"Midnight Sky" tells the story of a scientist living alone in a research outpost in the far North who is one of the only people to survive a global catastrophe that killed most of the planet's inhabitants.  As a result of the catastrophe (whose precise nature is never fully explained), the planet's air is toxic and unbreathable.  No one will live above ground again.

    One day, however, he hears from a spaceship, Aether, on its way from Jupiter back to earth.  He tells them to go back to Jupiter's inhabitable moon.

     

    At this point, only two crew members, a man and woman, are still on the ship.  She's pregnant.  What to do?

    

    They leave to start a new world.

    

    What would you do?  Would you take a chance on a new world?  Or would you brave your way into the decimated old?

    

    Put another way, what are you most willing to trust:  what you hope in the new or what you remember from the old?  As we go into 2022, ponder this question.  Ponder your life, ponder God:  what is most worth knowing?

    Happy New Year!

    Christmas has come, and now it is gone.  People are taking their ornaments down, stores are offering their after Christmas sales, travelers are going home.  It's over for another year.

    Or is it?  If Christmas means anything, anything at all, it cannot possibly be contained in one day.  If the Creator has come, how can anything--and any of us--ever be the same?  History, and everything in it, including you and me, has irrecoverably changed.

    

    What has made has come to what it has made.
    

    Christmas reminds us that we live in a universe of meaning.  And that we could not live otherwise.  Christmas also tells us that this meaning's fullness can only be real if it is birthed in a spoken origination of space and time, a definitive genesis of all that is real and true.  It is only then that it can be.
    

    Christmas is only the beginning of what we see.

 

    Most of us have heard the "Christmas story" countless times.  Across the world for thousands of years, people have read and pondered, over and over, Luke's account of Jesus' birth.  One might almost think that there is nothing new to find in it.

    But there always is.  As I was reading it this year, I found myself struck, struck anew by the thought that the first people to hear about Messiah's birth were shepherds.  In the twenty-first century, most of us do not think much about shepherds.  In Jesus' day, however, shepherds were an integral part of the economy.

    Yet shepherds were despised, viewed as the lowest of the low, the modern day equivalent of the Roma of Europe.  Few wished to associate with them.  They spent their days--and nights--largely apart from the rest of the people, living lonely lives in the fields and hillsides of the nations.

   But the shepherds were the first to know.  They were the first to be told.  Before anyone else knew, the shepherds knew about the birth of Messiah.

    God remembered those whom the world had forgotten.

    Christmas reminds us that when all is said and done, we should understand that God, the vastness of personal transcendence, is not about greatness.  He's about humility.  Humble thankfulness for the fact of existence.

    And love.  Love for a humanity who had dismissed and fogotten about him.

    Merry Christmas!

     As many of us enjoy our Christmas season amidst our varying degrees of affluence, we must not overlook those among us who, in what for most is one of the happiest times of the year, are suffering.  In countless ways.  In particular, I am thinking about the people of Ukraine, pummeled daily by the missiles of a person deluded by a dream of lost empire.  Bereft of heat and electricity, thousands of Ukrainians are suffering horribly.

    I think also of the millions in Africa who are likewise affected by the maniacal actions of this person in Moscow.  Due to this person's perfidy, these millions cannot get sufficient grain to make bread.  A vast famine is imminent.

    Moreover, how many more millions, those who live close to the borders of Russia, who labor daily under the threat of invasion, their lives and livelihood hanging by a too slender thread, remain?  Too many.

    Closer to home, I think about one of our neighbors whose mother passed away shortly after Christmas last year, enduring his own sense of grief.  Christmas will be very different for him and his family this year.

    And then I wonder, given the innately divine goodness and purposefulness of the world, how to put it all together.  More than ever we are to be reminded  f how much we, walking as "in a riddle," need to believe in it.

    And, in the biggest picture, very little more.

      If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you may know that today, December 21, is the winter solstice.  The "shortest" day of the year.  Or as Robert Frost puts it in his "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "the darkest night."  Happily, although it may not seem like it, the winter solstice is actually the grand turning point of the year, the day and night in which time and light begin to grow.  It's the end of the light, yes, but its genesis, too.  We lose, yet we win, moving, ever so slightly, toward the greater light to come. 

    I love the winter.  I love how it masks and shrouds, I love how it engages reflection, I love how it sends us into places we would not otherwise go.  And I love how winter helps us "see" what sight can be.  As we trek through these darker days, we come to understand that light is not illumination only.  Light is rather the underlying rhythm of all creation, a continuity of divine favor, a favor that speaks in gloom as well as joy, a favor that underscores the fact of a purposeful planet:  "The Light of the world."

