Not as well known as Mozart, whose birthday we remembered a few days ago, Franz Schubert was nonetheless one of the most remarkable musicians in Western history.  Immensely productive and profoundly creative, Schubert wrote some of the most ethereal and haunting melodies of all time.  We listen to his music and feel transported, lifted above what is earthly and material, moved into transcendence.  Today, January 31, is Schubert's birthday.

     Schubert's music gives us pause.  If music only told us what we already know, we probably wouldn't get as much out of it as we do.  We do not need to be reminded of what is obvious and normal.  We rather need to be encouraged to ponder what is beyond the apparent, what breaks down the seen, what splits the visible apart.  We want to know what we, at the moment, cannot.

     And this is what Schubert's music does.  Descending into the darkest recesses of his soul, Schubert talks to us about the deepest mysteries of existence, how we walk in a wisp, a gossamer veil stretched between us and the other side of time.  He romanced eternity.
     

    As do we all.  Every day we balance, balance between presence and absence, perched on a thin line dividing present reality and ultimate destiny.

    

    Thanks, Franz Schubert, for showing us that life is bigger that life itself.

      It's a big day:  the birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  Around the world, people continue to be astonished by the immense creativity and wonder of this Austrian's music.  Although Mozart died, sadly, at the tender age of 35, he produced an array of musical expression that most musicologists agree is unmatched.  As a contemporary said of him, "He was like an angel sent to us for a season, only to return to heaven again."

    Confronted with Mozart's prodigious talents, we marvel.  We marvel at the nature of the human being, we marvel that we are creatures of such remarkable abilities, that we are gifted in a nearly infinite number of ways.  How could such a thing be?

    Such is something for which materialistic evolution has yet to give us a convincing answer.  Their inability reminds us that, consciousness and sentience aside, we, and life, are far more complex than an inexplicably fortunate blend of chemicals.  

    

    Maybe we really are not alone in the universe.

    Thanks, Mozart, for your music and song.  Thanks, too, for showing us that, in these all things, there is far more to reality than meets the visible eye.

       Although for some it may be overshadowed by Amadeus Wolfgang Mozart's birthday, January 27 is an important day for another, perhaps more compelling reason:  it is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  This is a day that should cause all of us to stop, think, and weep.  How does one begin to grasp the deliberately engineered deaths of over six million people?  How does one connect with a person who lost the sum of his lineage in a concentration camp?  How can we possibly comprehend being the object of such virulent hatred and racism?

    And how can we categorize those who fomented this horror?

     We can't.  And that's the point.  God aside, evil has no explanation.  It has no point, it has no plan.  It is beyond our ability to fully understand.  Many Holocaust scholars insist, and rightly so, that the Holocaust is an event that surpasses the widest and deepest boundaries of our ken and imagination.  It's beyond intelligibility.
     

    Yet it happened.  Writing to me nearly three decades ago, an American then living in Jerusalem and who had made clear to me that he did not believe in God, allowed that the Holocaust caused even him to acknowledge the reality of the metaphysical.  Why, he reasoned, would anyone with a hatred other than one rooted in the tenebrosity of a twisted notion of the metaphysical--and personal God--engage in such horror?

     Weep for our Jewish brothers and sisters, and pray for those who persecute them. And believe. At all costs, believe in the ultimacy of God.

 

  

    In the heat of existence, on the days when we are feeling particularly overwhelmed with the exigencies of being alive, we may feel as if we are like people who, as Virginia Woolf observed in her "Lives of the Obscure," are "advancing with lights in the growing gloom," heading toward obscurity, the obscurity of a life lived, a life enjoyed immensely but a life one day to end and be gone, never to return.

      Believing in more than life is hard in the morass of the material present.  We cannot see it, so why put our trust in it?

    Fair enough.  Yet as William Yeats reminds us, "And God stands winding his lonely horn, and time and the world are ever in flight."  Though time wears on and the years drag by, unyielding, sometimes burdensome, ever unchanging, something permanent remains.

    It's hard to see the end of a road at its beginning, yes, but if the world is to have any point, any point at all, there is always a road to follow.  And there is always an end.  An end rooted in the permanence of the necessarily personal ground of existence.

      Today, many Americans will take time to remember Roe v Wade, the 1973 United States Supreme Court that legalized abortion in the U.S.  Since the current Supreme Court recently overturned that decision, however, such remembrances have been taking on different hues.  For those opposed to abortion, it was to vow to carry on so as to make abortion illegal in every state.  For those who support a women's right to choose to have an abortion, it was to continue, state by state, the quest to keep the option open.

