If you're Irish or have some Irish in you, you may well be thinking about today:  St. Patrick's Day.  Patron saint of and missionary to the Irish nation, St. Patrick came into a remote and unsettled land dominated by various strands of Celtic religious thought and proceeded to teach and explain the Christian gospel.

    It seems that he did so rather successfully, too.  Despite what has historically been some very deep cultural rifts among the Irish populace, Christianity is still admired and celebrated throughout the land. God and Jesus remain very important.
          

    Amidst the revelry of the day, however, we overlook the profundity of what Patrick had to say.  Consider one of his meditations on Psalm 46:

     "Be still and know that I am God.
      Be still and know that I am.
      Be still and know.
      Be still.
      Be."

    Amidst the "beingness" and celebration, Patrick is saying, remember from whom it all comes.  

    "Be" in the fact of the creator.  Understand what life is really all about.

    By the way, I'll be traveling for the next couple of weeks.  See you in April!

 

     

    Purim!  Last week, our Jewish brethren completed their annual celebration of Purim.  Purim is a remembrance of liberation, a day to recall how God, once again, rescued the Jewish people from potential annihilation.  Like the Exodus, celebrated in about a month from today at Passover, Purim recognizes that despite all the machinery we have amassed to keep ourselves safe and secure, personally and internationally, it is ultimately transcendence that provides seminal meaning and value to our efforts.  It is only the work of larger presences that ensure purpose in our dogged attempts to keep ourselves free.

    Purim tells the story of Queen Esther, a Jewish woman chosen by the Persian king Ahasuerus, probably Xerxes I, to be his bride.  As things go on, Esther's uncle, Mordecai, learns of a plot concocted by the courtier Haman to slaughter all the Jews in the Persian Empire.  In words that have resonated with believers for centuries, he goes to his niece and advises her that, "And who knows whether you have not attained royalty for such a time as this?"  It is you, Esther, and only you who can intervene with the king to save us.
    

    And Esther does, delivering her people from potential destruction.  Although we may not always see the passage of transcendence in our earthly reality, and while we may miss its intimations in the life of the world, Purim demonstrates to us that, as much as we might like to suppose that the cosmos is void of larger purpose, purpose nevertheless prevails.  Given our technologies, we may well be able to rescue ourselves from almost any situation of peril, yet we may overlook the greater point:  in a planet stripped of transcendent meaning, what does it really matter?
    

    "For such a time as this."  We really do have value.

      March 15:  the Ides of March.  On this day in 44 B.C., Julius Caesar, a general and would-be dictator of the Roman republic, was assassinated, set upon by a group of nearly sixty people, including his supposedly best friend and associate Brutus, and stabbed to death on the floor of the Roman Senate.  It was an ugly demise.

     As the historian Plutarch tells it, some time prior to that day, Caesar was warned by a seer that he would die before March 15 ended.  In a movie made about Caesar some years ago, he was pictured seeing a crow fly overhead as he traveled to the Senate that day.  In much ancient lore, including that of Rome, a crow was considered to be a bad omen.

     In his piece "Crossroads" (popularized by the long gone band Cream), the legendary blues singer Robert Johnson paints a picture of a decision to be made, a barrier to be bridged or, to borrow from Caesar once again, a Rubicon to be crossed.  Though the story is that the song describes a pact that Johnson supposedly made with the Devil, we cannot be sure.

     The point is this:  we all have our Ides of March, we all have our crossroads.  We all face, whether we sense it beforehand or not, potentially transforming moments.  How these moments will transform us we usually do not know.  But we understand that each of our moments lingers on the cusp of change.

     But why?  We do so because we believe that the world has meaning.  We believe that what we do matters.  We believe that we are creatures of sense living in a sensory world.  In a solely material world, a world absent of transcendent presence, however, we cannot legitimately claim that what we do matters.  On what basis do we claim the fact of meaning?

     Unless this world is personal, unless this world has an ultimate origin in what is not chemical, we cannot have an ides of March.  Caesar--and all the rest of us--would not matter one whit.

     If you're a scientist, or even if you're not, you may be aware that today, March 14, is colloquially known as Pi Day.  The enduring standard for countless calculations and computations, pi, otherwise known as 3.14, is used throughout the world to affect uniformity in all matters mathematical.  Pi is one of the remarkable events of mathematical constancy:  its value never changes.  And its decimal points go on indefinitely.  One could spend a lifetime calculating the decimal valuations in Pi and never reach the end:  in this regard, pi is infinite.

    Although technically Pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, its meaning far exceeds its usefulness.  By this I mean that in a world that, at times, seems woefully random and chaotic, the planet's structures and systems are, nonetheless, amazingly constant.  Over and beyond the unpredictability of history and time, this fragile globe on which we live is, in fact, highly predictable:  the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter will always be the same.  At the same time, the value of this ratio is, put another way, infinite:  it never reaches its end.

    So there we have our planet:  achingly finite, yet astonishingly infinite, a fixed point of materiality in an infinitely bound universe.

    Maybe there really is something more than what we can visibly see.

    

    As you may know, last night was Oscar night in Hollywood.  For those who follow the Oscars, it was of course a visual feast:  the the parade of "celebrities" on the red carpet adorning the entrance to the auditorium prior to the ceremony; the interviews with numerous movie stars; the vignettes splashed on the auditorium screen, and more.  Magazines that cover "celebrities" found much fodder for their next issue.

