Creator of the novel Frankenstein (when she was but in her early twenties), Mary Shelley led a highly fascinating and somewhat tragic life.  Her father was the anarchist author William Godwin, her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women (and who died shortly after giving birth to Mary).  She was also married to the outspokenly atheistic poet Percy Shelley until he tragically died in the Bay of Spiza in Italy in 1822.

    Although most people believe Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein to critique the Industrial Revolution's focus on the life of the mind while overlooking the supremely important place of the heart, and she did, there might be more to the story.  More precisely, Frankenstein is a parable about the limits of humanness.  In the person of the "monster" (who turns out to be far more intelligent than the 1931 Hollywood movie makes him out to be), Shelley provides an incisive narration of the ultimate emptiness of the human condition.  She powerfully demonstrates that for all of its magnificence, humanity is finally as confused and shallow as the world over which it purports to rule.

    Dr. Frankenstein's words, in the movie, upon seeing the "monster" move its hands, exclaims, "Now I know what it feels to be God!" speaks volumes about Shelley's vision.  What would we do, really, if we were God?  Would we create the world as it is, or would we do something entirely different?  And how would we know either way?

      Can any of us bear the burden?

    "The purpose of this novel was to show how the unmanageable and invincible is often better restrained by love and pious feeling than force."  So said the revered German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his "Novelle," which he published in 1828.  The "Novelle" is considered to be Goethe's initial foray into constructing a moral narrative, that is, a narrative intended to make a moral point.  Rather than constructing a story with no real point, as many novels published in the twentieth-first century often do, Goethe used the "Novelle" to demonstrate that narrative can be used in ways that transcend plot.  Indeed, the plot is often the moral.

    This notwithstanding, in offering these lines, Goethe is suggesting that, broadly speaking, we can often deal with what seems insuperable or ummanageable in ways beyond brute force.  That it is love which, in the way that love tends to transcend our arrogant human pride and selfishness, often in a manner we cannot readily comprehend, wins the day.  Yes, wars are often won through overwhelming military force.  However, overwhelming military force cannot change the human heart.  For it is the heart in which we find who we most are:  force has no traction when piety and love confront it.  Though militarily speaking force may win, it really does not.

    For if love is not the greatest thing, and if love does not prevail, we are merely spinning our wheels in this complex game we call life.  What otherwise is the point?

      Have you seen "Thirteen Lives"?  It presents, in a very dramatic way, the 2018 rescue of twelve members of a Thai soccer team who, due to unexpected flooding, found themselves trapped in the Tham Luang Nang Non cave in the Chiang Rai Province of northern Thailand.  Directed by Ron Howard, "Thirteen Lives," among other things, underscores the immense capacity, despite all that we see in the world each day, of human beings to care for each other.  Over 5000 people from all over the globe came to help get the boys, and their coach, out of the cave.  Every boy, and the coach, survived.  (Sadly, two Thai Navy SEALS who were involved in the rescue effort, died, one to asphyxiation, the other to a blood diseases he contracted in the course of the rescue.)

    Whatever else we may say about the evil that people do, we can point to the rescue of the boys and conclude that, without doubt, people still love to love and they still love to be loved.  Moreover, the world, despite its many malfunctions, is a really good place.

    After the rescue, one of the SEALS remarked, "We are not sure if this is a miracle, or what, [but] all of the 13 Wild Boars are now out of the cave."

    Indeed.  Regardless what forces or agencies that we choose to laud for this remarkable achievement, we can all rejoice.  Life, and the God who made it, are good.

    By the way, I'll be traveling for the next week or so.  Talk to you upon my return.  Thanks for reading!

     

     Have you ever had a pet rat?  I had three when I was growing up.  They were fun pets, really: active, friendly and cuddly, and adventurous.  The downside is that they do not live very long:  three years at most.

    So it was that my daughter, who loves animals, lost her pet rat recently.  She was quite devastated:  despite appearing to be in excellent health, he only lived two and a half years.  We thought he might beat all the odds and live for five years.  Alas, it was not to be.

    Those of us who have had pets, particularly mammalian ones, can testify to the hold they exert on us and how easy it is to become attached to them.  In many cases, such pets become like members of one's family, so when they pass on, we mourn, often deeply.