    I'd be hard pressed to find anyone who likes the idea of abortion.  I certainly don't.  Few of us are necessarily delighted to have an abortion.  On the other hand, I say to the anti-abortionists that if you wish to abolish abortion altogether, walk the talk.  Work just as hard and just as fervently to ensure that states and interested charitable organizations have the funds, and the desire, to provide pre--and post--natal care to those who need it.  If you claim to be "pro-life" (whatever this means), then seek to convince states, relevant organizations, and the federal government to work together to ensure that women who, for whatever reason, find themselves pregnant, receive proper care.  In addition, work to ensure that they and their child receives proper care AFTER birth.  Do not reject public programs that attempt to help women who find themselves in this situation, do not oppose efforts to cut off funding for the many public programs that offer aid.  Churches cannot do it all.

    Nor can individuals.

    Love the mother, love the child.  Abortion is an immensely complex issue, and we do ourselves no favor when we distill it to empty shibboleths and simplistic sloganeering.

    God is still there.  Let's listen to his love.

       As many of you may know, today the U.S. remembers the birthday of civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr.  Central to this commemoration is King's belief, a belief he shared with millions of others, that freedom, the ability to do what one chooses, when one chooses to do it, is one of humanity's greatest privileges and blessings.  We all deserve to be free.

     For this is what God wants.  He made us to be free, to free to choose, to be free to do.  To be free to live as we like.

     Freedom is wonderful, and freedom is intoxicating.  But freedom can be frightening.  We often do not know what to do with it.  We frequently do not know what its fullness really means.  We frequently miss the point.  We abuse it terribly.
     

    Maybe that's why, as John records it in chapter eight of his gospel, Jesus told his audience that, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."  True freedom is to know the truth:  the truth of the fact of God.  King knew this well, and steadfastly centered his call for freedom in the presence of God.  He knew that freedom is only meaningful if it is grounded in something bigger than itself.

     

    He knew that freedom is more than a release from physical bondage, a slip of one material experience to another. 
    

    As we remember King's birthday, we also remember that the freedom he preached is ultimately, as Mahatma Gandhi observed in his explication of satyagraha, self-discovery in truth.  We are not free in an accidental universe, a cosmos without definition; we are free in a universe made real by truth itself.

    

       Perhaps you can identify with a longing for outdoor adventure, a longing to step out of the regular and normal, a deep seated desire to break away from the staid rhythms of quotidian existence.  If so, you are decidedly not alone.

     But you might wish to be.  You might wish to be tromping through an uncharted wilderness area hundreds of miles from anyone or anything else.  You may seek the deepest unknown there is.

     

    American novelist Jack London wrote profoundly on this spirit of adventure, this thirst to explore, to topple boundaries, to abandon everything in quest of inner fulfillment.  His Call of the Wild captures this urge perfectly:  the lonely yet determined human pitted against the forces of the distant and remote wilderness, the former seeking meaning, the latter inundating him with it.

     There are many wilds, there are many unknowns.  Although London focused on the wilds of the material world, it's not difficult to see that in seeking the wilds of this world, we cannot help but find the wilds of another.  Finite creatures wandering in a nearly infinite cosmos, we humans need the wilds of transcendent mystery to really see who we are.

     About a year before the Great War, a team of twenty-five men set sail on the HMCS Karluk to explore the islands of the Canadian Arctic, the vast stretch of ice and ocean between the MacKenzie River and the North Pole.  It was a harrowing voyage.  Midway through the trip, as winter's onset occurred far too quickly, the Karluk became trapped in the ice, eventually sinking to the bottom of the sea.  Happily, the crew was able to retrieve quite a bit of equipment, food, and supplies, sufficient to support them for the winter they realized they would now be forced to spend on the ice.

    Almost immediately, however, things began to go wrong.  Unstable ice, several lost search parties, an arduous and exhausting journey to Wrangel Island, the nearest land, and even more trouble getting from Wrangel Island to the shore of Siberia and, eventually, Alaska, proved devastating.  By the time, Captain Robert Bartlett was able to arrange rescue the next spring, half the crew had died.  The expedition returned a semblance of its original self.

