In my recent travels in the West, hiking through its mountains, I often had occasion to think about the author Herman Hesse.  Hesse's Siddhartha, author Hermann Hesse, a German novelist whose works were highly popular in the soul-searching years of the Sixties and Seventies, recounts the journey of the prince who would later be the Buddha.  As he tells the story, Siddhartha, a young prince of immense wealth and privilege, grew increasingly dissatisfied with his life.  Is there anything else, he wondered, to existence besides material abundance?

    So one day Siddhartha left the palace for the open road.  As he did, he encountered, in succession, an elderly man, a sick man, and a dead man.  He had never seen aging; he had never experienced sickness; he had never known of death.  These sights shattered all of the categories he had established for understanding the world.

    After many months of wandering, the prince arrives at a river, a peaceful, flowing river.  He is struck by the river's steadiness, its rhythms and quiescence, the way it seemed to flow unhindered, unbidden, ever and always free.  And always remaining the same.  

     So should be, Siddhartha concluded, life:  a single and continuous present, never beginning, yet never really ending, either.  We live into existence as a river.  It's all we need.  In the river, we see truth:  everything is one.

     Some physicists insist that time itself does not exist, that life is simply a series of events with no larger purpose or connecting force between them.  Like, I guess, a river.

    However, if a river is all that life is, we'll never really know it:  once we do, we don't.  We need form, we need boundaries.  In themselves, events do not constitute meaning. 

    And we all want meaning.

    Maybe we really do need a God.

     Did you see the supermoon?  A rare and exciting astronomical phenomenon, a supermoon occurs when the moon, in its elliptical orbit, is at its closest to the earth.    Because of the moon's exceptional proximity to the earth, it appears to be much larger in the sky.  Hence, the moniker supermoon.

    Due to some cloud cover that night, we unfortunately missed seeing the supermoon this year.  But we happily saw many photos of it taken from around the planet.  It's always amazing to see.

    Although our most ancient ancestors did not know what caused the moon to appear so large in the sky, they certainly understood that such an occurrence was special, special in a number of ways.  While we in our so-called "enlightened" age understand why the moon appears to be larger on the night of a supermoon, we still do well to step back from our scientific commitments and marvel at the sight.

    And realize, once again, that it's a surprising world, a surprising world created by, however we wish to think of him, a surprising God.

    By the way, I'll be traveling--exploring mountains--for the next couple of weeks and will not be posting.  Thanks for reading!

     As most of the world knows, earlier this week, July 4, the United States  celebrated its Independence Day.  It commemorated the day in 1776 that the gathered colonists announced that the thirteen colonies would henceforth be free of the British crown.

    American writer Mark Twain once observed, "Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it."  As we read of the continuing crackdowns on individual rights in too many other parts of the world, including, I might add, the U.S., we have new reason to consider the wisdom of Twain's assertion.

    As many have said, freedom is only as free as we want it to be.

      July:  the month for celebrating independence.  A couple of days ago, July 1, Canada celebrated its Independence Day.  On this day in 1867, Canada officially became independent of the British crown (though still a member of the British Commonwealth), free to pursue its own destiny.  It's cause for much rejoicing.

    With good reason.  As tomorrow I think about America's independence day, I trust that all of us realize anew that freedom is an enormously precious thing.  For as countless people who have lived through times of dictatorship can attest, little do we grasp the extent of our freedom until we no longer have it.

     A number of years ago, I happened to be in Canada on July 1.  It was a day of great celebration, a day off from work, picnics and gatherings, and, at night, fireworks.

    We all celebrate our freedom in different ways.  At the core of it all, however, is our corporate and often unvoiced understanding and conviction that humanness is meeting the challenge of being choice making beings in a world over which we have little control.  We're free, yes, but we're not free to be free.