    We could debate for some time about why pets attach themselves to us.  I will only say this:  such attachment serves to underscore how incredibly personal we, and our mammalian friends are.  We are personal beings who live in a personal universe.

    Out of this comes my question:  if the cosmos began with impersonal matter, how did it ever become personal?

     "As for the days of our lives, they contain seventy years, or if due to strength eighty years, yet their pride is but labor and sorrow; for soon it is gone and we fly away."

    So observed Moses, the revered leader of the nascent nation of Israel who led its people out of captivity in Egypt, where they had been enslaved for four hundred years.  These words come from Psalm 90, which tradition holds to be the only psalm Moses wrote.

    Recently, I helped a very good friend, someone I've known for over fifty years, celebrate turning seventy.  Today, at least in the West, in contrast to Moses' words, most of us view seventy as far from the end of living; indeed, if a person dies at the age of eighty, many of us wonder what happened.  My friend believes he has many more years to enjoy his existence.  And, all things being equal, he probably does.

    But Moses' words belie the quick conclusion that they reflect the thinking of his time and not our own.  His larger point is that, regardless of how many years we live, relatively speaking, the total span of our life is not long.  As one of the characters in the movie "Cloud Atlas" remarked, "Your life is but a drop in an endless sea."

    True enough.  That's why just a few verses further on in the psalm, Moses asks God to "teach us to number our days, that we may present to You [God] a heart of wisdom."

    Nonetheless, life is an amazing gift.  Use it wisely.

    Coram Deo.

     How do we adjudicate life and death medical decisions?  In 2014, one of my cousins passed away from mesothelioma, an insidious, and largely incurable, form of cancer which doesn't regularly strike women in their sixties.  It was tragic, really:  she left behind a husband, two children, and three grandchildren.

    I mention my cousin because a few months ago her husband and I were talking about the ethics of medical costs and decision making.  We agreed that it was very easy for someone to assert that the nation needs to ration, or at least curtail the disbursement of medical care to someone who is clearly dying.  However, as he put it, "I would have done anything to preserve Liz's life."  When we come face to face with death in our family, ethics and financial considerations suddenly become very fungible:  ethics, be they deontological or consequential, quickly fall prey to human emotion.  Numbers and politics cease to matter, and a living outcome becomes the only thing.

    How sad it is when we "weaponize" medical care and decision making and make them political or moral animals in service of larger, and usually irreverent, ends.  I venture to say that, in the big picture, there is a balance.  The deeper problem is understanding enough to find it.

    When we are dealing with matters of death and the deep feelings of longing and transcendence that accompany it, we will eventually find ourselves confronting something far greater:  God.

    And what will we do?

     Although I realize that war in Ukraine no longer dominates the newsfeeds in the way that it did at the moment of the Russian invasion in February of this year, this war, unfortunately, continues to create immense difficulties and hardships for the people of Ukraine.  Its human toll is singularly devastating:  thousands of lives lost, thousands of homes destroyed, hundreds of businesses gone forever.

    And for what?  In his mad obsession to restore Russian "greatness," Vladimir Putin seems willing to ruin the lives of millions of people, and not just in Ukraine.  If not for the recent agreement to allow Ukrainian grain to be shipped to other parts of the world, the Russian leader's war threatened to drag millions of people into starvation.  It's unconscionable.

    I struggle with the war's destruction, I struggle with the mind of a person bent on aggrandizing himself, and I struggle with the person and place of God.  Though for the first two of these I can find some material explanation, for the latter, I have no ready answers.  It is the dilemma that it poses that constitutes the ultimate challenge of faith.

    For it will not do to respond that, "Well, God has a plan."  For whom?

    No, it is these times that force those of us who believe in an infinite and loving God to make an extremely revolutionary stand:  will we affirm the fact of loving and transcendent purpose in worldly darkness or will we continue to believe that, in a random world, bad things happen and we will never know why?

    The choice is upon all of us.

      Tisha B'Av.  One of the most solemn days on the Jewish calendar, Tisha B'Av ("Ninth [day] of Av") (Av is the fifth month in the Jewish calendar) remembers the destruction of the Jewish temples in Jerusalem:  the first one, built by Solomon and destroyed by the Babylonians in the sixth century B.C., and the second, built after the Exile and destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D.  Commemorated yesterday, Tisha B'Av is a day (and night) of intense summer mourning; in fact, many Jews see the entire summer as a time to remember and mourn the loss of the temples.