      

     

    Step into the darkness, treasure the light.  Enjoy the marvel of a remarkably consistent--and persistent--personal creation.

    As we remember the fourth and final Sunday of Advent and look towards its culminating event, Christmas, I think frequently about its origins.  As the gospel accounts make clear, Jesus was born in Bethlehem (literally, "house of bread"), a town that we might today call a hole in the wall, a little village largely forgotten by the rest of the world. 

    Few people cared what happened in Bethlehem.

     Nor did few people care when, after God told Joseph to take Mary and Jesus and flee the country to avoid King Herod's deadly predations, Jesus lived for a time in Egypt.  Mary and Joseph were likely viewed as just one more set of refugees, one more group of aliens moving through the flotsam of the Empire, their lives a mirror of countless migrations before:  no big deal.

    But this is precisely the point.  Though Jesus was an alien and refugee, born in obscurity and forgotten and overlooked by the rest of the world, he was the one in whom God chose to make himself known.  In Jesus, the poor and forgotten refugee, resided the greatest hope of all time.  It's the ultimate irony, the greatest surprise.  It's God's way of demonstrating to us that just when we think we have everything figured out, be it our views about immigration, aliens, refugees, or anything else, we really do not.

    But isn't that what God is all about?

 

    Hanukkah (Chanukah) has begun!  Although it is a minor holiday on the Jewish liturgical calendar, because Hanukkah usually occurs around Christmas, it has tended to generate a significant amount of attention in the Western world.  For some, it is considered the Jewish "equivalent" of Christmas.

    While this conclusion is far from the historical and theological truth, it does communicate an important point.  Although Chanukah commemorates the rededication of the Temple after it had been profaned by the Seleucid emperor Antiochus Epiphanes (he sacrificed a pig on the inner altar) in the second century B.C.E. and not the birth of Jesus, it is nonetheless a time to rejoice.

    To rejoice in lights.  To rejoice in the light and faithfulness of God, to delight in God's continuing bestowal of life and illumination to human beings.  Chanukah reminds us that whether we know it or not, each day we walk in the grace of a infinitely remarkable light, a light without which we would not be.

    The light of a personal God.

          Today is Beethoven's birthday:  his 252nd.  What can we say about Ludwig von Beethoven?  This famous portrait of him captures how many of us see him:  a brooding, brilliant composer.  Beethoven's music comes to us as a force of nature, barreling and twisting its way into our hearts, breaking our souls apart, forcing us to grapple with and contemplate the deeper forces that drive human existence.  We swoon over the viscerality of Beethoven's melodies, we wonder about the power of the humanness and universe which his songs describe.  A Romantic in the purest sense, Beethoven reminds us of other worlds and other things, of the presence and possibilities of transcendence.

    I thank God for Beethoven.  I thank Beethoven for showing us as we are, beings of mind as much as creatures of heart, dynamically personal entities who are made to step bravely into the contingencies of life, to take hold of everything that is before us.  Although we may never know exactly how Beethoven felt about a personal God, we nonetheless recognize that his music forces us to ponder the mystery that such a being--and presence--lends to existence.

     I thank God for using Beethoven to open and unfold for us glimpses of what we, life, and God, can be.

     

      Defining spirituality is difficult.  If we attribute it to a god, we miss that many unbelievers attest to having spiritual experiences.  If we assign it to a nebulous immaterial presence, we encounter the problem of making something amorphous and undefinable into something that is physically real.  And if we say that spirituality is thoroughly human, we run into the perennial dilemma of understanding how consciousness can emerge from inert matter.

    Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian surrealist painter, thought much about spirituality in regard to art.  He did so as a way of explaining how art overwhelmed what he considered to be the spiritual darkness of Marxism.  In art, Kandinsky said, we feel hints of transcendence, intimations of things we cannot easily fathom, emotional insights that we do not experience otherwise.  We look into another world, a world of purer light, real or imagined, a world that eclipses the rigid (and, to him, meaningless) materialism of the Marxist worldview.

    Kandinsky's art reflects his words aptly.  It is highly abstract and difficult to grasp easily, but that's the point:  spirituality isn't supposed to be simple.  If it were, it would be no more than another product of our material human whims.

   

    Maybe that's why the Incarnation is so true yet so befuddling.

     

    

     As I heard about the recent arrests of a group of people, led by a German prince, who had conspired to topple and German government and establish a far right state, I thought about a book published in 1934, shortly after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany.  Written by Lion Feuchtwanger, this book is titled The Oppermanns.

