Economy or character?  This the question that every voter faces when she walks into a voting booth.  Put another way, should we vote for a person who clearly lacks even a semblance of integrity but who promises economic revival or a person who is of high integrity yet appears to be less optimistic about his/her ability to revitalize an economy?  What is more important?

    In a poll taken after the 2016 election, the majority of evangelical voters indicated that they voted for the person whom they believed would do the most of the country's economy.  It was not about abortion, it was not about same sex marriage.  It was about money.

    As the 2024 campaign heats up, evangelical voters face a similar situation.  Should they vote according to a person's character? Or should they vote according to how much they believe this person will ensure economic health for the nation?

    For really, in the long run, it all comes down to belief.  Are we willing to believe the promises of a person without character or are we willing to believe the promises of a person who has it in spades?  And how do we judge character, anyway?

    Again, it's all about belief.  About faith.  About trusting in a presence larger than us.  Because we do not really know.

    Choose carefully.

By the way, I'll be traveling for a week or so and will not be posting.  Talk to you in June!

      

     Have you heard Johannes Brahms's Requiem?  Based on words from Psalm 90, Requiem is surely one of the most powerful pieces of music Brahms composed.  It is a profound reminder of our humanness, our fragility, our mortality.  "Teach us, Lord," it says, "to number our days so that we will develop a heart of wisdom."

     

    We are not forever on this planet.
    

    The Requiem also uses a line from Isaiah 40, "All flesh is grass."  How can we not agree?  Magnificent though we be, we are in truth "grass," here today, gone tomorrow:  we are so frightfully evanescent.  Who will ever know that we were born?
     

    Reams have been written about whether  Brahms believed in the worldview behind these words, but that's not the point.  Our lives are gifts, gifts which we have for a very short time.  If the universe is unconscious and impersonal, our lives are gifts in the darkness of a purposeless cosmos, a shout into nothingness.  If on the other hand the universe is personal, the conscious expression of a conscious God, our life is a gift of profound purpose.  Brief though it may be, its brevity happens in a wider umbra of time and destiny.  We are grass, yes, but we are grass that, even if it fades and dies, will eventually burst forth again.

      Perhaps you've heard of German musician Richard Wagner.  He's most famous for two things.  One, his "Ring" cycle opera (the most well known part of which is probably "Gotterdammerung" ("The End or the Twilight of the Gods").  Two, the influence that his music exercised, and not in a positive way, on Adolf Hitler.

     Wagner's "Ring" is a very long opera.  Only those who really like it are wiling to sit through its seventeen hour length.  The plot is involved and complicated.  And rich with Norse mythology.  It's a singularly powerful work.

    In thinking about the "Ring" as I read a study of it recently, I was reminded that, at its core, the "Ring" is about the point of life.  It says this, however, in a deliberately exasperating way.  As this study put, the "Ring" argues that although love is beautiful, it is worth nothing.

    In other words, although we should love and treasure love and life, we should also know that when they end, everything else does, too.  It's not difficult to see how this thought undergirded Naziism:  if there's no afterlife, there's no meaning.  Therefore, as British occultist Aleister Crowley once observed, whatever is met:  do whatever you wish.  You're going to die anyway.

    For some, this is simply accepting the brave futility of existence.  For others, however, if mythology is to mean anything, anything at all, existence must have a deeper underpinning.  Otherwise, why even dream of it?  

 

     "We can only obey our own polarity," stated American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, "'Tis fine for us to speculate and elect our course, if we must accept an irresistible dictation."  So Emerson observed in "Fate," an essay he published in 1860.  Like all of us, Emerson struggled with the often frustrating balance between what we want to do with what actually happens.  Though we all make plans, though we all develop life visions, big or small, we all know that, as many have said, "Stuff happens."  We never know.

    The ancient Greeks envisioned three spinster sisters who lived in a cave far away from all human habitation.  Together, these sisters rolled out a length of thread for every human being and then, in seemingly arbitrary fashion, snipped it.  The point at which they snipped the thread marked the end of that person's life.  Sometimes the sisters rolled out the thread for some distance, say for the playwright Sophocles, who lived to be ninety.  Other times the sisters snipped the thread very soon after rolling it out, perhaps for the Spartan babies who were deemed deformed at birth and promptly discarded.  Either way, neither gods nor humans could undo the sisters's decision.

    It's a delicate balance.  Even if we accord ultimate sovereignty to God rather than the simple randomness of reality, we nonetheless stand before the same issue:  we walk in profound mystery.

        Have you read The Epic of Gilgamesh?  One of humanity's oldest written stories, Gilgamesh first appeared in the writings of ancient Sumer, shortly before the close of the third millennium BCE.  While whether it deserves to be called history's first narrative tale remains a matter of scholarly debate, Gilgamesh certainly presents one of humanity's earliest attempts to come to grips with the fact of death.

