In an article I read recently, some commentators compared the way in which Russian president Vladimir Putin is systematically destroying Ukraine's energy infrastructure, causing untold hardship to millions of people, to a similar act of genocide, that of the famine that Josef Stalin unleashed in Ukraine ninety years ago.  Holodomor, the Ukrainians called it, "death by hunger," an act of merciless tyranny the nation will never forget.

    Will this present suffering ever stop?  Will the Russians ever relent?  Aside from arming and encouraging the Ukrainian army, the rest of the world can do little to halt the destruction and, concomitantly, the genocide.  How, one asks, will justice ever be done?

    Other than casting this situation in what can be at times a rather opaque and bewildering metaphysical framework of meaning, I don't know.  I really don't know.  The impunity seemingly enjoyed by the Russians at the moment appears to defy all rules of moral logic, present and future:  why?  Darkness, a deep epistemological darkness, covers the land.

    Nonetheless, the world really does have a point.

    How can we suppose otherwise?

       Widely renowned for his profound and otherworldly poetry, William Blake, whose birthday we remembered last month, wrote some of the most memorable verses in the English language.  Millions of seekers, spiritual and otherwise, have used his lines (in his "Auguries of Innocence), "To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour" as they meditated on the meaning of their lives.  Millions more have employed the metaphysical fractures running through Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" to develop their vision for understanding a material reality which at the same time seems permeated with ethereal activity and semblance.  Blake's words capture the essence of the modern quest for wholeness and meaning:  even though life seems mysterious, even futile, we human beings still want to believe that it matters.  So what do we do?

    

    Particularly if, as modernity avers, there is no God.  It is the perennial dilemma of being a human being.  How do we balance what we want to think with what we feel we must believe?

    Blake pushed creativity to its limits, mining life for all he could.  He took hold of existence in full.  He understood very well that if there really is no God, we will always fail to understand the metaphysical strivings of the human being.

     Maybe there's more than we think.

    

    Believe it or not, yesterday was the first Sunday of Advent.  Christmas is upon us.  "Level every mountain," says Isaiah, "raise every plain.  Make the rough smooth, make the way straight.

    "And all flesh shall see the glory of the Lord."
    

    Isaiah is telling us to get ready, to get ready to commemorate, once more, the culmination of centuries of prediction and longing, to make ourselves ready to remember, again, that the metaphysical is more than cosmic nebulosity, that it is personal, that it is faithful, that what it--God--promises will surely come to pass.

    

    Advent is about memory, the memory of God.  It brings to mind the things of God that, in the words of Gary Schmidt and Susan Felcher, may "have," for many of us, "disappeared."
    

    Advent therefore tells that we can remember with hope.  It reminds us that we can believe in the worth of the past, the past to which, rippled with the hidden movements of God, has been pointing to this very day.  It underscores the purpose of existence.
    

    Advent says to us that what seems to have disappeared (that is, for many of us, God) hasn't disappeared at all.  Advent tells us that, in the person of Jesus, God has come, and God is here, completely and wonderfully present, available, and new.

       God opens his hands," writes the psalmist, "and satisfies the desire of every living thing" (Psalm 104).  Although we all have much for which to give thanks, perhaps the most important thing for which we can be thankful is that we can give thanks.  We can rejoice that we can be aware of who we are, that we can experience the gracious bounty of the universe, that we can know, really know, that we are beings who can create life, culture, and moral sensibility.  We can be grateful that we are here.

     Many a theologian has observed that all truth is God's truth.  If so, we can also give thanks for that which enables us to know everything else:  living and personal truth.  Absent this truth, nothing has point.  Give thanks therefore that despite the fractured state of modern spirituality and the numerous political issues that attend this end of November celebration, truth remains.  And that truth is knowable.

     

    We live in truth's materiality yet we exist in its eternality.

    Happy Thanksgiving!

     If you're a Baby Boomer, you remember.  Fifty-eight years ago yesterday, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was killed, gunned down by an assassin in Dallas, Texas.  For those of us who lived through this day, we will never forget it.  Although a number of presidents had been assassinated previously, JFK's occurred in our lifetime, in our time, in our day.  We didn't read about it in history books; we experienced it, experienced it directly and personally, in a profoundly visceral way.  Our world would never be the same.

