Yesterday, in America anyway, was Memorial Day.  In addition to the many barbecues and gatherings this holiday spawns, it also births numerous displays of patriotism, even, dare I say, jingoism, among the American populace.  Lots of flags, lots of parades, lots of honoring of veterans.

    Although we may differ on what justifies sending troops into combat, and though we may debate how a war should be fought, we can agree, I think, to be grateful for those who, whether through conscription or voluntarism, put themselves on the line for people, people like you and me, people they may never meet or know, for causes both clear and ambiguous.

    The price, however, is high.  Military cemeteries around the world testify to this amply.  It's tragic and unspeakably sad.  So many lost and broken lives.  And this does not include the even more numerous civilians who, through no fault of their own, are trapped and die in the middle of military conflict.

    Hence, memory.  It is important to remember.  To remember who has been, to remember what they did.  To remember what we have lost.

    Most of us want peace.  Peace in our families, peace in our nation, peace in the world, and peace in our hearts.  Although some wars might seem necessary, they are never absolutely good.

    As countless religions attest, we do not grow by seeking our own welfare and safety only.  Over and above it all, we are called to seek the common good and not solely our own.

    And to remember those who have enabled us to do so.

    

 

      Universally known for his highly innovative art, Salvador Dali, whose birthday falls in the month of May, has left a fascinating legacy for us to contemplate.  You may like his work, you may not.  Either way, however, Dali's work makes us think.  What if the world is as fungible as his art makes it to be?  What if our thoughts are as slippery as his work makes them appear to be?

     In short, what if existence is as surreal as Dali's art renders it?  Although we could discuss for some time the concept of reality, and although most of us realize that we determine our vision of reality through our individual perception, we can nonetheless see the wisdom of Dali's vision.  How much do we really know about what we feel and see?

     As Dali tells us, it is the fact of life's mystery that makes it singularly alluring:  it is as much darkness as it is light.  And that's the point:  we err when we suppose we can fit existence into a box.  Even if we believe in a greater presence, and even if we hold to the notion of an afterlife, we are still knocking at the door of what we don't know.

     After all, we are only human.  In the same way, however, God is only God, which is the central issue:  the fact of God's factuality ensures that while life's mystery endures, it is a mystery lived in a meaningful universe.

     And with this we find hope.

      Does evil exist?  A friend of mine does not think so.  People do bad things, yes, but they are not evil.  Moreover, she says, a cognitive and active "evil" is not roaming through the world.

     Millennia ago, Augustine observed that evil is the privation of good.  That is, when good diminishes, evil is born.  But, the prelate added, evil does not exist in palpable form.  It is simply the result of a decrease in good.
     On this, in addition to the horrific school shooting in the U.S. earlier this week, I draw your attention to the case of Ian Brady, a forthrightly unrepentant torturer and killer of several young children in Great Britain in the 1960s. 
     Brady died some years ago at the age of 79.  (His love, Myra Hindley, who assisted in some of his deeds, lives on.) Some would say that Brady was evil, through and through, that there was no good in him. Furthermore, the acts he committed, many people feel, were entirely evil as well; there was absolutely nothing good about them.
     If people are made in the image of God, though a highly tarnished image at that, however, we cannot say that Brady was entirely evil.  Above and beyond all else, he is a human in the image of his creator.  Nonetheless, he did what most of us consider to be bad and evil things.
     And that's the point.  If we determine evil on the basis of our situation--and we definitely do--how do we ultimately know what really is evil?
     The short answer is that we don't.
     Is my friend right?  Only if we are all alone in the universe.  Only if there is no God. If there is no God, however, we'll never really know, absolutely, what is evil.
     Or even that it exists at all.

     It happened again.  Another mass shooting in the United States.  At least nineteenth children are dead.  Why?  Does not anyone realize that the more guns people have, the more apt they are to use them?  Americans are the most heavily armed people on the planet.  It has more guns than people.  Yet are Americans really safer?

    Hardly.  Talk of gun control notwithstanding, I believe that America needs to look deeply at itself.  What is it about American culture, a culture that, in various manifestations, has penetrated to almost every corner of the globe, that breeds the level of fear and angst that leads to these shootings?  It's not because America has, according to many commentators, allegedly rejected God.  America is one of the most religious nations of the globe.  Besides, religious people own guns, too.  And they are more than willing to use them to defend themselves and their property.

