Although Christmas has dominated the holiday news lately, we cannot overlook that the day after Christmas, yesterday, marks the first day of Kwanza.  Based on a Swahili term meaning "first fruits," Kwanza, its principles grounded in African culture, celebrates  harvest, bounty, and human diversity.

    

    Kwanza lauds the beauty and meaningfulness of this world, its harvest, its bounty, its joy of a year rightly lived.  The happiness of living in a world whose wonder speaks constantly to us, the beauty of the rhythms of the planet:  a call to treasure the immensity of existence.

     Christmas's celebration of God's presence in the world is essential, yes, but Kwanza's rejoicing in the munificence which this presence ensures is worth remembering, too.

  

    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!

   

     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.

     How do we measure faith?  In the first chapter of his account of Jesus' life and doings, the gospel writer Luke tells the story of Zacharias and Mary.  Mary is the mother of Jesus, Zacharias a priest who attends the temple in Jerusalem.  As Luke relates, both are visited by the angel Gabriel, who delivers to each of them a startling prophecy, an almost overwhelming prediction about what will soon come to pass.

    You will have a son, Gabriel tells Zacharias.  Even though your wife Elizabeth is barren, she will, in the coming year, become pregnant and give birth to a son, whom you are to name John.  And, Gabriel continues, God will make your son a great prophet, one who will announce to Israel that Messiah's coming is imminent.

    As any of us would be, Zacharias is puzzled and fearful at what he hears.  So as the text tells it, he replies, "How will I know this for certain?"  He's old, his wife is barren:  can I really believe this?

    Annoyed, Gabriel reminds Zacharias that he, Gabriel, is an emissary of God, and adds that therefore how can you, Zacharias, not be willing to believe what you hear?  He strikes Zacharias mute until John is born.

    Several months later, Gabriel visits Mary.  You, Mary, will be the mother of Messiah.  Though you are a betrothed virgin, you will become pregnant, not by your husband to be, but by the spirit of God.  Your son will be named Jesus.

    In contrast to Zacharias, Mary simply responds that, "How will this be?"  That is, she doesn't ask whether she can know this for certain, but rather, yes, I believe:  tell me how this will happen.

    As we venture into the final phases of the Advent season, we can all learn from Zacharias and Mary.  When confronted with a call to believe, do we ask how can we know for certain?  Or do we simply wonder:  how will this truth happen?

    How we respond makes all the difference.

      

      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 sometimes difficult to grasp easily, but that's his 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.

     

    

     "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 Christ (the Messiah, "the anointed one") who would enlighten and save all those who longed for him.  He speaks of the light that would come.
     

    On the third Sunday of Advent, we remember this fact of Messiah's light.  We remember how, like the rising sun exploding over a frigid mountain ridge, Messiah--Jesus--has brought us light, the light of enlightenment, the light of hope and meaning that shines through the cold of an often Munchian existence.  It is a light that, if we embrace its rising, embrace it as 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.  Only in the light, the light of transcendence wrought in Jesus, Jesus the image and person of God, will hope therefore be, infused in its necessary light.
    

    The light of the world.

     

     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.

     Beethoven opens and unfolds for us glimpses of what we, life, and God, can be.

    We err when we suppose that, "Science is not just omnicomptetent but unchallenged, the sole form of rational thinking."  Mary Midgley, a British moral philosopher who died a few years ago, appreciated science.

    As should we all.  But Midgley understood science's limitations very well.  She knew that when a society elevates science, a discipline that does not seek to know what is moral or what the world means, but simply how the world works, to a position of unquestioned rational and moral authority, it loses its sense of what is possible.  It loses its sense of what is possible for beings like us who are moral and believing animals to learn in a vast and often bewildering world.

    And in so doing, science misses the larger point.  Unless the world is regarded as something more than "what is," we have no basis to know what it means.

    There is rationality, and there is morality.  And neither can be understood without the other.

    "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 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 and grants meaning to 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?

     Last night I celebrated, with a Hasidic Jewish congregation, Hanukah.  It was a wonderful time of joy and light.  When I woke this morning, I realized that today, December 8, is the forty third anniversary of the death of former Beatle John Lennon.

    Such a  divergence, such a contrast.  In one of Lennon's most famous songs, "God," he says, "I just believe in me; Yoko and me.  That’s reality.”