    Setting aside the seemingly endless debates about assassination conspiracies, the relative value of JFK's presidency, or intimations that JFK might be the "AntiChrist," and looking at the bigger picture, we see one simple truth:  we live in a frighteningly capricious and unpredictable world.  Though we build our lives on concrete particulars, we construct our life meaning on universals, on hopes and dreams we cannot always see.  We are finite creatures living in a bottomless world.

    At JKF's grave in Arlington cemetery, the flame burns eternal:  only in transcendence do we see what is really true.

     "If there were no death, there would be no rebirth," the German artist Anselm Keifer, whose work is experiencing a bit of a renaissance in the West, remarked in a recent interview.  Quite.  Even if we do not center this thought in a religious perspective, we still see that Keifer's remark recognizes the embedded rhythms of the universe.  Throughout the breadth and depth of the cosmos, nothing, be it a star, lion, or human being, can be born without someone or something, somewhere and somehow, experiencing diminishment of some kind.

    For anyone familiar with the second law of thermodynamics, which tells us that the total amount of matter and energy in the universe is constant, and that therefore when energy is lost, matter gains, and vice versa, this may not be a big surprise. On the other hand, the immutable factuality of this law simply affirms Keifer's point:  unless we live in a completely static universe (and what kind of a cosmos would that be?), we will confront, every moment of every day, this cycle of death, in some fashion, and, in some similar fashion, rebirth.

    Is some process of resurrection therefore imprinted into the fabric of the cosmos?  Maybe.  Resurrection between matter and energy, however, is one thing:  from the most ancient of times, humans have believed in it.  But resurrection into an absolutely new life is quite another.

    Therein is the greatest mystery of all.

     Are you familiar with the COP 25 conference?  Held in Egypt and concluded about a week ago, the COP 25 represented a nearly unprecedented gathering of representatives of the nations of the world to discuss and, it was hoped, develop concrete solutions to issues of climate change.  As the conference drew to a close, the major point of contention appeared to be establishing the responsibility of the developed--and the most polluting--nations toward the nations whose existence the developed world's actions were threatening.

    After much debate, the decision was made that a fund would be established to aid these developing nations in dealing with the effects of climate change.  But of course this agreement was not necessarily legally binding upon the developing nations that signed it.  Should it be?  Though that's another debate, the principle that should prevail, from my viewpoint, is that those who have been given much, usually at the expense of those who have been given little, should be ready to give up what they have to aid those who have less.  That is, the wealthy should be ready to impoverish themselves, relatively speaking, to improve the lot of others.

    After all, no one has attained his or her affluence on their own, and no one has become wealthy independent of others or the planet.  No one can claim that he or she is fully "self-made."  That's delusional.

    There will always be enough to go around.  We just need to agree that there is.

    And trust in ourselves and God.

     Perhaps you've read about the efforts of thousands of Venezuelans to travel from their broken country to the United States.  Most of the attention paid to this effort has focused on the hardships the migrants encounter when navigating the "Darien Gap," a muddy, lawless, and nearly impassable section of the trail that connects North and South America.  It's a perilous passage.

    Recently, a photo appeared of a man carrying a little girl through the Gap.  But the girl is not his.  Earlier in the trek, Sarah, age 6, got separated from her mother (but was later reunited with her) and the man, taking pity on her, ferried her through the Gap.  As he did so, Sara was reported to cry out, "The glory of God, giant and sacred, he carries me in his arms."

    Such profound words, such a little human being.  Yes, God can seem overwhelming, demanding, and wholly apart.  But unless such omnipotence and might can love the human being, it's really not worth much, is it?

    Do you like haystacks?  I say this somewhat tongue in cheek to make a larger point:  this month, November, marks the birthday of French painter Claude Monet.  One of the most famous of the nineteenth century impressionists who, together, transformed the nature of art, Monet achieved perhaps his greatest fame for his series of haystack paintings.  Visit the Art Institute of Chicago and see many of them:  Monet had a haystack for every time and season.

    Yet Monet was more than haystacks.  He painted a number of pastoral scenes, deeply impressionistic reworkings of the French countryside, masterpieces of the subtley of light and color.  They shine with joy, a joy of happiness, a joy of the very essence of the sublime.

    Consider one of Monet's most well known theses:  "I wish to render what is."  In Monet's work we see an effort to take what "is" and make it as we feel it should be.  Not what we think it should be, but what we feel it should be.  We turn rationality on its head; we elevate emotion over all.