    No, this shooting is one more expression of the continuing fracturing and misinterpretation of the fine balance between freedom and order.  Americans treasure their freedom, treasure it more, it seems, than life, each other, or even God.  And that's the problem.  Americans need to learn to trust each other with their freedom.  We cannot separate freedom from integrity and community.

    Having freedom will not set us free from ourselves.

     Have you seen "Chariots of Fire"?  Winner of the 1982 Academy Award for Best Picture, "Chariots of Fire" tells the story of two runners, Eric Liddell, a Scottish Presbyterian, preparing to join his family's Christian mission in China, and Harold Abrahams, a British Jew, son of a wealthy family who is attending the University of Oxford.  As the movie unfolds, it follows the running careers of both men, their successes and plaudits received and, eventually, how their paths converged at the 1924 Olympics.

    At the Olympics, Abrahams ran and won the 100 meter run, and Liddell, after refusing to participate in a qualifying heat for the same race because it was held on Sunday, his sabbath, later raced in and won, in world record time, the 400 meter run.  Before the race, Abrahams admitted that winning the 100 meter race would be his ultimate defining experience.  His life's point depending on him winning that race.  As he watched Liddell's joy as he ran the 400 meter, however, he was shaken:  though he had found no essential joy in his success, Liddell seemed to be experiencing precisely the opposite.  Why?

    The movie leads the audience to answer the question for itself.  I mention "Chariots" because Vangelis, as he is commonly known, the Greek born writer of its memorable soundtrack, passed away last week at the age of 79.  We all wonder about the point of our lives.  Do we live our life in quest of an ultimate experience or do we live it by acknowledging our place in a larger framework of ultimacy and meaning?

    

     Perhaps you have heard of or have seen the recently released photograph of the massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.  It's quite amazing, and not just for the photographic effect.  It's amazing because it tells us that at the heart of the massive Milky Way, the star formation which has been the fodder of countless stories, legends, and speculations, lies a point at which all tale and light ends.  Though on this planet, safely ensconced in its gravity and gravitational pull, we are free to dream and vision about what is beyond us, we dare not think of a place where this can no longer happen.  A place exceeding normal sensibility, a place not subject to form or definition.

    A point of overwhelmingness.  Maybe this black hole has done us a favor.  It demonstrates to us that for all our human ability, we may never fathom what such a place means.  We may never be able to comprehend such beyondness.

    Maybe, however, that's the point:  we're frightfully, and wonderfully, human.

     Reality is unknowable and constantly changing, the second century Indian Buddhist Nagarjuna once remarked, and to therefore try to define it, he added, is to misunderstand  it.

    Nagarjuna has a point.  How do we really know what we experience?  Though we can veer between affirming the fact of a God who enables and validates reality and the idea that because reality is entirely accidental, answering such a question is hardly worth our time, either way we may miss the larger issue.

    God or not, we move through a world and cosmos which, despite us using the best instruments of detection and analysis we have, ultimately evade any attempt to really define it.  In the end, we are using what we know to learn what we do not, using the tools we use to define to define what these tools are not equipped to understand.  We are captives of our moment, victims of our humanness.

    In a good way.  At least we know that we are looking.

     "We can only obey our own polarity," stated American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, "'Tis fine for us to speculate and elect our course, if we must accept an irresistible dictation."  So Emerson observed in "Fate," an essay he published in 1860.  Like all of us, Emerson struggled with the often frustrating balance between what we want to do with what actually happens.  Though we all make plans, though we all develop life visions, big or small, we all know that, as many have said, "Stuff happens."  We never know.

    The ancient Greeks envisioned three spinster sisters who lived in a cave far away from all human habitation.  Together, these sisters rolled out a length of thread for every human being and then, in seemingly arbitrary fashion, snipped it.  The point at which they snipped the thread marked the end of that person's life.  Sometimes the sisters rolled out the thread for some distance, say for the playwright Sophocles, who lived to be ninety.  Other times the sisters snipped the thread very soon after rolling it out, perhaps for the Spartan babies who were deemed deformed at birth and promptly discarded.  Either way, neither gods nor humans could undo the sisters's decision.

    Although most of us today do not believe in these spinster sisters, we nonetheless wrestle with what appears to be the rather arbitrary and uncontrollable nature of existence.  We all know about people who appear to have done everything they can to ensure good health, then abruptly drop dead of a heart attack, as did a 64 old master's level runner in Michigan (I learned of this from my brother) a couple of years ago.  And we are all aware of people who seem as if they will die young, then live to a ripe old age, including any number of rock musicians who, despite having abused their bodies greatly, keep going. 