     Maybe.  Granted, transcendence and religion do not lend themselves well to our rational perceptions.  On the other hand, if we could explain everything with chemicals, we would never really know why we find the insight to pose assertions like Lennon's.

    

    Rightly should we then wonder why we are who we are.  Rightly should we wonder why we can celebrate, why we can write music.  Why we choose to challenge our limits.

    

    Hanukah speaks of openness, the openness and mercy of God.  As we consider this, and as we remember the very different openness of John Lennon, we also ponder the ultimate challenge:  how do we know who we are if all we know is ourselves?

    It's no accident that we wonder about God.

  

    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.

 

      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 what we do not know about it, that is, 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 it will underscore its futility.  What has it been for?  But for Rilke, 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?

     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 promises will surely come to pass.

    

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

    Put another way, Advent tells that we can look with hope.  It reminds us that we can believe in the worth of the past, the past which, rippled with the hidden movements of God, has been pointing to this very day.  It underscores the essential hopefulness 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.

        Widely renowned for his profound and otherworldly poetry, William Blake 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.

    

    "We can be heroes, we can be heroes," sings David Bowie, "we can be heroes just for one day."  As I watched Bowie sing this song many years ago, I watched his audience, too:  everyone in the crowd seemed to be singing along with him, the entirety of their being expressing his or her wish that, for just one day, he or she could be a hero, and swim, as Bowie puts it, "like the dolphins [through the sea]."

    It is a thoroughly human dream:  we all want to be heroes, we all want to take hold of a destiny, we all want to be free, free to make the world for us, free to capture our life wonder.  And so we should.  We are made for destiny, we are made for vision.  We are made to be, as Bowie offers once more, "kings and queens."
    

    Not kings and queens in a literal sense, of course, but kings and queens of humanness, the kings and queens we were created, in God's image, to be:  kings and queens, heroes of the world, the most heroic dolphins of the sea.
    

    Seize the moment, be a hero, and swim in the ocean, but be mindful of the moment, for it is only God's heroics, his loving and selfless sacrificial work and eternal presence in Jesus, that enabled it to be.
    

    Every hero needs a home.

 

    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.

        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.  Sixty years ago tomorrow, 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.

    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.

    Ironically, two other famous personages passed away the same day.  Both were British:  Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, C.S. Lewis, writer of many works of fiction and Christian apologetics.  Both contributed much to our understanding of what is possible and, more significantly, what can be true.

    Yet even as we consider JKF's grave in Arlington cemetery, where the flame burns eternal, we realize that only in transcendence do we see what is true.

     In our family, November is a big month for birthdays.  As you may recall, I had mine a couple of weeks ago.  Last week, we celebrated 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 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 "beingness".  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.

       Although we missed All Souls Day in this blog, its point is still worth thinking about.  It's good to remember.  It's good to remember our loved ones who are gone, and it's good to remember what has gone well, as well as what has not.  And it's good to remember existence, even life itself.

    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 a book of retrospection, given to him by his children, my engineer brother recounted his experience of school.  Predictably, his favorite classes were math and science.  He had no meaningful memories of his humanities courses!

    Today, many colleges and universities, whether driven by politics, financial need, or simple pragmatism, are reducing their emphasis on the humanities and focusing their resources on programs that, they say, will enable students to earn a reasonable living in today's highly competitive (and materially obsessed) world.

    While I understand the motivation, I believe people are more than numbers and money.  Sure, we all want to live comfortably, and sure, we all want to find meaningful work.  Absolutely.  Yet if this is all that we find important, we are missing the core of who we are:  creatures of moral imagination.  And unless we are exposed to courses offering us opportunities to engage that imagination, we will fail in our efforts to construct a viable society.

    We'll lose our basis for wise and cogent deliberation, we'll miss our opportunities to understand ourselves as we deserve.  We will miss the point of existence.

    It's not about survival and fun.  It's about meaning.

    Claude Monet:  are you familiar with his work?  You may well be, particularly if you like haystacks.  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.  Indeed:  he 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 subtly 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. 

     Two days ago, Nov-ember 11, was Veterans Day in the U.S.  As most students of World War I are aware, November 11, 1918, marks the day that the armistice of World War I took effect (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month).

