Creator of the novel Frankenstein (when she was but in her early twenties), Mary Shelley led a highly fascinating and somewhat tragic life.  Her father was the anarchist author William Godwin, her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women (and who died shortly after giving birth to Mary).  She was also married to the outspokenly atheistic poet Percy Shelley until he tragically died in the Bay of Spiza in Italy in 1822.

    Although most people believe Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein to critique the Industrial Revolution's focus on the life of the mind while overlooking the supremely important place of the heart, and she did, there might be more to the story.  More precisely, Frankenstein is a parable about the limits of humanness.  In the person of the "monster" (who turns out to be far more intelligent than the 1931 Hollywood movie makes him out to be), Shelley provides an incisive narration of the ultimate emptiness of the human condition.  She powerfully demonstrates that for all of its magnificence, humanity is finally as confused and shallow as the world over which it purports to rule.

    Dr. Frankenstein's words, in the movie, upon seeing the "monster" move its hands, exclaims, "Now I know what it feels to be God!" speaks volumes about Shelley's vision.  What would we do, really, if we were God?  Would we create the world as it is, or would we do something entirely different?  And how would we know either way?

      Can any of us bear the burden?

    By the way, I'll be backpacking in the American West into next week.  Thanks for reading.  Catch you upon my return.

     Genius or monster?  This is the question that many people asked upon reading Francoise Gilot's My Life with Picasso.  A woman with whom Picasso lived ten years and with whom he had two children (both of whom are still alive), Gilot writes vividly and insightfully about Picasso's extraordinary artistic genius.  She presents remarkable pictures of his creative processes.

    At the same time, Gilot writes, with equal insight and candor, of Picasso's arrogance and abusive ways.  It's not always a pretty picture.  Such a dichotomy causes us to wonder, again, at the notion of genius in the human being.  Why, we ask, must such amazing ability be paired with such jarring personal disorder?

    Ah, the mystery of humanness.  Profound brokenness, overwhelming wonder.

    How does one fathom the ways of God?

    

     Recently, I had occasion to read, after many years of thinking about doing so, Richard Wright's The Outsider.  Although Wright, who was born in 1908 and died in 1960, is perhaps better known for his Native Son, after reading The Outsider, I have come to conclude that the latter is the more compelling read.  Its insights into the effects of racism on those who experience it are singularly profound.  One marvels that Wright was able to put such painful profundity on paper amidst the otherwise "happy" world of the American Fifties.

    While I won't reveal much of the plot, I will say that the novel features a young man named Cross Damon who, like Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Native Son, finds himself caught in a web of almost unimaginable circumstances, circumstances largely driven by his positions on racism and communism, from which he cannot extract himself.  It's a study in frustration, yet also a paean to individual perseverance.  Reading it makes one wonder, as Cross often did, what life's point really is.  Cross rejects religion and what he perceives as its pie-in-the-sky hope, and dismisses communism as an empty philosophy that focuses solely on power and which pays little heed to the true nature of the human being.  He is therefore left with a world without meaning.  Although he later comes to think that perhaps love is the answer to a cold world, he finds that he cannot be loved.

    In the end, all he has left, or so he thinks, is the Law.  The Law as the ultimate ordering element in our lives, the Law to which we are all subject, the Law that governs all of our affairs.  Yet the Law is impersonal.  It will not help him nor will it  condemn him.  So Cross becomes the ultimate outsider:  in rejecting or being rejected by everything around him, he fades away into a frightful anonymity.

    No one even knows he lived.

     "The mountains are calling, and I must go."  When I hike through the mountains of the American West, as I did frequently these months of summer, I think often of these words from the American (though he was born in Scotland) naturalist John Muir.  Like Muir, I find mountains singularly compelling, a place to which I feel I must go, a place in which I feel most at home.  Happily--and gratefully--I have to this point been able to travel to mountains at least once or twice a year.

    What do I find?  Peace, vision, insight, challenge, rest:  new pictures of how life plays itself out in an intentional and meaningful world.  New pictures of existence as a divine image bearer in a broken world.  Fresh paths into the deeper patterns of reality.  And more.

    Ultimately, however, I find how complicated living with the complexities of a meaningful life in a purposeful world can be.

    And isn't that the point?  Living without purpose requires little effort.  Living with it, and the God from which it comes, however, is the greatest challenge, and opportunity, of all.

     "Whenever I hear that we should not teach people what makes them uncomfortable, it sends shivers down my spine."  I heard these words from a native German, one of the many guides I employed while I was leading a student trip to Central Europe this past spring.  We were in Berlin at the time, visiting various sites of memory, getting firsthand looks at the many ways that the nation of Germany was trying to never forget the atrocities of its past.

    Our guided had a good point.  At the moment, many people in different parts of the U.S. are seeking to ban certain books from being used in the classroom or local library or, alternately, attempting to prevent teachers from talking about anything that makes students "uncomfortable" upon hearing it.  Although I understand the wisdom of assigning or making available age appropriate texts in the classroom or community library, I also believe that, by its very nature, teaching should make people uncomfortable.  Teaching should challenge people, should jar their categories, should make them rethink their positions, should cause them to look more closely at why they believe what they believe.  While teaching can be a way of affirming or solidifying belief, it is also a way of creating conditions that allow people to consider, even change, belief.  To consider and change for the better of the student and the community in which he or she participates.

