answer this question quickly.

     Ramadan, one of the greatest events in the Muslim calendar, began last week.  Thirty days of fasting, culminating in the feast of Eid al Fitr, Ramadan is a time for every Muslim to take time to celebrate and reflect on his or her relationship with Allah and the world.  It's a season of hope, wonder, mourning, and contemplation, a slice of the year in which Muslims, like most people of faith, take time to focus more intensely on why they live as they do.

    You may not agree with the tenets of Islam; you may not like the beliefs most Muslims hold; you may be uncomfortable with Islam in general; you may even be frightened of Islam.

     

    Either way, do use the fact of Ramadan to remind yourself that we live this life as a gift, that we spend our days in the aegis of a personal transcendence.  We live in the umbra of a beautiful (and often exasperating) wave of experience, balancing what we see and what we cannot.  Ramadan tells us that we are not alone. It says to us that we live in a vision, an intensely personal vision in which all things find purpose and meaning, the full truth of what is.

    There's much more to believe than what we see.

     Of course today is April 1:  April Fools Day.  It's also the the birthday of one of the greatest of the Romantic pianists:  Sergei Rachmaninoff.  Born in Russia, eventually emigrating to America and, shortly before his death in 1943, becoming an American citizen, Rachmaninoff (my wife's favorite musician) composed some of the richest music ever written for the piano. His work blends intense and mournful melody with powerful and intricate chords and keyboard movements, beautifully capturing the deepest spirit of the Romantics.  Rachmaninoff's music gives us a poignant window into our perennial struggle with the vast and unyielding import of sentient existence.  It shows us that however intellectual we may suppose ourselves to be, we are, in the end, creatures of heart and imagination.  We live as sensual beings.

    Rachmaninoff helps us realize that although reason is an essential part of who we are, we make our biggest decisions with our heart.  To put this in theological terms, although we may believe, as a matter of intellectual assent, in a particular religious tenet, we can only trust its truth for our lives with our heart.  Trust is the wellspring of rational belief.
     As much of Rachmaninoff's music tells us, though we live for the moment, we flourish in the eternal, however we conceive it to be.  We affirm transcendence even as we live in the immanent.