    The Oppermanns is a study in the horrifyingly insidiousness of the creep of anti-Semitism.  It describes the lives of a few Jewish families trying to live in the aftermath of Hitler's rise to power.  One by one, each family comes to grasp the reconditely burgeoning enormity of the anti-Semitism that is sweeping across Germany as the Nazis solidify their hold on the hearts and minds of the populace.  Yet initially, they suppose that everything will be fine.  As the days go by, however, they come to realize that, no, things will not be fine.  The State is intent on eradicating every vestige of Jewish existence.

    So it is with us today.  We are often unwilling to accept that our freedom is threatened.  Be patient, be hopeful, we tell ourselves.  Do not worry unduly.  Things will change.

    Sometimes things do change.  Other times, however, they do not.  And then what do we do?

    Isn't liberty, personal, cultural, spiritual, and otherwise, precious?

                                              More than we think.

     Perhaps you're familiar with the "heavy" metal group called Metallica.  One of the biggest bands of the Eighties and Nineties, Metallica pioneered the so-called "thrash" metal music that captivated millions of people in their time.  Incredibly fast guitar playing, pounding drums, and screaming and morbid lyrics ripple through their music.

    But it's immensely popular.  Why?  It captures the angst so many people feel, the sense of ennui and helplessness that runs through the hearts and lives of countless people around the planet, the feeling of lost control and empty future that dominate the thinking of so many human beings.

    Yet the irony of all this is that, according to a profile of James Hetfield, Metallica's lead guitarist, which I read recently, he, too, struggles to find some sense of permanency in his life and heart.  Though largely happy and immensely wealthy, Hetfield continues to search for his meaning.  He knows there's something more.

    Aren't we all?  Ask almost anyone whether he or she is happy and most of the time that person will respond positively.  Dig beneath the surface, however, and that person will acknowledge that, yes, things are good, but that more often than not, that person isn't sure why or what everything means.

    What does that say about us?

    Maybe there really is a God.

    Advent is upon us.

     "For the people who walk in darkness," wrote the prophet Isaiah, "will see a great light (Isaiah 9:1)."  Isaiah speaks of Messiah, the one who would come to illuminate an Israel darkened by disappointment, abandonment, and sin.  He speaks of the one who would open the eyes of all those who longed for a bigger picture of reality, who sought to see a greater light.  Those who believed in more.

     

    On the third Sunday of Advent, we remember this fact of light.  We remember how, like the sun exploding over a frigid mountain ridge, transcendent light, the light of enlightenment, the light of hope and meaning that shines through the cold of an often disparate existence.  It is a light that, if we embrace its rising, embrace it fervently and without reservation, will change our lives forever.
     

    Though we may struggle with the idea of eternality, though we may question the presence of God, we all long for light. We all long for hope and meaning.  We all long for a window into a richer existence.
    

    In an accidental universe, however, richness is impossible, for value and morality cannot be measured or even be.  Only in a personal cosmos, a cosmos in which an enlightening transcendence is possible, can hope and purpose be, infused with meaningful light.
    

    The light of the world.

      Is God incomprehensible?  It's an age old question, one that has occupied many, many books.  The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, long known for his deeply measured thoughts about God, asked this question constantly.  Buried at the heart of his inquiring was his notion that life itself was incomprehensible.  If we can't comprehend God, how can we expect to understand the life he has bequeathed us?  So, he asked, how do we live?

     Rilke's answer was to embrace, in living our lives, all that is beyond our control, particularly death.  To fully understand life, he suggested, we must wrap it in the specter of death.  To ignore death is to ignore the fullness of life.
     

    Though Rilke's position may sound rather morbid, it is, on the other hand, decidedly cognizant of the framework of our mortal existence.  We all will die.  If we believe there is no afterlife, however, then we may conclude that death, though it be inevitable, may not so much affirm the fullness of life as to underscore its assumed (but not provable) meaningfulness, as well as, for some, its futility.  What has it been for?  But for Rilke, as one who has placed a degree of credibility in the supernatural, to embrace death is to embrace the incomprehensible, that is, God.  In this is the fullness of life, to know that from which it has ultimately come.  Life has meaning beyond itself.

     We may agree that God is incomprehensible, but if we believe that life is incomprehensible, too, we have missed the point.  If we reject the idea of God, we are still faced with the grim reality that life is incomprehensible.  And what will we then do?

    I heard the other day the poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”  It reminded me of Canadian (and now American) singer Neil Young’s song, “When God Made Me.”  In it, Young questions God, asking him why he made people a certain way, why he made people when he knew they wouldn’t believe, and more.  Both pieces ask a very good question:  how can I believe in a God if I do not understand him?  Why must I wander in the darkness when I’m standing in the light?