     Despite all that humanity may do to prevent them, wars continue to happen, and many people feel called to or are conscripted to fight in them. Unfortunately, while some survive, far too many do not.  And this doesn't count the untold numbers of civilians who perish as well.  War's tragedy is immense. 

    Veterans Day is therefore a mixed bag, a remembrance of a heartbreaking nexus of duty, honor, suffering, and pain.  When I think about Veterans Day, I therefore think about such things; I think about heartfelt conviction, I think about the slippery nature of sin.  I also think about the beauty of peace and and the joy of human compassion.  And I wonder how God, in Jesus Christ, one day intends to set all these ambiguities right. 

     It's not easy.  It's not easy to know what, amidst the forest of human ambition and emotion, God thinks.  It's not easy to know what eternity, the lens by which all things will be assessed, envisioned, and judged, means.  We live in a riddle.  Yet God is present, in peace as well as war, his love for us ever unchanged.

     And maybe, in all of our human stumblings and beautiful yet flawed rationality, that's what we most need to know.

      Ah, birthdays.  We all have them.  Last week I celebrated mine.

     Birthdays are an occasion to rejoice.  They re also an occasion to ponder.  Many years ago, when 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.  Though I still believe that life is a promise and expectation of river and ocean coming constantly together in a creation I did not really make, and that, furthermore, we--all of us--are poems, beautiful and gripping poems of existence, I also know that unless we are poems set in a framework of transcendent purpose, destiny, and conclusion, we miss the whole point.

    Happy birthday to all.

 

    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 contention 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.  He knew that 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, he therefore argued, we must believe that, the historical veracity of the Bible notwithstanding, he is there.
     

    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.

    

    Sometimes, however, that's the hardest thing.

     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.

     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 that was, oddly enough, wrestling with the ennui of modernity was looking for a way through it, a way to navigate the bewildering--and exciting--angst that it created.  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.

     Sunday marked the beginning of the festival of Diwali.  It is a holiday sacred to over a billion people around the world:  a joyous occasion.  Diwali is known as the festival of lights, the lights of color, brilliance, enlightenment, and happiness:  all that which enters into the mystery and wonder of life and the God who gives it.

    It's apt.  Unless we celebrate life in the framework of higher purpose, its lights becomes little more than momentary confluences and coalescences of dust and plasma, things in which we have found ourselves, raw and unknown, and told we must live.

    

    Enjoy life, enjoy its lights.  Be happy for it.  And rejoice in the fact of purpose, the purpose of a creator.  Light won't shine long in a forgotten universe.

     About a week ago, as I was race walking through a forest preserve near my house, I slipped on some ice and, as timing would have it, landed directly on my face.  Then followed several hours in the emergency room, out of which I emerged with two stitches and a massive dressing.  Happily, no broken bones to speak of.  The upshot was that I was rather wiped out most of last week and am only now getting back on track.

    In the interim, I missed talking about Halloween, the Reformation and, perhaps, at least to me, a big moment, my birthday.  I hope to offer some perspective on these this week.  This notwithstanding, being laid up for a few days, as most times of being sedentary do, sparked a number of thoughts and meditations on the frailty of my (and our) humanness.

    How strong we suppose ourselves to be--until we are not.  In the space of a few seconds, as energized as I supposed myself to be, I was incapacitated.  While I managed to walk the remaining two and a half miles home after I fell, I was nonetheless far from normal.  But in a way, that was fine.  In my recovery, I had unexpected moments to actually stroll through the forest, to see, for instance, the evergreens, still shining and full even as their deciduous counterparts were losing leaves with every passing second.  It made me think about ultimate stability.

    We all long for an anchor, we all long for integration.  We all seek wholeness.  On this planet, however, we will never find it, at least in permanent form.  We will forever be seeking it.  If this world is to be a place where we can at least find wholeness in temporary form, however, it must be a world with meaning.

    And it must be a meaning we cannot assign to it.  Otherwise, it's no meaning at all.

    I'm grateful for a world whose meaning I can assign but never create.

     As Halloween, the Celtic Samhain, the night that, in ancient tradition, the spirits and goblins of the inner earth escape, for one bone chilling evening, their chthonic imprisonment and roam about the planet, weaving magic, confusion, and mystery into the lives of those still living, approaches, we wonder.   Why do we think about such things?  Why do we speculate on what might lay on the "other side"?  