    For the rest of us, however, the Oscars come and go as if nothing has happened.  By next year, the movies and stars which excelled this year will be forgotten, and the new winners will be forgotten promptly in the following year as well.  We wonder:  what is the point?  The movies made money, the stars made money, people were entertained, the culture grew some more furrows, and then we move on to the next thing.  It's gone as quickly as it has come.
     

    So goes much of Western culture.  It passes over and through us almost seamlessly, as if it had never happened, as if we had never experienced it at all.  Thanks to the magic of soundbites, Andy Warhol's famous fifteen minutes of fame have shrunk to less than a minute, as evanescent as they can possibly be.  We barely know they were here.

    Yet we keep moving on, keep pursuing our life dreams, perhaps thinking about one of the leading characters in the novel Perks of Being a Wallflower's wish that he not lapse into "oblivion."  We strive for presence, for presence is all, in an epistemologically empty cosmos, we have.  It's almost enough to make one wish for a God, for then, and only then, will any of the Oscars ever have any lasting point.
    

    Indeed, for then, and only then, even after every movie has run, every star has passed on, and all has turned to dust, this presence, more powerful and intense than we can presently imagine, will continue still.

      In this terribly broken world, we cannot help but wonder:  why cannot we control, why cannot we mitigate, why cannot we turn back the forces of evil?

    As we think about this week, the second week of Lent, we have opportunity to wonder about this anew.  Even if we are in a position of great authority, we cannot control everything, nor can we extinguish all evil.  Lent is about giving up, giving up our time, our pursuits, our hopes of lasting control.  We acknowledge that if we try to control everything, we will inevitably end up creating a world of us and us alone, a world without any real point.
    Lent is one of God's ways of telling us that though we are remarkable creatures, seemingly capable of directing the course of our life and that of the world, we will never control it all.  Lent reminds us that we are finite, that we have limits, that our marvelous attributes can only take us so far.  Sooner or later, we encounter a bump:  we realize that we are not so remarkable that we in ourselves can decide what we are and what existence means.  How can we?  We are only us.

    We in Lent are like the "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog," standing before the world, its joy, its pain, watching, planning, waiting, yet unable to exercise ultimate control over that which we see.
     Precisely.  To live wisely, we must give up.  We must give up who we are now to find whom we are, in truth, destined to be.

     As March continues on its merry way, I take a moment to mention that today is International Women's Day!  Moreover, March is, as a drinking mug I inherited from my mother always reminds me, Women's History Month.  It's about time.  For too long, historians tended to overlook women and the role they played in moving humanity forward.  Conditioned by the social nuances of their times, and driven, perhaps, by various levels of cultural chauvinism or myopia, most historians, traditionally male, dismissed the contributions that women have made to the human adventure.

    If we are to hold that men and women are both made in the image of God and are therefore of equal worth, we err, err seriously, when we ignore, reject, or pass over the many ways that women have shaped human history for its good.  It's tragic, really:  we are in truth forgetting the meaning of the framework, physical as well as metaphysical, in which the universe functions.  It's no accident that when the writer of Proverbs 8 described wisdom, he personified it as a woman.  He knew.  He knew that male and female are woven deeply into the created order.

    And why not?  Without women, none us would be here today.  Therefore, whether you believe in God or not, believe in the worth of every human being, male and female all.  Celebrate who we are!

     Have you experimented with Chat GPT?  It's rather amazing, yes, but at the same time rather unnerving.  Yet those who have developed it insist that Chat GPT will enhance our lives.  Maybe so, but maybe not, too.  This raises one of the thorniest issues about the technology that daily makes increasing numbers of inroads into our lives.  Even if we can do it, that is, develop AI to the level of Chat GPT, should we?  And if we should, why should we?

    The human mind is extraordinarily supple and fecund.  It is capable of astonishing things, AI being one of them.  Yet the mind really has no master.  We humans cannot tame it.  We can only use it.

    And is utility a starting point for morality?

     This past Sunday marked the first Sunday of Lent.  Repentance and circumspection dominate, as those so inclined spend ever more time pondering the exigencies within their lives, the fleeting puffs of materiality in which we have life and breath.  Life looks more remarkable than ever:  a befuddling experience, yes, but the only experience, at this point, we have.

    Given the wonder of the world, it's easy to rejoice in life without also wondering why life is, why we have it, why this existence has been given to us.  To what end do we live?
 

    This is Lent's call.  Lent invites us to look at what matters most.  Who will we really be when we leave this world:  ashes or creatures of eternity?

    March 1:  the birthday of the composer Frederic Chopin.  One of the most dazzling musicians of the Romantic Era, Chopin in his too short life (he died at the age of 39) composed a host of memorable pieces for the piano.  His works are marked by an exuberance of life that resonates with the sounds of memory and contemplation.  We listen to them today and think about how his modest Polish origins blended with his relatively cosmopolitan lifestyle (he was well acquainted with Hungarian composer Franz Liszt and the novelist George Sand) to produce melodies that speak to many parts of our souls.

    As Lent continues apace, we find special call to remember Chopin.  We remember his creativity, we remember his vision.  We remember his angst and his brief existence.  And we realize, again, that we live in a beautiful yet tragic world, that we dance on a very narrow line between being here and not, and that we, human beings, magnificent creators though we be, find our humanness most profoundly when we submit to the mystery of who we may not really believe we are.

    But what we will one day be.

    More, in a couple of days, on my trip into the desert wilderness last week.