     Briefly, Gilgamesh tells the story of Gilgamesh, the mighty king of Uruk who knew no rival.  But when Gilgamesh encounters Enkidu, a wild man, unruly and untamed, he quickly realizes he has met his equal.  Gilgamesh and Enkidu then agree to roam the deserts and mountains of Mesopotamia, overcoming all who dare stand up to them.

     One day, however, Enkidu develops a fever and, after some days of agony, dies. As Gilgamesh mourns his fallen friend, he says,“When I die, shall I not be like Enkidu [gone forever]?  Woe has entered my belly.  Fearing death, I roam over the steppe.” 

     Gilgamesh has encountered the limits of his mortality, and finds he can do nothing about it.  So it is that later in the story, the "ale-wife" says to him, “Gilgamesh, where do you roam?  The life you pursue you shall not find.  When the gods created mankind, death for mankind they set aside, life in their own hands retaining."

     However powerful you are, Gilgamesh, you will never undo or overcome death.

     Nor can we.  Well, some might respond, that's just how life is.  True enough.  Yet this still doesn't explain why, if we are nothing more than a collection of molecules, we tremble before the prospect of the imminent and total loss of existence.

     Maybe we really are more than a cosmic afterthought.  And maybe there really is, as the "ale-wife" suggested, a life, a uniquely uncaused life, out of which our life comes.

     Despite the way it's been exploited commercially, Mother's Day, which the West remembered yesterday, remains a good day.  Whether we have good or bad memories of our mothers (or perhaps a mix), we must admit that without our mothers, we would not be here, would not have found life, would not have tasted the marvels of existence.  If our mother genuinely loved us, so much the better, for we learned early on that the world is indeed a good place, and that life is indeed an adventure worth pursuing.  For those for whom the opposite was true, I'm sorry, deeply sorry.  Life was likely not as pretty.  In fact, it may have been inordinately cruel.  Yet I hope and trust that as you have spun out your life, you have found healing and remedy, that you have found that even if your mother did not seem to love you, other people do.

    I loved my mother (she died in 2010), and miss her very much.  I'm so thankful God gave her to me, and me to her.  And my memories of her enduring and steadfast love for me makes me realize, over and over, every day, the enduring and steadfast reality of God.

    

    Thanks, God, for my mother.

     Many years ago, I had occasion to write a short essay about emptiness.  Emptiness is an odd thing, really, a condition we cannot contemplate short of being in a position where we are experiencing it--and then we are no longer experiencing it.  Nonetheless, emptiness is a notion worth thinking about:  what does it mean to occupy, much less experience, a condition of total absence?

   

    I thought about emptiness anew when I recently read an article about the Japanese village of Kesen.  Over ten years have passed since an earthquake, followed by a tsunami, fractured and drowned this little enclave on the northern Japanese coast.  Hundreds of people died, instantly, and many more lost their homes.  The village was leveled, never to be what it once was again.

     

     Over the ensuing years, a few inhabitants of Kesen returned to try to rebuild what they once had.  Others had never left.  Despite their best efforts, however, everyone realizes that the life they once had in Kesen will never be theirs to experience again:  the emptiness will linger forever.

     

    So it is with emptiness.  Even if we try to fill it, we cannot erase it.  We cannot put together what has been broken beyond repair, to reassemble what has been eradicated beyond its ability to once again be.  And that's the point about emptiness, a point that is both its horror and virtue; it is emptiness's eternality that reminds us of its meaninglessness apart from a larger hope.

    

    Emptiness is a call to mourn.  It is also a call to hope.  It is a call to remember and find the power of memory once more.  As some of the former residents of Kesen take time this month to remember the day on which their lives were shattered and irrecoverably changed, to remember the emptiness that fell upon them, we around the world might join with them in stepping into the power of a moment that, because this is a purposeful world made by a purposeful God, it, despite all its problems, sustains us.

  

    Today, May 5th, is Cinco de Mayo.  Although it is not Mexican Independence Day (traditionally celebrated on September 16), it is nonetheless a day to remember:  Mexico's 1862 liberation from an oppressive French occupation.  A stronghold of economic and political might before Europeans arrived on its shores, Mexico spent several subsequent centuries toiling under the weight of various foreign nations who, unfortunately, viewed Mexico primarily as a land to be exploited for their own use.

     It's an all too familiar story:  imperialistic Westerners marginalizing and abusing the rest of the world. 

    Freedom can be messy and complicated.  Nonetheless, despite its complexities, freedom to be, whatever we become and, to a point, regardless of how others view it, is preferable to never finding freedom at all.