    Regardless, we all must come to grips with the uncertainty of existence.  It's a delicate balance.  Even if we accord ultimate sovereignty to God rather than the simple randomness of reality, we nonetheless stand before the same issue:  we walk in profound mystery.

     I have written before about Pussy Riot, the Russian all woman punk and protest band who made itself known by staging a performance in a Russian Orthodox cathedral in 2012.  Although many Russians disliked the band's choice of venue, labelling it blasphemous, many did not disagree with the sentiments the band expressed:  the increasing tyranny of Vladimir Putin over the Russian people.

    For their deed in the cathedral, the band's leaders were arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to one to two year terms on a Siberian penal colony.  One had to leave her children at home.  When they were released, despite the continuing danger, they continued to speak out against the Russian leader.

    Earlier this week, Maria Alyokhina, one of these leaders, announced that she had safely escaped from Russia and was now in Lithuania.  She and a colleague disguised themselves as food couriers, slipping into Belarus and, subsequently, with the help of well placed international intermediaries, made their way into the Baltic state.  Having been jailed six additional times since her stint in Siberia, she decided, for her own wellbeing, it was time to leave, at least for now.

    All talk of blasphemy aside (the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church, by the way, has steadfastly supported Putin's invasion of Ukraine), I have long admired Alyokhina and her compatriots.  They are very brave women, willing to take a principled stand against what they believe to be an anti-democratic Russian leader, despite the legal consequences.

    Pussy Riot's actions raise intriguing questions.  What does one do when religion supports tyranny?  How does one reconcile the fact of a loving God with a fellow religious tradition that seems to favor death and destruction?

    I'll leave you to decide.  Pray for Alyokhina, pray for Russia.  Pray for God's favor on us all.

  

     

     Have you heard Johannes Brahms's Requiem?  Based on words from Psalm 90, Requiem is surely one of the most powerful pieces of music Brahms (whose birthday we remember this month) composed.  It is a profound reminder of our humanness, our fragility, our mortality.  "Teach us, Lord," it says, "to number our days so that we will develop a heart of wisdom."

     We are not forever on this planet.
     The Requiem also uses a line from Isaiah 40, "All flesh is grass."  How can we not agree?  Magnificent though we be, we are in truth "grass," here today, gone tomorrow:  we are so frightfully evanescent.  Who will ever know that we were born?
     Reams have been written about whether  Brahms believed in the worldview behind these words, but that's not the point.  Our lives are gifts, gifts which we have for a very short time.  If the universe is unconscious and impersonal, our lives are gifts in the darkness of a purposeless cosmos, a shout into nothingness.  If on the other hand the universe is personal, the conscious expression of a conscious God, our life is a gift of profound purpose.  Brief though it may be, its brevity happens in a wider umbra of time and destiny.  We are grass, yes, but we are grass that, even if it fades and dies, will eventually burst forth again.

     Most of us attended high school.  Most of us finished, some of us did not.  For me, high school was a highly memorable experience.  So when I traveled to California to attend my 50th (actually the 52nd but it was delayed because of Covid concerns) high school reunion recently, I was rather amazed to see where all of us had landed since we had graduated.

    Our paths ran the gambit from being a police chief to being a newspaper editor to being a professional baseball player to being an accountant to being an artist to being a newscaster to being a lawyer to being an event planner to being, for many of us, me included, teachers.  We've all had our journeys, we've all had our times.  And most of us are still standing.

    But not all of us.  I'm always shocked and saddened at the number of my classmates who have passed on . . . the list grows too quickly between each reunion.  This usually makes me think about the words of an old Hebrew prayer I shared when I eulogized at my mother's funeral, "Give permanence to the works of our hands [Lord], give permanence to the works of our hands."

    On our own, we cannot measure the import, meaning, or purpose of our lives.  We live, we do, we die.  And we're gone.  For most of us, high school is a long way in the past.  Yet because this is a purposeful universe, the things we did then resonate even today, and will continue to do so tomorrow.  Our lives never really die completely.  That is our comfort, that is our hope.

    Thank goodness for an intentionally meaningful creator.

     If you were around in 1970, perhaps you remember the explosion that rocked a section of Greenwich Village in New York City.  It was the result of some misfiring in a session of bomb making by members of the Weather Underground, the leading protest and revolutionary group in the American Sixties.  Only one person escaped the explosion:  Kathy Boudin.  She died last week at the age of 1978.