    Is there another reality?  Are the facile assumptions on which we have long relied rational and true?  Amidst all its silliness and frivolity, Halloween should make us think that our assumptions may not be what we imagine them to be.  That there is other, that there is more.  There is a beyond, a somethingness which we might not otherwise see.
 

    Perhaps deceased spirits are wandering, wailing about their ignominy.  Perhaps.  Yet how could spirit be without spiritual presence?

    And how could spiritual presence be without light?

     It's extraordinarily difficult to speak religion into the public square.  I was reminded of this afresh after I read several articles about the religious beliefs of Mike Johnson, the newly elected speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.  Although I have no reason to doubt Johnson's description of himself as a born again evangelical Christian, as someone who also considers himself to be a born again evangelical Christian, I do have reason to question how Johnson sees his beliefs working out in his capacity as a public figure.

    Even allowing that some of Johnson's remarks may have been intended either for political soundbites or taken out of context, I still find them troubling.  I find them troubling not only because I do not share the conclusions to which they come, but, bigger picture, I find them troubling because they seem to overlook the very fragile hold we pitiable and finite humans have on the meaning of the biblical text.

    Not one person on the planet has a monopoly, in all times and places, on the precise and absolute meaning of biblical scripture.  Hence, when I read that Johnson proclaimed that God has "ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment," using words that he is surely basing on his understanding of the absolute sovereignty of God (a truth I readily affirm), I cringe.  Has he really considered the implications of this statement?

    Johnson also states that while the Bible teaches Christian to practice "personal charity," the commandment (the Hebrew belief, one embedded deeply in the Old Testament scriptures, scriptures which Christians almost universally hold to be as true as those of the New Testament, that we must care for the ger, the "foreigner" or "stranger" re:  immigrants) "was never directed to the government."

    Really?  Do not most Americans agree that the American government is a government (to quote Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address) "to the people, by the people, and for the people" and that, rightly, understood, the government is therefore an extension of the people?  Does charity stop at our front door?

    Again, Mr. Johnson, think carefully about how you frame your beliefs.  You may end up not "Christianizing" America, as seems to be your goal, but instead will fracture it even more than it already is.  Be careful for what you wish for.

    God is a very big God.

    And no, we do not "got this."

     Yesterday I talked about Samuel Coleridge and imagination.  Today, I talk about another person who grappled with imagination:  Blaise Pascal.  A philosopher and essayist of the seventeenth century, Pascal lived nearly two hundred years after Coleridge.  His time was distinctly different from that of Coleridge.  Nonetheless, Pascal's thoughts about imagination offer us some useful insights as we grapple with the rise of what some commentators have called "expressive individualism," the notion that, divorced from any universal moral anchor, humanity is fit only to express individual identity and nothing more.

    Pascal observed that as much as we would like to suppose that we humans are creatures of rationality, we are ultimately creatures beholden to our imagination.  Our emotions, he noted, play a far greater role in how we live and make decisions than our reason.

    Pascal is on to something.  Yes, we use reason to make decisions, but no, we do not make decisions solely on the basis our reason.  After all, we are creatures of imagination.  And we cannot help it:  it's how we're made.

    So what does this mean today?  Pascal was a person of faith.  Reason, he observed, will take people to the brink of grasping God.  Absolutely.  But it is only imagination that will allow them to move themselves to a position where they are willing to believe in the existence of a being whom they cannot visibly see.

    In a personal universe, imagination is the road to ultimate understanding.

  

     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.
 

   Speaking out of 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:   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 analogical imagination.
    

    Maybe it is easier to understand God than we think.

      This week, as my siblings and I reminded each other, marks another year, another year since the passing of our father forty years ago.  Despite the span of those decades, we still miss him, and our mother as well.  Time may heal some, yes, but time will never fully overcome the scars its events imprint on our lives.  There are losses that, try as we might, we cannot completely assuage.  Although we learn to live with them, though we may even come to develop a measure of acceptance about them, we will never totally erase them from our hearts.  For always and forevermore, they are embedded in the innermost patterns of our soul.