  

      Universally known for his highly innovative art, Salvador Dali has left a fascinating legacy for us to contemplate.  You may like his work, you may not.  Either way, however, Dali's work makes us think.  What if the world is as fungible as his art makes it to be?  What if our thoughts are as slippery as his work makes them appear to be?

     In short, what if existence is as surreal as Dali's art renders it?  Although we could discuss for some time the concept of reality, and although most of us realize that we determine our vision of reality through our individual perception, we can nonetheless see the wisdom of Dali's vision.  How much do we really know about what we feel and see?

     As Dali tells us, it is the fact of life's mystery that makes it singularly alluring:  it is as much darkness as it is light.  And that's the point.  We err when we suppose we can fit existence into a box.  Even if we believe in a greater presence, and even if we hold to the notion of an afterlife, we are still knocking at the door of what we don't know.  After all, we are only human.

    On the other hand, God is only God.  The of God's factuality ensures that while life's mystery endures, it is a mystery lived in a meaningful universe.

     A couple of weeks ago, I was reading about the incredible frenzy at a Taylor Swift concert for "Swiftie" merchandise and paraphernalia.  It's mind boggling.  People camping overnight to be the first in line for the latest sweatshirt, people getting into fights over who is next in line, and long, long lines that sometimes result in nothing, and more.

    Taylor Swift definitely has a grip on her fans' loyalties.  On the other hand, so do most other extremely popular musical bands.  I mention these vignettes simply to invite us to consider how we prioritize our fealties.  In this age, at least in the West, we have an astonishing array of choices on how we spend our money and time.  How do we decide?

    It's not easy.  There's nothing wrong with having affections, there's nothing wrong with liking a particular type of music.  We're only human.

    We would not be pursuing what some might call trivialities otherwise.  And therein is the rub.  We may laugh at the "Swifties," we may deem their obsession foolhardy, even dangerous, but we cannot escape that we would not be human without them.

    We're all bent by who we are.

      There is an old Swedish fable that tells the story of a family that has been told to expect, at a certain hour, the arrival of someone whose presence will change their lives forever.  As the narrative moves along, the family waits and waits, glancing often at the clock, wondering if this person will really come.

     Then the hour comes.  But the person does not appear.  After thinking about this for a few moments, the father remarks, "The hour has come, but not the man."

     So is history, humanity's as well as our own.  How many times has an opportune moment arrived in the global narrative, a moment, a kairos, that could change life forever, and no one is there to seize it?  Oddly, we will never know.  We will never know because if we did, we would have stepped into it ourselves.  We rarely discern a transforming kairos until after it has happened.  All we do is try to keep moving forward.

     For instance, did Albert Einstein know that when he published his Theory of Relativity he was inaugurating a seminal moment in science?  Did Leonardo da Vinci know that when he developed the theory of perspective in art he was changing how we do painting?  Did Abraham know when he ventured forth from Haran into Canaan that he was unleashing a torrent of political machinations that endures to this day?  Did Buddha know that his ideas would transform thinking across enormous stretches of Asia?  Did Mary Woolstonecraft (mother of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein) know that her writings on female freedom would help birth the feminist movement of the nineteenth century?

     In this time, a time in which the world seems to be in a state of constant upheaval, we do well to look for the kairos.  We do well to look for what we don't think we'll see.

"You see, the worst of it is when you admit that it can’t ever change.  When you are young you think happiness will come later on, and you hope for things; and then the same old poverty gets hold of you and you are caught up in it . . . Now I don’t wish anyone any harm, but there are times when the injustice of it makes me mad.

"And then, if only there were some truth in what the priests say, if only the poor of this world were rich in the next . . . no, when you're dead, you're dead . . . so there it is, we're done for."

    Depressing, isn't it?  These lines are from a novel by nineteenth French author Emile Zola called Germinal.  Written amidst the enormous labor upheavals in the Industrial Revolution, Germinal captures the plight of the ordinary laborer who, trapped in the grip of the owner's control over almost every aspect of his life, feels totally bereft of hope.

    Even if there is an afterlife.

    

    Physical pain and feelings of political impotence indeed make for a raw existence. And when these are compounded with the pain of thinking that even the remedy of an afterlife is not forthcoming, we are left with very few options with which to live a meaningful life.  Although Viktor Frankel in his classic Man's Search for Meaning, his analysis of the mental postures of those who survived the Nazi death camps, demonstrated that regardless of one's circumstances, people will continue to strive for hope and meaning, the absence of an afterlife notwithstanding, one still wonders:  where does it all end up?

    

    If we say that we live in a meaningless material vacuum, we have no satisfying answers to this question.  But if we say that we live in a world pervaded by supernatural thought and destiny, we do not always have satisfying answers, either.

    Herein is therefore the confounding point:  answers cannot exist without purpose, and purpose cannot exist without God.

    How much are we willing to trust?