Widely renowned for his profound and otherworldly poetry, William Blake wrote some of the most memorable verses in the English language.  Millions of seekers, spiritual and otherwise, have used his lines (in his "Auguries of Innocence), "To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour" as they meditated on the meaning of their lives.  Millions more have employed the metaphysical fractures running through Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" to develop their vision for understanding a material reality which at the same time seems permeated with ethereal activity and semblance.  Blake's words capture the essence of the modern quest for wholeness and meaning:  even though life seems mysterious, even futile, we human beings still want to believe that it matters.  So what do we do?

    

    Particularly if, as modernity avers, there is no God.  It is the perennial dilemma of being a human being.  How do we balance what we want to think with what we feel we must believe?

    Blake pushed creativity to its limits, mining life for all he could.  He took hold of existence in full.  He understood very well that if there really is no God, we will always fail to understand the metaphysical strivings of the human being.

     Maybe there's more than we think.

    

    "We can be heroes, we can be heroes," sings David Bowie, "we can be heroes just for one day."  As I watched Bowie sing this song many years ago, I watched his audience, too:  everyone in the crowd seemed to be singing along with him, the entirety of their being expressing his or her wish that, for just one day, he or she could be a hero, and swim, as Bowie puts it, "like the dolphins [through the sea]."

    It is a thoroughly human dream:  we all want to be heroes, we all want to take hold of a destiny, we all want to be free, free to make the world for us, free to capture our life wonder.  And so we should.  We are made for destiny, we are made for vision.  We are made to be, as Bowie offers once more, "kings and queens."
    

    Not kings and queens in a literal sense, of course, but kings and queens of humanness, the kings and queens we were created, in God's image, to be:  kings and queens, heroes of the world, the most heroic dolphins of the sea.
    

    Seize the moment, be a hero, and swim in the ocean, but be mindful of the moment, for it is only God's heroics, his loving and selfless sacrificial work and eternal presence in Jesus, that enabled it to be.
    

    Every hero needs a home.

 

    Do you ever feel as if God is distant?  Or not there at all?  You're not the only one.  The poet Anne Sexton, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer who died in the last century, penned some profoundly constructed words in this regard.  In her "Rowing Toward God," she writes of how she is constantly rowing toward God yet how this rowing is an "awful" rowing that never seems to reach him.

    And even when she thinks that she has reached God, she finds that he is not as friendly or welcoming as she thought he might be.  Moreover, she realizes that, in the end, God holds all the cards ("five aces," as she puts it).  Her ultimate destiny is completely in his hands.

    So Sexton's is an awful rowing, an awful rowing toward a destination which, to her, deeply disappoints, a destination that, to her, is devoid of hope.  Who really am I? she wonders.  If God makes the final call, what is the point?

    Indeed.  Apart from visible exchange with God, we might all wonder the same thing.  In a world which we did not make, a world in which God seems distant, even  nonexistent, and yet holds all the cards, who and why are we?  Is there a reason beyond the moment?

    Only if, as the apostle John wrote, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us."  Only if God has made himself known.

    The good news is that, in the person of Jesus Christ, he has.

        God opens his hands," writes the psalmist, "and satisfies the desire of every living thing" (Psalm 104).  Although we all have much for which to give thanks, perhaps the most important thing for which we can be thankful is that we can give thanks.  We can rejoice that we can be aware of who we are, that we can experience the gracious bounty of the universe, that we can know, really know, that we are beings who can create life, culture, and moral sensibility.  We can be grateful that we are here.

     Many a theologian has observed that all truth is God's truth.  If so, we can also give thanks for that which enables us to know everything else:  living and personal truth.  Absent this truth, nothing has point.  Give thanks therefore that despite the fractured state of modern spirituality and the numerous political issues that attend this end of November celebration, truth remains.  And that truth is knowable.

     

    We live in truth's materiality yet we exist in its eternality.

    Happy Thanksgiving!

      If you're a Baby Boomer, you remember.  Sixty years ago tomorrow, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was killed, gunned down by an assassin in Dallas, Texas.  For those of us who lived through this day, we will never forget it.  Although a number of presidents had been assassinated previously, JFK's occurred in our lifetime, in our time, in our day.  We didn't read about it in history books; we experienced it, experienced it directly and personally, in a profoundly visceral way.  Our world would never be the same.

    We live in a frighteningly capricious and unpredictable world.  Though we build our lives on concrete particulars, we construct our life meaning on universals, on hopes and dreams we cannot always see.  We are finite creatures living in a bottomless world.

    Ironically, two other famous personages passed away the same day.  Both were British:  Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, C.S. Lewis, writer of many works of fiction and Christian apologetics.  Both contributed much to our understanding of what is possible and, more significantly, what can be true.

    Yet even as we consider JKF's grave in Arlington cemetery, where the flame burns eternal, we realize that only in transcendence do we see what is true.

     In our family, November is a big month for birthdays.  As you may recall, I had mine a couple of weeks ago.  Last week, we celebrated my wife's.  How funny it is, that despite the seemingly endless points over which people disagree, the vast disparities and differences in income, vocation, and station in the human family, and the diverse political, cultural, and religious loyalties that mark human beings, all of us, every single one of us, has a birthday.  At some point in history, at some unique singularity in space and time, we all were born.

    It's really rather extraordinary.  For untold millennia we were not here, and then, one day, in the proverbial flash of a moment, we were.  We began.

    And how we all treasure our "beingness".  How we all love and value our lives.  And how much most of us try to hang on to them for as long as we can.  For this reason, even if we are indifferent to them, we appreciate our birthdays. They mean that we are still here.  They remind us that we still "are."