    Yesterday, many across the planet remembered the fortieth anniversary of the death of John lennon.  In one of Lennon's most famous songs, "God," he says, "I just believe in me; Yoko and me.  That’s reality.”

 

    Granted, transcendence and religion do not lend themselves well to our rational perceptions.  And that’s the problem.  Ironically, it’s also the solution.  If we could explain everything with chemicals, if we never developed questions like Cohen and Young pose, if we subsumed all experience into a plastic (or computerized) box, then, yes, we would need nothing else.  But we can’t.  So we wonder.

    

    And we mourn those whom we've lost.

    

    As we therefore remember John Lennon, we also ponder the ultimate challenge:  how do we know who we are if all we know is ourselves?

       "It is a day that will live in infamy," said Franklin Roosevelt after the attack on Pearl Harbor.  For those who were alive when it happened, the attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor, whose 82nd anniversary is today, changed their world forever.  Never before had America been attacked, never before had such devastation been visited upon its shores.  Life was turned upside down.

     But isn't that the nature of existence?  It's capricious, random, and unpredictable, a series of unexpected waves in an unfathomable sea, an illusory skein on an abyss whose bottom we will never see.
     
     Yet we go on.  We grieve for those who lost their lives in this attack.  And we grieve for the thousand and thousands of additional lives that were lost redressing what happened.  The pain and carnage defy all form and sensibility. 
     
     And we continue to believe in meaning.  As we should.  No one should die unremembered, no one should die alone. No one should leave this life lost and abandoned, a forgotten and abandoned image of God, an entity without a point.

     Advent's light, however, reminds us that the horrors of existence are never the end.

  

     Since the days of Auguste Rodin, sculpture has often occupied a special place in the artistic imagination:  what is it really trying to say?  Consider the works of American sculptor Charles Ray and his unique ability to speak through his creations.  Even though it is clear that, in his "Archangel," this sculpture has little to do with communications from the divine, it nonetheless seems to reflect, or so the critics say, transformation.  Or what theologians call an apotheosis:  a transformation into God.

    Yet on the other hand, most of us wish, in some way, to be different than we are today.  We may wish for better people skills, increased insight into what life means, greater compassion for our fellow humans, deeper love for our spouses or significant other, and so forth.  Bottom line, we want to find our greater point.  Even if it is a point that only we define.

    And we will do so whether we believe in God or not.  When I consider Ray's "Archangel," I therefore ponder how much it expresses who we are.  Be it people in passage, people in stasis, or some blending of the two, we long to see who and what else we can be.

    After all, we're purposeful creatures in an intentionally purposeful universe.  Otherwise, we would have no claim to aspire to anything.

    "For the grace of God has appeared," writes the apostle Paul in the third chapter of his letter to Titus, "bringing salvation to all people" (Titus 2:11).  As we remember the second Sunday of Advent, we can think afresh about the idea that in the historical person named Jesus, we see, in flesh and blood, concrete and visible expression of God's grace, physical manifestation and display of his truest posture toward humanity.  Jesus' appearance tells us that, above all, God is love:  the grace of God.
    

    We grant each other grace every day, as we should.  Yet it is God's grace that elevates us above the too frequent senseless and confusing vagaries of the world in which we live.  It is this grace that tells us that there is hope, a hope that reality is more than what we see, a reality that frames and orders all we do.  It is a grace that tells us that whatever else we may think about God, what we ought to think most about him is this:  God is loving, God is gracious, and God is for us, for us today, for us tomorrow, for us forever. 
   

    This may leave you nonplussed.  Fair enough.  However, do we really want to believe that this world, this magnificent and bounteous and amazing world, cannot speak beyond itself?

     If you enjoy rock and roll music, particularly that of the Seventies, you may have heard the news:  Christian McVie, a longstanding member of the British band Fleetwood Mac and one of its most prolific songwriters, passed away yesterday.  She was 79.

    But her music will live on.  One of her most famous songs, enshrined in the excitement of Bill Clinton's 1992 election to the presidency of the United States, is "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow."  It's a song of optimism, a song of hope:  never cease imagining that there will be another day.

    And there will be.  Yet therein is the glory, and tragedy, of humanness.  Highly gifted, made in God's image, yet a captive of her finitude, Ms. McVie demonstrates to us that, in the big picture, though we are wonderfully designed and created, we are enormously fragile.

    Ironically, we are also made to dream of another day.  Futile though finitude may be, it can't be completely contained in a meaningful and intentionally created world.

    Rest well, Christian McVie.