    And in so doing, we capture the heart of who we, and the world, most are.  Although we are indeed rational beings, we are also, in our deepest essence, beings of passion, creatures of viscerality, pathos, and imagination.  So do we embrace the world, so do we embrace its hiddenness, the powerfully ordered transcendence that ripples through it.

     We thank Monet for this insight, that amidst our dogged attempts to understand life rationally, perhaps we do better to grasp it as it most fully is:  the passionate renderings of a profoundly passionate creator. 

     Although it was celebrated a couple of months ago, the Jewish feast of Succoth is worth thinking about. For it remembers and acknowledges God's care:  the abundant rhythms of the harvest and the flow of the natural world. Even in the desert wilderness of the Negev, a desolate land hundreds of miles from any city or town, Yahweh demonstrated his concern for the Hebrew people.  Though he could seem frightening, God provided food and shelter for his traveling people.

    Many of us do not need to worry about where we will get our next meal.  But billions of people do.  And these same billions are heavily dependent on the inevitability of the world's rhythms; they count on the ability of the land to provide for them, year after year after year.

    And usually the land does.  Now we do not know precisely how God works in the world, nor do we know exactly how he moves in the natural processes he set into motion, if he even does.  But we do know that as long as we take care of it, the world will take care of us.

    To this, regardless of how we understand God's relationship with the world, we can certainly acknowledge that the world is not random.  It is a place of order and design.  It is a place of grace.

    We are such contingent beings.

    In our family, November is a big month for birthdays.  As you may recall, I had mine a couple of weeks ago.  This week, we celebrate my wife's.  How funny it is, that despite the seemingly endless points over which people disagree, the vast disparities and differences in income, vocation, and station in the human family, and the marvelously diverse political, cultural, and religious loyalties that mark human beings, all of us, every single one of us, has a birthday.  At some point in history, at some unique singularity in space and time, we all were born.

    It's really rather extraordinary.  For untold millennia we were not here, and then, one day, in the proverbial flash of a moment, we were.  We began.

    And how we all treasure our "boringness".  How we all love and value our lives.  And how much most of us try to hang on to them for as long as we can.  For this reason, even if we are indifferent to them, we appreciate our birthdays. They mean that we are still here.  They remind us that we still "are."

    Yet as we all know, what begins eventually ends.  And what will we do then?  I ask because if there was once a time beyond time out of which time came, there will be a time beyond time into which time will one day end.  We do not live in a vacuum, and neither does existence.

    It's difficult to picture life without death, yes, but it's even more difficult to picture life without a life from which it comes.

     Christian Nationalism?  We discussed this topic at last month's meeting of my atheist discussion group.  Although Christian Nationalism is understood in a variety of ways, in basic form, it is a conviction that, in essence, the U.S. should be a "Christian" state:  church and state are one.

    Yet this raises other issues in turn.  Prime among them is this question:  what is a "Christian" state?

    In addition, even if we can define a "Christian" state, how do we know we want one?  If we're all Christians, then I guess it wouldn't be a problem.  But not everyone in America is a Christian.  And that is not likely to change.

    In his Commedia, otherwise known as the Divine Comedy, the late medieval writer Dante Alighieri makes very clear, through some of the finest poetry the human imagination has ever produced, that, on balance, the affairs of church and state should be kept separate.  Although either is welcome to influence the other, neither should be politically or culturally supreme.  As the previous history of the Middle Ages demonstrates to us, to allow otherwise is a recipe for social disaster.

    Sure, if we are Christians, we might like for everyone else to be a Christian, too.  Muslims feel the same way about their tradition.  And we're free to talk with people about such things.  But to use the power of the state to do so?  It's a non-starter.

    Besides, a religion that uses the state to achieve its ends misses the whole point of what a religion should be:  a transcendent window into the ways of the world.

    Do you ever feel as if God is distant?  Or not there at all?  You're not the only one.  The poet Anne Sexton, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer who died in the last century, penned some profoundly constructed words in this regard.  In her "Rowing Toward God," she writes of how she is constantly rowing toward God yet how this rowing is an "awful" rowing that never seems to reach him.