    In 1983, as my siblings and I prepared to leave our mother to return to our lives after saying our final good-byes to Dad, one of our uncles remarked, "Everyone is going back to their lives."  True enough.  But we'd never look at our lives in the same way again.  Nor should we.  We're personal beings who respond to our lives in personal ways.  Our lives continue, yes, but take on more furrows with every passing year.
    

    And God and the universe remain, nearly inscrutable mysteries, the one never ending, the other its ultimate destiny in the first.  As are we.  And what then?
    

     Thank you, Dad.  Thank you for everything.  

    Around this time a few years ago, I wrote, using an excerpt from my book Imagining Eternity, about the moment in which I decided that Jesus Christ was undeniably divine, real, and objectively and subjectively true.  

    This week marks forty-nine years since that moment in the mountains outside of the tiny town of Jasper, Alberta, in the heart of the Canadian Rockies.  They are years that I find difficult to fathom or measure; year upon year of believing in and grappling with a person whose fullness I cannot in this life exhaustively assess; year upon year of following and listening to a being who has never made himself visibly known to me; year upon year of trusting in a invisible personal transcendence.

     So why believe?  Why live a life that, as the apostle Paul puts it, is one of faith and not one of sight?  Why be a rational being who is living a life devoted to the non-rational (but not irrational)?  Oddly, I live this life because I see that faith, believe it or not (no pun intended!), is, in light of everything that this life comprises, the most rational thing I can do.  Given the fact of my personhood; the fact of my mind and consciousness; the fact of the universes's incredibly complexity and order; the fact of the moral sense; the historicity and veracity of the Bible; and the millions and millions of people, including me, who have completely changed, in a positive way, their outlooks on themselves and existence in response to what they perceived to be a divine inbreaking or call:  I see no other way to understand existence.
    

    I believe because I cannot believe that, to borrow some words from Carl Sagan in his best selling Cosmos, the world is all that is and all that ever will be.

    Indeed:  if Sagan is correct, why does everyone long for more?

     Although he died in an asylum at the end of the nineteenth century, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche continues to speak to us today.  I recently came across a rarely published addendum to his work, Will to Power, and share it here.       

    So does Nietzsche write, "All these bold birds who fly out into the wide, widest open--it is true!  At some point they will not be able to fly any farther and . . . But who would want to conclude from this that there was no longer a vast and prodigious trajectory ahead of them.  All our great mentors and precursors have finally come to a stop  . . . and it will also happen to you and me!  Of what concern, however, is that to you and me!  Other birds will fly farther!"

    Although divining the precise intentions of Nietzsche's mind is difficult, it seems that what he is saying here is that even though we one day will "fly" no longer, others will.  The human adventure will continue.  It's a reassuring thought.  By the time he penned these words, Nietzsche, though he was the son of a Lutheran pastor, had come to reject everything about Christianity and its promise of eternal life.  It was a religion for weaklings, he averred.  Better to live bravely and die!

    Maybe so.  Our humanness is indeed wondrous and grand and, to this point, seemingly capable of sustaining progeny, seemingly capable of birthing even more "birds" to extend its experience of existence beyond the present.

    But then what?  Absent an eternal, when humanity is over, it will be as if it had never existed at all.

    Nietzsche's genius was to understand this more deeply than many of those who actually do trust in the fact of eternity.  More than most, he grasped the essence of what life would really be like without God.

     Are you familiar with the Russian band and performance art group Pussy Riot?  Pussy Riot gained international attention in February 2012 when some of its members entered a Russian Orthodox cathedral and performed songs parodying Vladimir Putin and what they considered to be his perverted relationship with church.  Although many roundly condemned Pussy Riot's actions--entering a sacred space and performing rock songs--its point was clear:  Putin, religion, and politics do not mix well.

    It's difficult to disagree.  Although three of the band's members were eventually arrested and two of them served time in labor camps in Siberia, they, and the band itself remain unrepentant.  Indeed, at the present moment the band is touring internationally, performing, continuing to speak out against Vladimir Putin and steadfastly promulgating their belief that he is twisting the Russian culture to suit his own political ambitions.  Given Putin's violent actions against political dissent, we should consider them to be extraordinarily brave women.

    We may condemn how Pussy Riot presents its message, but we should not dispute its essential underpinnings:  we cannot put God into a box of our own making.  He, and we, are more than that.