    In the "modern" age that most of us occupy, we may not readily identify with the destruction of temples built so many centuries ago.  Yet like most buildings of note, temples are repositories of memory.  People look to temples to remind themselves of what has been, what is, what could be, and what one day will be.  They find in temples conduits and expressions of the collective consciousness that sustains them, the corporate beliefs on which their spiritual sensibilities and inclinations are grounded:  the traditions that endure.

     People also look to temples to remind themselves of the fact and presence of hope.  Although the temples of Jerusalem were destroyed, the hope, the perduring hope in the love of a good God, continues:  remembering the destruction of a temple tells people that their hope does not lie solely in the structures of this present reality.  Their hope rather rests in something, in someone whose longevity and purview exceed that of all the world's empires combined.  It is a hope, indeed, an active conviction and belief, that regardless of the turns of earthly history, there is someone who will always be greater and more, a lasting foundation of point and meaning.

     And that life is therefore ever more than what we now see.

     

    Hieronymus Bosch, the late Renaissance Dutch painter, left us a curious legacy.  On the one hand, his art seems to reflect a wish for the traditional, the staid and religiously structured medieval past that the Renaissance left behind.  On the other hand, it evinces a desire for a breakage from tradition, a severing of ties to what had long been considered to be morally valid.  His "The Garden of Earthly Delights" is a prime example.

     In a way, we're all like Bosch.  Most of us appreciate tradition, most of us value the tried and true, and few of us entertain a wish to overthrow the existing order completely.  Conversely, however, not too many of us wish to maintain things exactly as they have always been.  We wouldn't be fully human if we did.

     Consider religion.  Repeatedly, the many religions which have emerged in the course of human history have advocated a new way, a fresh way of looking at the world.  That's their appeal:  a richer perspective on existence.  We may agree or disagree with any or all of the world's religions, but we cannot deny how they have opened new and, usually positive, avenues of thinking for billions and billions of people.

    It's tricky, this humanness of ours is.  We constantly balance a compelling desire for stability with an equally compelling desire to undo it, to undo it for a greater day.  As we should.  God didn't make us to stand still.

     One book I read during my recent travels was Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. Perhaps you've read it, too.  If so, you likely have not forgotten it.  It's a harrowing portrait of cultural fervor gone too far.  America has collapsed, imploded over political excess and machination, and a tiny group of the elite is controlling the lives of thousands of people.  So controlling is this elite forces a group of fertile women, the Handmaids, to bear children for the Commanders, the rulers of the now truncated nation.  Pregnancy machines and nothing more.  Any dissent is punished severely, usually by torture and a horrible death.

    In a forward to a more recent edition of her novel, Margaret Atwood insists that she has no animus against religion.  Rather, she says, she does not wish to see religion used to exploit people.  Which, the careful reader will readily see, is what happens in Handmaid's Tale.

    Excessive devotion to any religious or political creed or, even more, person--say, a demagogue--always creates more problems than it solves.  It never turns out well, and will lead inevitably to immense social carnage and destruction.  And no nation is immune to such things:  the world of Handmaid's Tale can happen anywhere.

    We're called to love our liberty to express ourselves, but not to use this liberty to make our liberty the sole definition of what freedom can be.

     Much criticism has been leveled at American president Joe Biden regarding his recent visit and exchange with Saudi Arabia ruler Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, otherwise known as MBS.  Given that during his 2020 presidential campaign Biden vowed to make MBS an international pariah for his well established involvement in the assassination of Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi, many people accused Biden of hypocrisy.

    I suppose they have a point.  Why does the so-called leader of the free world freely consort, even seem to support, a person who apparently ordered the brutal murder of a prominent dissident?  MBS's conduct seems antithetical to everything for which an American president supposedly stands.  Moreover, the sheer immorality of a ruler who did that of which MBS is accused definitively challenges all boundaries of a reasonable political imagination.

    Unfortunately, it is America's dependence on oil that is ultimately driving Biden's actions.  With inflation and high gas prices pushing his approval rating to an all time low, Biden likely felt forced to reestablish relations with the Saudis and their oil reserved:  his presidency depended on it.  On the other hand, every one of Biden's predecessors did exactly the same thing:  they were willing to tolerate, even enable, the actions of dictatorial Saudi monarchs to ensure American access to Saudi Arabian oil.