    And even when she thinks that she has reached God, she finds that he is not as friendly or welcoming as she thought he might be.  Moreover, she realizes that, in the end, God holds all the cards ("five aces," as she puts it).  Her ultimate destiny is completely in his hands.

    So Sexton's is an awful rowing, an awful rowing toward a destination which, to her, deeply disappoints, a destination that, to her, is devoid of hope.  Who really am I? she wonders.  If God makes the final call, what is the point?

    Indeed.  Apart from visible exchange with God, we might all wonder the same thing.  In a world which we did not make, a world in which God seems distant, even  nonexistent, and yet holds all the cards, who and why are we?  Is there a reason beyond the moment?

    Only if, as the apostle John wrote, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us."  Only if God has made himself known.

    The good news is that, in the person of Jesus Christ, he has.

    

     "Then I looked again at all the acts of oppression which were being done under the sun.  And behold I saw the tears of the oppressed and that they had no one to comfort them; and on the side of their oppressors was power, but they had no one to comfort them" (Ecclesiastes 4:1)

     The writer makes a good point.  Although we rightly weep over at the pain and oppression that roam across the world, and often crater at the immensity of the coercive suffering that visits too many of our fellow human beings, we can realize that those who are causing this pain, though they have power, and though they have authority, as the writer notes, they really have nothing.  In truth, they are separating themselves from their humanness, ripping apart who they really are.  They are giving up their place in the human community.

    And there is no one, as the writer observes, who will invite them back.  Though Josef Stalin ruled Russia with total authority for over twenty years, his word and will unchallenged, he lived a life alone and apart.  He became, in the narrative of Aleksandr Solzhenitysn's First Circle, one whom no one could know, who could not be loved, a person who, in making victims of so many, had become a victim himself.

    This of course doesn't justify Stalin's actions, nor does it offer much comfort to those whose lives were destroyed, utterly destroyed by his rabid paranoia.  Such things will never be remedied in this present existence.  But these words do allow us to better understand the character of an oppression that, unfortunately and broadly speaking, affects, in some way, all of us.  Oppression is never right, and it is, tragically, driven by a thirst for power which will never be satisfied.  Such thirsting is, as the writer opines elsewhere in Ecclesiastes, "vanity."  It's worthless.
    

    As Lord Acton cogently put it, "Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely."  So did Stalin (and all other oppressors as well) die, corrupted absolutely by the absolute nature of their power.

    If you are at all familiar with the history of art, you are aware of Pablo Picasso, the famous Spanish painter who is perhaps best known for introducing the world to cubism.  Much has been written about Picasso, and countless museums have mounted exhibitions of his art over the years.  He has achieved a notoriety, good and bad, and fame which few artists have surpassed.  Late last month, the world remembered his birthday.

     Prior to Picasso, art, despite its numerous divergences into Impressionism and Postimpressionism and the like, continued to present its images reasonably proximate to the object it was portraying.  But cubism broke up its images, fracturing them, twisting them up and down and around, bending them in ways that they would never be in real life.

     Although some people found Picasso's forays threatening and felt as if his art was making their world less secure, others welcomed Picasso's perspective.  It was simply another way of looking at the human condition.  It underscored that a world wrestling with the ennui of modernity was looking for a way out.  Though Picasso's cubism didn't necessarily solve the problem, it more than made it plain:  we are significant people in, apart from loyalty to a divine being, an insignificant universe.
     

    When boundaries fade, we find new boundaries still.

     Unless you've been living in a cave for the last several months, you doubtless know that yesterday was Election Day in the U.S.  Although final results for some races are still pending and no one know just yet what the ultimate outcome will be, it appears that, at the very least, part of the fabric of the U.S. Congress will change, along with the governorships of several states.

    Some people are delighted with the results; others may be weeping.  Still others may be neutral or, alternatively, resigned to whatever happens.  Either way, elections force us to consider, among other things, the nature of power.  While power seems intrinsic to positions of political prominence, focusing solely on the means of power that may attend a particular office misses the point.  Fully expressed, power is not about aggrandizement but humility.  And rulers are not elected to serve themselves but those who put them in office.

    True power recognizes that undergirding this often bewildering world is an order, an order which no human being made.  An order that expresses a larger presence, a bigger reality, a fuller picture.  We did not make ourselves, nor do we live solely on our own offices:  we're contingent, woefully contingent. Hence, it is the wise ruler who grounds his/her work in humility and service.  And it is the even wiser ruler who acknowledges that, in the big picture, he/she is as evanescent as the ocean sand.