    As to book bans, well, one doesn't need to look farther than Nazi Germany to see where those can eventually land.  Discernment in material, yes, elimination of material, no:  ultimately, we're better off knowing than not.

 

     

    Hieronymus Bosch, the late Renaissance Dutch painter, left us a curious legacy.  On the one hand, his art seems to reflect a wish for the traditional, the staid and religiously structured medieval past that the Renaissance left behind.  On the other hand, it evinces a desire for a breakage from tradition, a severing of ties to what had long been considered to be morally valid.  His "The Garden of Earthly Delights" is a prime example.

     In a way, we're all like Bosch.  Most of us appreciate tradition, most of us value the tried and true, and few of us entertain a wish to overthrow the existing order completely.  Conversely, however, not too many of us wish to maintain things exactly as they have always been.  We wouldn't be fully human if we did.

     Consider religion.  Repeatedly, the many religions which have emerged in the course of human history have advocated a new way, a fresh way of looking at the world.  That's their appeal:  a richer perspective on existence.  We may agree or disagree with any or all of the world's religions, but we cannot deny how they have opened new and, usually positive, avenues of thinking for billions and billions of people.

    It's tricky, this humanness of ours is.  We constantly balance a compelling desire for stability with an equally compelling desire to undo it, to undo it for a greater day.  As we should.  God didn't make us to stand still.

     If you follow the popular music scene, perhaps you heard, last week, about the passing of Randy Meisner, one of the founding members of the Seventies band the Eagles.  He was 77 years old.  Cause of death?  Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

    Though I enjoyed some of the Eagles' music, I was never a die hard fan.  Nonetheless, after a friend sent me a video of Meisner singing his signature song, "Take it to the Limit," I found reason to be sad.  In it, he sings of dreams, of destiny, of time:  a paean to the wonder and fleetingness of human existence.  It's a testament to the profound longing for meaning in an otherwise unfathomable life.

    We who live in the affluent West, particularly those who, like the members of the Eagles, enjoy tremendous wealth, have not really found what makes life significant.  So we wrestle, we struggle; we seek and search.  We are always looking for a way through this bewildering existence in which we find ourselves.  Although it is indeed a glorious existence, its glory ironically rests in the tantalizing frustration that makes us uniquely human: a longing for meaning.

    Rest well, Randy Meisner.

    By the way, I'll be traveling next week.  Talk to you in a couple of weeks.  Thanks for reading!

        A musician, an artist:  colorists consummate, each paints images of the world.  The one does so with his music, the other with his brushes.  Last month, in looking at the music of Robert Schumann, we noted its sense of fantasy and wonder, its blend of magic and reality, the way that its melodies transport us to new lands.  When we turn to the work of the Dutch artist Rembrandt Harenszoon van Rijin, otherwise known as Rembrandt, we stumble into an equally remarkable vista, one of profound and telling detail infused with extraordinarily rich and vibrant color.  We often wonder whether our world is really this amazing.

      Perhaps it is.  Perhaps what Rembrandt most does for us to open our eyes so as to allow us to shed our preconceptions about existence, the often utilitarian way that we view being alive, to encourage us to let our imaginations roam to what could be and, perhaps most important, what ought to be.  Maybe Rembrandt is showing us how to look for more than we expect to see.

     To see what is really there.  To see, for instance, in the "Return of the Prodigal Son" (based on the timeless story presented in the gospel of Luke), a father's love, yes, but even more a transcendent God's love for us all.

     It's the ultimate vision of our humanness.

Ernest Hemingway

      Isn't truth a funny word?  Most of us appreciate it, most of us desire it. Very few of us, however, can define it.  Philosophers tell us there are essentially two ways of looking at truth.  The correspondence theory suggests that truth is simply that which corresponds to reality.  While this seems logical enough, it raises other questions:  how do we know what is real and how do we therefore know what corresponds to it? 

    Taking a different tack, the coherence theory holds that truth is the sum total of what seems apparent, logical, and right.  Truth is not fixed but is rather what appears to be most correct based on the prevailing evidence.  Yet how do we decide what is most correct and right?

     Though I see virtue in both perspectives, I won't try to reconcile them now.  I merely wish to make an observation about the necessity of truth.  When we insist that truth is relative or a creation of the moment, we are essentially saying that truth does not exist.  If so, we have no good reason to hold that even we exist.  If nothing holds, if nothing is sure, then neither are we.

     We need truth to be truth.  Otherwise, we became like the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, who, in the final scene of the novel, when he has just watched his wife die giving birth to his child, then stood by as the child died, too, "put on his hat and walked into the rain."

     And unless we let truth be truth, we will be ever walking, too.  Like the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, who, after losing his wife and newborn son, "put on his hat and walked into the rain."

    The end.