Although I will be traveling next week, camping and hiking in the deserts of Southern California, I did not want to let to pass up that next Wednesday is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent.  Ash Wednesday reminds us that, whether we believe in an afterlife or not, we are ultimately no more than dust.  When we die and pass out of this life, what remains of us will soon be no more, too, returned to the earth from which it has come.

    The illustration on this page is of Jesus during his forty days in the deserts of Israel.  After his baptism but before he began his public ministry, Jesus spend forty days and nights in the desert.  While we do not know exactly what he did in that time (other than fending off the temptations of Satan), we can be sure that he meditated and prayed.  Of what he prayed we cannot be certain, but we can probably be safe on assuming that he, like many of the Jewish prophets before him, found profound solace and insight in the desert.  Being in the desert is an apt picture of journeying through Lent.  It's a constant reminder of who we, frail and fragile humans, really are:  ashes and dust.

    Before my siblings and I scattered my mother's ashes atop her favorite mountain in the San Gabriel Mountains of California in October of 2011, we opened the box that contained "her."  All that Mom ever was had been reduced to a small pile of ashes.  All her years, all her love, all her joy, all her meaning, all her hopes and dreams now no more than a bag of ashes.  It was sobering.

    Even more sobering is that one day, every one of us will be exactly the same.  Happily, however, even as it reminds us of our mortality, Ash Wednesday also reminds us to realize that we are not dust and ashes only. We are spiritual beings, physical creatures with spiritual form and transcendent vision, created by a spiritual and eternal God.

    Much more than this we do not need to know.

      Alone they were and, like the protagonist of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, free.  Quitting their corporate jobs and leaving everything to explore and experience the world, Lauren Geoghegan and Jay Austin traveled as they wished, stepping into cultures and times far from anything they had ever known.

     And along the way, they experienced the goodness of humanity.  Everywhere Lauren and Jay went, they were overwhelmed with outpourings of compassion and hospitality.  People, they wrote, are good.

     One day, however, they encountered a group of men who had sworn allegiance to ISIS. The fairy tale quickly came to a tragic end.  Lauren and Jay are gone forever.

     Nonetheless, Lauren and Jay were not mistaken.  People are good.  Every one of us, every last one of us, is made in the image of a good God.  We are all unique and special and loved by God.  But sin has fractured God's image in us; sin has cracked the mirror.  And horribly bad things happen.

     I don't despair, however.  As the Dutch missionary Corrie ten Boom, arrested and sent to Auschwitz for sheltering Jews during the Holocaust, once said, "There is no pit that God's love is not deeper still."

     Nothing can conquer transcendent love.

     Although in many ways Valentine's Day, which we remember today, has become (or, I might say, degenerated into) a Hallmark holiday, it actually has a measure of legitimate historical origin.  Its name comes from St. Valentine, one of many martyrs in the early years of the Christian Church.  Valentine gave his life for what he believed to be the greater good of God.

    Subsequently, however, as the early Church faded into history, the name Valentine morphed into a day associated with earthly love and romance.  Nonetheless, it's still a good day.  What harm can come from thinking about love?

    

    Years ago, the Beatles sang that, "All you need is love."  In more ways than the Fab Four likely thought at the time, this is one of the truest statements in all the world.  In an impersonal universe, a beautiful but empty cosmos, love remains the greatest thing.

    

    But wait:  how can love exist in a universe without meaning and therefore no words for it?

    Maybe that's why Valentine was willing to die:  he knew that, ultimately, love cannot be without the fact of God.

 

    Did you watch the Super Bowl?  I watched the first half, Rhianna's half time show, and the closing moments of the game.  Millions of other people, however, watched the entire game, all four+ hours of it.

    I often wonder what our many animal friends think about the sight of that many people glued to their television sets for over four hours, eating, talking, laughing.  Whatever are those human beings doing?

    Simply being, I guess, human beings, magnificent, glorious, frail, intelligent, self-conscious and incomplete sentient beings availing themselves of the only existence they will ever have on this planet.

    Therein lies the puzzle.  Where else will we find such an intriguing combination of will, tenuousness, folly, and determination?  Is this God's intention or is this evolution's result?  Either way, it's nothing anyone could have predicted:  life's essence eludes us unless we understand why it is.

    And to deny that we need to know why life is, is, it seems to me, as big a crutch as an unbeliever might say about the nature of faith.  We will never escape our need to know.  So did British philosopher Iris Murdoch observe that, "It is a task to come to see the world as it is."

       From Mozart to Schubert to Mendelssohn:  these last few weeks have been filled with numerous musician birthdays.  Their contributions to music and the enriching of the human adventure have been singular and vast.  Born into a Jewish family (although his father separated himself from Judaism before Felix was born) and later baptized as a Christian, Felix Mendelssohn composed in a wide range of genres, choral to orchestral to chamber to operatic, each work distinguished by its melody, passion, and attention to detail.  Some of his most famous, and most recognizable, works include "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing," 

"Overture to a Midsummer Night's Dream," and the "Wedding March."  He was acknowledged as a prodigy early in his life, most notably by Goethe, writer of the timeless story of Faust.  People found his music uniquely captivating.