    Throughout, however, the men aboard the ship never lost hope in their mission--and themselves.  Their perseverance is potent testament to the resilience of the human spirit in some highly abject circumstances.  Reading the account reminded me of the travels and travails of Ernest Shackleton at the opposite end of the world (see the story of the Endurance).

    Morally, we humans can be incredibly broken beings.  Physically and emotionally, however, though we are far from perfect, we have an astonishing capacity to sustain ourselves.

    Maybe the world really has a point.  Maybe it really has meaning.  Otherwise, why would anyone bother?

    "Not all who wander," observed Lord of the Rings author J. R. R. Tolkien, "are lost."  How true this is.  To wander is to contemplate and meditate, expand and explore, to travel without a clear destination.  It is to be open to what comes our way.  And to grow and learn from it.  When we wander, we let go.  We let go of our plans and intentions, set aside our immediate ambitions.  We step away from the past, cast aside the future.  We don't plan, we don't frame.  We don't set a time.

    When we are lost, however, we are looking for something specific, a place or destination where we had hoped we would be.  We're missing something.  And we do not always know what it is. 

    But the nuances of being lost are complex.  Some twenty years ago, James was a prisoner on death row in the state of Texas.  In an interview he gave a week before he was to be executed for his crime, James acknowledged that all his life he had been lost.  He had never thought about what his life meant, never thought about where it began or where it was going.  He only did what was immediately before him.

    At some point in his imprisonment, however, James embraced Christianity.  He gave his heart to Jesus.  Everything changed.  He no longer felt lost.  In fact, he felt "found."  As a result, as he put it in the interview, "All my life, I never had a home.  Now [after he was executed] I'm going to have one."

    Wandering is essential.  Ironically, so is being lost.  For sometimes it is when we are the most lost that we are the most found.

    

    A king.  As they studied the Zoroastrian and biblical prophecies about a coming king, the magic of ancient Persia realized this king would be a special king.  In him, the magi saw, God would really come to earth.  Small wonder that they made the arduous journey over the Zagros Mountains, across the arid expanse of Arabia, and onto the international trade routes that coursed through the Levant, to enter Palestine.  Who would have imagined such a thing?

    Epiphany demonstrates that only when we allow inklings of the divine into our hearts will we understand what the world is really all about.

    

    God is there, yes, but we are fallen human beings.

    Physical sight is only the beginning.

    

    Although the Feast of the Innocents, the Christian Church's remembrance of the Roman king Herod's first century order to slaughter all the newborns in Bethlehem so as to eliminate the newly born Messiah, occurred last week, its modern day parallels are all too clear.

    

    If we substitute the name of Vladimir Putin for Herod, we see that then or now the motivation for killing innocents is the same:  a craven desire to hang on to one's power at all costs.    

    Not wishing to take any chances that Messiah would live to bring his message of salvation (meaning, literally, "rescue") to Israel, Herod decreed that all children in Bethlehem two years and under be killed.  It was a thoroughly brutal act, a despicable act of a tyrant so desperate to retain his throne that he was willing to eviscerate an entire generation of children.
    

    So it is in the mind of this modern day "king":  power is all.

    Pray for the children of Ukraine.

    Though it's often very difficult to reconcile the evil machinations of a human heart with the fact of a loving and omnipotent God, we must try.  Unless we do, we will continue to wrestle struggle with a dark, dark unknown:  a cold, cold world  without any point.

    God can be confounding, yes, but a pointless world is even more.

      Have you seen Edward Munch's The Scream?  A piece that has puzzled and cajoled people for decades, The Scream seems to exemplify the alienation that so often characterizes the inhabitants of the West.  Overwhelmed by a world that offers them everything but meaning, countless people in the so-called developed world cry out for help, some help in making sense of what seems to be a pointless reality.

     Affluence reigns, yes, but without any foundation other than the assumption that life is worth it, and this only because those who decide this have nowhere else to go.  If the world is a closed system and we are therefore born only to die, then life, however wonderful it may be, ends before it begins.  So we scream:  why must this be?

     As we look into the New Year, as we continue to do what we can to live a good life, we realize that the world is not closed, that it is in fact entirely transparent and open, open and streaming into a web of reality vastly larger than we can imagine.  Life is meaningful because it is grounded in a transcendence that has spoken, a transcendence that has made itself known.  Life is more than itself.  And we are more than who we are.  Love is present, ascendant and true.

     

    Hence, in contrast to Munch's bleak perspective, we scream not why must this be, but rather how can such wonder be?

    Enjoy the second day of 2023!