    Bottom line, all ye who aspire to political office, recognize your place.

    For it's really very, very small.

     Today, I celebrate my birthday.  And, by many standards, it's a significant one.   How so?

     The year I turned twenty-two, I was in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.  I had just emerged from four months of backpacking in the Canadian Rockies and was now traveling east, taking a long way back to the States.  Given all that was happening in the world and the majesty of the mountains in which I had been, my birthday seemed a very little mark in a very large canvas.

     

     It still is.  At the time I turned twenty-two, all I could know is that life was a promise and expectation, an inkling and anticipation, a river and ocean coming constantly together in a creation I did not really make, a creation that, regardless of how I then saw it, could only be meaningful if it spoke of transcendence.

    So it is today.  Otherwise, nearly fifty years later, although I still believe all of us to be poems, beautiful and gripping poems of existence, I now believe that unless we are poems with transcendent purpose, destiny, and conclusion, we miss the whole point.

 

     Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the famous British Romantic poet, once observed that imagination is how the self grapples with its perception.  Put another way, imagination is how we give life to what we perceive.

    Writing nearly two centuries later, modern neurobiologists conclude that imagination is the result of metaphoric processes which happen, often unconsciously, in our brains.  It is the product of our innately image making selves.
 

   Writing from another time, the early medieval theologian Augustine suggested that humans use analogy to understand the transcendent, in particular, the person of God.  Confronted with the transcendent and infinite, people tend to think in terms of analogy.  Their finite minds cannot directly grasp the nature of the infinite.  So they resort to analogy and, by extension, the metaphor making ability of their imagination.
    

    We may never "see" the transcendent in this existence.  But we certainly sense that it is, in some shape or form, "there."  We are creatures of an analogical imagination.
    

    It might therefore be easier to understand God than we think.

    

    Thanks, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for in your own way you point us to the fact of a transcendent presence without which we cannot even begin to grasp who we are.

      As we consider the fact of All Souls Day, the day after Halloween, we remember.  We remember our loved ones who are gone, we remember what has gone well, we remember what has not.  We remember existence, we remember life itself.  We ponder the import of memory.

    We also ask, how do we explain what has happened, what has been?  How do we measure the span of our existence?  How do we measure the value of our days?

    In ourselves, though we may take pride in reflecting on a life we believe to be well lived, a life that has made its mark, how do we really know?  We have only ourselves and our fellow human beings by which to assess.  We measure the unknown by what we know.  And what we know is frightfully little.  Rarely do we ever see the big picture.  Rarely do we grasp the full meaning of our years.  We're finite creatures living in a finite world, a world that, one day, according to all cosmological predictions, will be burned up by an expanding sun, gone forever, never to be seen again.

    Even if we are but dust, we affirm that dust only has value if it has a reason to be.  Absent this, though dust could well be, we have, despite everything in us, no reason to believe it should.  It all just happened.  But why?

    As we remember, as we look back, and as we also look forward, we can think, as poet Robert Browning once wrote, whatever is to come, we come face to face with the fact of existence.  Why must it be?

    Maybe there really is a God.

    In addition to October 31st being Halloween, it is also what many people call "Reformation Day."  Five hundred years ago, on the door of a church in Wittenburg, Germany, a Catholic monk named Martin Luther posted ninety-five theses describing what he believed to be serious problems with the way the Catholic church (the only Christian tradition of the time) conducted its affairs.

     Undergirding these theses was Luther's conclusion that indulgences, rites of penance, sermons, and church attendance aside, what is most important about people and God is that people find God through faith.  In this material world, we cannot see God visibly.  Yes, Jesus came, died, and rose again, but he's no longer openly present on the planet.  If we wish to know God, we must therefore believe that, on the basis of the historical veracity of the Bible and the rumblings of our inner heart, he is there.
     

    If people wish to know God, they must set aside what they see for what they cannot, and trust, simply trust, that God is there.

    And that he longs to love and communicate with human beings.
     

    If, and this is a big "if," they wish for him to.

    

    Luther's crucial insight was that despite everything people think they need to do, be it rituals, church attendance, asceticism, and the like, to find God, they really only need to do one thing:  believe.
    

    Yet sometimes that's the hardest thing.