     As I think about Mendelssohn, I realize, again, the remarkable fact of music.  To form sound, to frame melody, to write song:  there is nothing quite like this  in all the cosmos.
    

    Before composers like Mendelssohn, we can therefore only stand in amazement, astonished that we can emulate, albeit in shattered form, the timeless and ageless marvel of that which empowers and expresses what is.

     Perhaps you're familiar with the ancient Japanese art of Kintsugi.  It is an art form that begins with the premise that brokenness is not something to be regretted, but as something out of which can come something even better.  In contrast to most Western thought which holds that brokenness is something to be covered up, Kintsugi says that what is broken is not to be rejected and "fixed" back to its original form, but rather to become into something that is new, originally and dynamically new.

    Key is the idea that what was broken doesn't go away; it is remade into something that has never been before.  It is remade using even better materials than those with which it was originally constructed.  What was, however, remains.  But it is completely new.

    As many of us are feeling overwhelmed with the state of the world and wondering how much longer humanity will survive on the planet, we do well to take another look at the idea of Kintsugi.  Any new world we create will necessarily reflect the one we leave behind.  It cannot do otherwise.  Yet isn't it better to take what is not working now and, using fresh ideas and vision, remake it into something new, than to completely destroy the present for a future unknown?

     Pray for the nation of Turkey.  Outside of understanding the nature of the geological processes that ripple constantly through the netherworlds of the planet (and we know quite a bit about such things) and how some regions of the world are, unfortunately, prone to seismic activity, I have no answer to the horror of the earthquake that devastated the nation earlier this week.

    Yes, this is a good world, and yes, this is a purposeful world.  And yes, this is a world grounded in a transcendent wisdom.  But this is a difficult wisdom.  It fractures as much as it heals, breaks as much as it repairs and renews.  It's there, but like everything on this earth, it is caught between the unassailable integrity of its origins and the shifting and mercurial impact of its present moments.  And incredibly heartbreaking things happen.

    And God seems gone.  Pray for relief, pray for solace, pray for strength.  Pray for international aid for this beleaguered part of the world.  Believe in the ultimacy of a wisdom that not only bends under the weight of the challenges of finitude, but which also creates beginnings beyond it.

     Job.  For those who are even remotely familiar with the Hebrew Scriptures, otherwise known as the Old Testament, the book of Job has a special place in their imagination.  Job revisits the perennial question:  if there is a God, and if this God is omnipotent and good, then why do people suffer?  How can a good and all-powerful God justify a world of pain?

    Particularly when this pain, as it is presented in Job, afflicts a person who seemingly does not deserve it.  Why does God allow Satan to visit a series of unmitigated disasters on him, his health, his wealth, and his family?  Nothing about this makes any sense.

    Therein is the puzzle of the book.  Why should we believe in God when his actions do not make sense?  Although many will respond that, well, we finite humans cannot understand the thoughts and actions of an infinite God, that is, such knowledge is not ours to know, this is little comfort when we are wallowing in emotional grief or physical pain.  Or to respond that, no matter what, God is with us, well, that's great but our grief and pain remain.

    That's why faith is so difficult.  Believing in the impossible in the face of the possible is exceedingly challenging.  Or, some might add, delusional.

    Maybe so.  Yet just as we conclude that we can live without God, we will soon realize that we cannot live without him.  Do we really want a totally hopeless universe?

        In the U.S., February is Black History Month.  In truth, one finds it rather odd that we must set aside a month to celebrate a history of a people whose lineage is considerably longer than that of the more dominant race in the world today, that is, white people.  In fact, as Nell Irvin Painter points out in her 2011 The History of White People, it is the white skin color that, from a genetic standpoint, is the more "aberrant" of human skin colors.  Moreover, whether we believe that humanity began in southern Iraq vis a vis the Garden of Eden, the savannah and gorges of central and southern Africa, or some combination of the two (which, given geological shifts many eons ago, seems likely), we must admit that our earliest ancestors were anything but lily white.

     Due to racist behavior perpetrated by other races and ethnicities in the course of human history, the virtues of Black culture have often been ignored, suppressed or, worse, abused and destroyed.  This has been at our peril.  We can only enjoy and appreciate humanity when we can explore and experience all of its manifestations.  That we realize that, over and above us all, is a God who has created us to be, in the world he has made, together.

     This month, and every month, celebrate the marvel of our amazingly manifold humanness.

     Today, Groundhog Day, is a day buried deep in ancient European belief and lore, a day of reckoning, a day that marks the approximate midway point (otherwise known as Beltane or, from a Celtic standpoint, Imbolc) between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox.  It is, as those who live through cold and snowy winters, the point at which, maybe, just maybe, things are on the upswing, and that, going forward, the earth is closer to spring than winter.

     Today, we know much more about the weather than our ancestors.  We can predict its trends far more effectively.  Most of the time, this is good.  On the other hand, with each new statistic and predictive instrument we devise and use, we put one more layer between us and our world.  We're perhaps safer and better prepared, yes, but we are not necessarily better off.  We forget what the world is like.  We overlook the beauty of the rhythms with which our planet breathes.

     And maybe we forget that we live in a reality whose meaning does not cconsist in our ability to tame and conquer it, but rather in our willingness to acknowledge its mysteries.  We learn that, finite that we be, we will never fully outwit that which we did not make.