A musician, an artist:  colorists consummate, each paints images of the world.  The one does so with his music, the other with his brushes.  Last month, in looking at the music of Robert Schumann, we noted its sense of fantasy and wonder, its blend of magic and reality, the way that its melodies transport us to new lands.  When we turn to the work of the Dutch artist Rembrandt Harenszoon van Rijin, otherwise known as Rembrandt, we stumble into an equally remarkable vista, one of profound  and telling detail infused with extraordinarily rich and vibrant color.  We often wonder whether our world is really this amazing.

      Perhaps it is.  Perhaps what Rembrandt most does for us to open our eyes so as to allow us to shed our preconceptions about existence, the often utilitarian way that we view being alive, to encourage us to let our imaginations roam to what could be and, perhaps most important, what ought to be.  Maybe Rembrandt is showing us how to look for more than we expect to see.

     To see what is really there.  To see, for instance, in the "Return of the Prodigal Son" (based on the timeless story presented in the gospel of Luke), a father's love, yes, but even more a transcendent God's love for us all.

     It's the ultimate vision of our humanness.

     Have you seen the Grand Tetons?  I've been fortunate to see them many, many times, and very privileged to have hiked and backpacked through them on multiple occasions over the years.  If ever you're in the West, take a moment to drive to Grand Teton National Park and see them.

    If and when you have that opportunity, put yourself in the mind of those intrepid explorers coming upon the Range for the first time.  Consider how formidable these mountains must have looked to those accustomed to the relative lowlands of the East and Midwest.  Think about the mental gyrations, and possibly fatigue, through which they were going as they pondered how they would cross over them.

    Today, of course, mountaineers scale the Teton's peaks hundreds of times a year.  Despite their jagged appearance, the Tetons are eminently climbable.  They're almost tame.

    Not really.  When I was backpacking through the range one July about fifteen years ago, I encountered a heavy, heavy snowpack.  Rarely had so much snow lingered into July.  But there I was, faced with the receding, albeit slowly, winter might of this awe-inspiring mountain range.  It was humbling.

    And good.  One wonderful dimension of raw nature is that it reminds us of our human fragility, our helplessness before the power of the natural world.  It cautions us against being supremely confident, being overly certain and sure.

    We confront mystery and the unknown.  And we come to know the utter and intractable finitude and, in some ways, futility, of the human being.

     Due to my recent travels, I fear I was not able to mention Bastille Day.  Bastille Day remembers the moment in July 1789 when cries for freedom from the tyranny of the French monarchy finally erupted into concerted action.  Long the symbol of the monarchy's iron grip on power, the Bastille, a dreaded prison, was a fitting place for the Revolution to begin.  And begin it did.

     Yes, the French Revolution was rather bloody, and yes, it killed many innocent people.  No argument there.  Inspired as it was by the American Revolution, however, the French Revolution signaled to the "powers that be" (as the late David Halberstram put it) that from this day forward the lower classes would no longer simply accept their lot and move through life accordingly.  From this day forward, they would seek a greater destiny.  After all, they asserted, they, too, are beings of immense marvel and potential.

     To the point, none of us is here solely to live for ourselves.  We are here for each other.  We are here to participate and share with each other in the bounty of a world created by God.

     And in this world, there is room for everyone to be whom he or she is destined to be.  Everyone.

     In the course of our recent travels in the West, my wife and I spent a few days in Yellowstone National Park.  Perhaps you have heard of the flooding that devastated the Park (and the town of Gardiner, immediately to its north) in June, obliterating, among other things, the north entrance and the road that leads from it to the Park. News reports do not do justice to the full extend of the damage these floods brought upon the Park.  It's tragic.

    It's tragic in itself, but it's also tragic because, big picture, this flooding was not a natural occurrence.  Unlike a heavy snowpack that damages a forest in spring or a lightning caused wildfire that scorches acres of mountain terrain, both organic events that arise out of the natural rhythms of the land, these floods were caused solely by human induced climate change.  As the planet, almost solely through human agency, has warmed, rainfall amounts have become distorted and snow is melting earlier.  Put together, this spells disaster for many national parks.  Yellowstone, the oldest national park (established in 1872), is no exception.

    How bright and selfish we humans are!  We suppose that the world is ours to master, exploit, and tame, when in fact it is not.  It is for us to respect and enjoy.  It is a gift, a gift of God.

    Do we really want to misuse a divine gift?

    Check this video:  https://www.nps.gov/yell/planyourvisit/flood-recovery.htm

       In my recent travels in the West, hiking through its mountains, I often had occasion to think about the author Herman Hesse.  Hesse's Siddhartha, author Hermann Hesse, a German novelist whose works were highly popular in the soul-searching years of the Sixties and Seventies, recounts the journey of the prince who would later be the Buddha.  As he tells the story, Siddhartha, a young prince of immense wealth and privilege, grew increasingly dissatisfied with his life.  Is there anything else, he wondered, to existence besides material abundance?

    So one day Siddhartha left the palace for the open road.  As he did, he encountered, in succession, an elderly man, a sick man, and a dead man.  He had never seen aging; he had never experienced sickness; he had never known of death.  These sights shattered all of the categories he had established for understanding the world.

    After many months of wandering, the prince arrives at a river, a peaceful, flowing river.  He is struck by the river's steadiness, its rhythms and quiescence, the way it seemed to flow unhindered, unbidden, ever and always free.  And always remaining the same.  

     So should be, Siddhartha concluded, life:  a single and continuous present, never beginning, and never really ending, either.  We live into existence as a river.  It's all we need.  In the river, we see truth:  everything is one.

     Some physicists insist that time itself does not exist, that life is simply a series of events with no larger purpose or connecting force between them.  Like, I guess, a river.

    However, if a river is all that life is, we'll never really know it:  once we do, we don't.  We need form, we need boundaries.  In themselves, events do not constitute meaning. 

    And we all want meaning.

    Maybe we really do need a God.

     As we look to the beginning of a new month, we perhaps think of what has been and what is to come.  Simone de Beauvoir, the famous French feminist and long time companion of the existentialist Jean Paul Sartre devoted much of a book, Force and Circumstance, to this very thing.  In one passage, she writes, "I loathe the thought of annihilating myself quite as much now as I ever did.  I think with sadness of all the books I've read, all the places I've seen, all the knowledge I've amassed and that will be no more [she then recounts a few of the remarkable things and places she has seen] . . . all of the things I've talked about, others I have left unspoken--there is no place where it will all live again."

    It's a rather sober reflection on the futility of existence, n'est pas?  But it's real.  One day, everything we know will end.  Though I'm not trying to be morbid, I am seeking to open us to thinking anew about what life means.  Because we are spiritual beings, beings fashioned by a creator God, however we wish to understand this, we ought to view and experience life as more than what we see at the moment.

    Memory is more compelling than a categorical end.

    By the way, beginning next week, I'll be traveling, again, for a few weeks.  I'll catch up in late July.  Thanks for reading!