    Other Western nations are no different, either.  In the end, it's all about the West getting what it believes it deserves:  continued affluence.

    Regardless of the compromises its people must make to get it.  While I appreciate my Western lifestyle as much as my next door neighbor, I do not believe we can pretend that it does not come without a tremendous cost, ecological, economic, and, most of all, moral.

    And who are we to think we can be the ultimate moral arbiter?

     Are the mountains our friends?  Many decades ago I was snowshoeing through the Sierra Nevada mountain range of California.  From the moment I started my backpack, snow began to fall.  It fell all through the day, and all night as well.  It fell most of the next day, too.  By the time the snow stopped falling, four feet of fresh powder blanketed the forest and surrounding peaks.  It was beautiful, but challenging.  Every landmark was obscured, every point that I might use to center my compass was impossible to see.  I had no clear idea where I was.

    It was scary.  Though I marveled at the magical way in which the snow had transformed the mountain landscape, I was also afraid.  Two days of storms had created a world beyond my control:  I didn’t know whether I’d ever make it home.  As I dug a snow cave, then crawled into it to cook my dinner that night, I reflected on my situation.  I’m so small, I thought, so very small.  And I’m at my wit’s end:  I have no idea where to turn.  Though I knew I loved these mountains dearly, I also realized that at this point they were not loving me in return.  No longer were they 

my friends.  Not at all.

But, I quickly caught myself, are these mountains really my enemies?  Maybe the deeper problem was that, like most of us, I did not like losing control.  I did not like having to admit that I had met part of the natural world which I could not conquer.  In previous years I had summitted dozens of mountains, winter, summer, and spring, always mastering obstacles, always overcoming every difficulty to reach the top.  I had always been supremely confident in my ability to find my way and succeed.

    Now I was not sure I could.  As I think about that night today, however, I realize that maybe, just maybe it was that very confidence that was my problem.  While by most standards we humans are more intelligent, capable, and moral than other animals, we err if we suppose that this means that we have a right to expect all other things to accede to our every whim and desire.  To assert otherwise is delusional.  This is a vast, vast universe, rippling with many, many events and phenomena that we may never master or understand completely.  And that is fine.

    After all, would we really want a world with no mystery or surprise, a world in which every natural system is totally predictable, a world that never exceeds our sense of awe and wonder?  Would we really want a world in which adventure could not happen, a world with no natural challenges to master or geological upheavals to overcome?  A world without any sense of the unknown?

    Unfortunately, in this life, we cannot have one without the other.  Yes, we rightly cower before expressions of nature’s potency with which we cannot deal or overcome.  And rightly do we weep when lives are lost in natural disasters.  Yet at the same time we enjoy being astonished at the glory that the natural world displays for us.  From the awe inspiring majesty of high mountains, the compelling emptiness of a distant desert, the verdant expanse of a boreal forest, or the enduring bliss of the open sea, we rejoice and delight in all that the planet has for us.  Its beauty is one of our greatest treasures.

    And it's no accident.

    In her fascinating and erudite book (Decay and Afterlife) about the meaning of ruins, author Aleksandra Prica makes a telling point about the cultural role of ruins. It is in ruins, she argues, that a society finds itself.  In ruins, a society sees both its past and its future, reminding itself that it did not emerge in an historical vacuum and that it will not end apart from the same.  A society's ruins are its successor's genesis:  one culture's demise is the birth of another.

    And life goes on.

    As I read through the book, I thought frequently of the closing scene in the original "Planet of the Apes."  Finally free to roam the planet with his newly acquired girlfriend, astronaut Charlton Heston (Taylor) comes upon what the most sinister of the apes knew all along he would see.  Half buried in the sand of the beach on which he is traveling, its once proud beacon now barely visible above the waves is the Statue of Liberty.

    A civilization that even now considers itself "exceptional" is, in the end, another ruin, gone, to use a common metaphor, the "way of all flesh":  dust for the ages.

    It's a humbling end.  Be thankful for ruins, for they are the lens through which we see ourselves as we are:  magnificent yet fragile creatures who are caught in a maelstrom of contingencies which we will never overcome.

    Even if there is a God.