    Although I didn't work directly with Kathy, I had interactions with some of her comrades in the movement.  The times in which we were active was one of the most volatile points in American history.  Dozens of books have been written about it.  Yes, Kathy made some grave mistakes:  consider the debacle of the 1981 Brinks truck robbery in which two policemen were killed.  Until her dying day, Kathy expressed remorse for what happened.

    On the other hand, from my standpoint, despite the many shortcomings of the revolutionary movements of the Sixties, overall, the nation emerged as a wiser country.  Fractured, but wiser.  Too many of the leaders of these movements are now gone forever.  But their legacy lives on.  As practitioners of Kintsugi know, sometimes the best art--and living--is done in the aftermath of sundering and brokenness.  If the revolutions can teach us anything, it is that sometimes we need to challenge and dismantle and break to find the way forward.

    Bigger picture, this seems intrinsic to the idea of the Cross.  Immense destruction and pain, yes, but out of it unimaginable newness and joy.

 

    Sure, it's a Hallmark holiday, and sure, it's an opportunity for the retailers of the world to lure people, particularly men, into their stores and showrooms, and sure, it's exploited by clergy and politician alike, but Mother's Day, which the West remembered yesterday, remains a good day.  Whether we have good or bad memories of our mothers (or perhaps a mix), we must admit that without our mothers, we would not be here, would not have found life, would not have tasted the marvels of existence.  If our mother genuinely loved us, so much the better, for we learned early on that the world is indeed a good place, and that life is indeed an adventure worth pursuing.  For those for whom the opposite was true, I'm sorry, deeply sorry.  Life was likely not as pretty.  In fact, it may have been inordinately cruel.  And I hope and trust that as you have spun out your life, you have found healing and remedy, that you have found that even if your mother did not seem to love you, other people do.

    The sacrifices a mother makes for her children mirror the sacrifices that our creator makes for us every day, the endless effort he makes to ensure that despite the brokenness of the world, we, humanity, endure.  Good or evil, sinner or saint, God loves us all, blessing us with everything we need to flourish on this remarkable planet.  Like a mother, God never forgets those whom he made.

    I loved my mother (she died in 2010), and miss her much.  I'm so thankful God gave her to me, and me to her.  And my memories of her love makes me realize, over and over, every day, the enduring reality of God.
     

    Thanks, God, for my mother.

    A few days ago, Ramadan ended.  Its final night (Eid al-Fitr) remembers the night that, centuries ago, the prophet Mohammad is said to have received the first of the divine revelations which would eventually become the Qur'an.  It is a night in which God (Allah) visited and manifested himself to his human creation in a way, as Muslims see it, he had not done so before.  It is a night of divine unfolding, a night in which the distant and unknowable God expressed himself in ways his human creation could understand.

     Ramadan reminds us that whether we believe it or not, God speaks.  God speaks through nature, God speaks through image, and God speaks through word.  Life is the speech of God.

     How much more remarkable do I therefore find the apostle John's understanding of Word, which he articulated several centuries before Mohammad walked upon the earth.  Not only does God communicate himself through the written word (which Jew, Muslim, and Christian alike confirm), but he communicates himself by showing us, directly and visibly in the person of Jesus, who he most deeply is.
     John showed us that although as Ramadan affirms, we do well to treasure the words of God, we come to know God most fully when we see him face to face.
     And everyone can know him.

 

      Today, May 5th, is Cinco de Mayo.  Although it is not Mexican Independence Day (traditionally celebrated on September 16), it is nonetheless a day to remember:  Mexico's 1862 liberation from an oppressive French occupation.  A stronghold of economic and political might before Europeans arrived on its shores, Mexico spent several subsequent centuries toiling under the weight of various foreign nations who, unfortunately, viewed Mexico primarily as a land to be exploited for their own use.

     It's an all too familiar story:  imperialistic Westerners marginalizing and abusing the rest of the world.  Thankfully, much of this is over.  Many issues, however, remain.  Much of Mexico, as well as many of its southern neighbors, continue to look to establish their way and place in the world.  Happily, they are now free to do so.

     Though freedom can be messy and complicated, we must always remind ourselves that despite its complexities, freedom to be, whatever we become, is preferable to never finding freedom at all.  God wants all of us to be free.  He wants us to find economic freedom, he wants us to find political freedom.
     Most of all, however, as Jesus tells us in the gospel of John, God wants us to find the freedom of truth, the freedom of the truth, the truth of trusting God.