    Yet as we all know, what begins eventually ends.  And what will we do then?  I ask because if there was once a time beyond time out of which time came, there will be a time beyond time into which time will one day end.  We do not live in a vacuum, and neither does existence.

    It's difficult to picture life without death, yes, but it's even more difficult to picture life without a life from which it comes.

       Although we missed All Souls Day in this blog, its point is still worth thinking about.  It's good to remember.  It's good to remember our loved ones who are gone, and it's good to remember what has gone well, as well as what has not.  And it's good to remember existence, even life itself.

    How do we explain what has happened, what has been?  How do we measure the span of our existence?  How do we measure the value of our days?

    In ourselves, though we may take pride in reflecting on a life we believe to be well lived, a life that has made its mark, how do we really know?  We have only ourselves and our fellow human beings by which to assess.  We measure the unknown by what we know.  And what we know is frightfully little.  Rarely do we ever see the big picture.  Rarely do we grasp the full meaning of our years.  We're finite creatures living in a finite world, a world that, one day, according to all cosmological predictions, will be burned up by an expanding sun, gone forever, never to be seen again.

    Even if we are but dust, we affirm that dust only has value if it has a reason to be.  Absent this, though dust could well be, we have, despite everything in us, no reason to believe it should.  It all just happened.  But why?

    As we remember, as we look back, and as we also look forward, we can think, as poet Robert Browning once wrote, whatever is to come, we come face to face with the fact of existence.  Why must it be?

    Maybe there really is a God.

     In a book of retrospection, given to him by his children, my engineer brother recounted his experience of school.  Predictably, his favorite classes were math and science.  He had no meaningful memories of his humanities courses!

    Today, many colleges and universities, whether driven by politics, financial need, or simple pragmatism, are reducing their emphasis on the humanities and focusing their resources on programs that, they say, will enable students to earn a reasonable living in today's highly competitive (and materially obsessed) world.

    While I understand the motivation, I believe people are more than numbers and money.  Sure, we all want to live comfortably, and sure, we all want to find meaningful work.  Absolutely.  Yet if this is all that we find important, we are missing the core of who we are:  creatures of moral imagination.  And unless we are exposed to courses offering us opportunities to engage that imagination, we will fail in our efforts to construct a viable society.

    We'll lose our basis for wise and cogent deliberation, we'll miss our opportunities to understand ourselves as we deserve.  We will miss the point of existence.

    It's not about survival and fun.  It's about meaning.

    Claude Monet:  are you familiar with his work?  You may well be, particularly if you like haystacks.  One of the most famous of the nineteenth century impressionists who, together, transformed the nature of art, Monet achieved perhaps his greatest fame for his series of haystack paintings.  Indeed:  he had a haystack for every time and season.

    Yet Monet was more than haystacks.  He painted a number of pastoral scenes, deeply impressionistic reworkings of the French countryside, masterpieces of the subtly of light and color.  They shine with joy, a joy of happiness, a joy of the very essence of the sublime.

    Consider one of Monet's most well known theses:  "I wish to render what is."  In Monet's work we see an effort to take what "is" and make it as we feel it should be.  Not what we think it should be, but what we feel it should be.  We turn rationality on its head; we elevate emotion over all.

    And in so doing, we capture the heart of who we, and the world, most are.  Although we are indeed rational beings, we are also, in our deepest essence, beings of passion, creatures of viscerality, pathos, and imagination.  So do we embrace the world, so do we embrace its hiddenness, the powerfully ordered transcendence that ripples through it.

     We thank Monet for this insight, that amidst our dogged attempts to understand life rationally, perhaps we do better to grasp it as it most fully is:  the passionate renderings of a profoundly passionate creator. 

     Two days ago, Nov-ember 11, was Veterans Day in the U.S.  As most students of World War I are aware, November 11, 1918, marks the day that the armistice of World War I took effect (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month).

     Despite all that humanity may do to prevent them, wars continue to happen, and many people feel called to or are conscripted to fight in them. Unfortunately, while some survive, far too many do not.  And this doesn't count the untold numbers of civilians who perish as well.  War's tragedy is immense. 

    Veterans Day is therefore a mixed bag, a remembrance of a heartbreaking nexus of duty, honor, suffering, and pain.  When I think about Veterans Day, I therefore think about such things; I think about heartfelt conviction, I think about the slippery nature of sin.  I also think about the beauty of peace and and the joy of human compassion.  And I wonder how God, in Jesus Christ, one day intends to set all these ambiguities right. 

     It's not easy.  It's not easy to know what, amidst the forest of human ambition and emotion, God thinks.  It's not easy to know what eternity, the lens by which all things will be assessed, envisioned, and judged, means.  We live in a riddle.  Yet God is present, in peace as well as war, his love for us ever unchanged.

     And maybe, in all of our human stumblings and beautiful yet flawed rationality, that's what we most need to know.

      Ah, birthdays.  We all have them.  Last week I celebrated mine.

     Birthdays are an occasion to rejoice.  They re also an occasion to ponder.  Many years ago, when I turned twenty-two, I was in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.  I had just emerged from four months of backpacking in the Canadian Rockies and was now traveling east, taking a long way back to the States.  Given all that was happening in the world and the majesty of the mountains in which I had been, my birthday seemed a very little mark in a very large canvas.

     

     It still is.  Though I still believe that life is a promise and expectation of river and ocean coming constantly together in a creation I did not really make, and that, furthermore, we--all of us--are poems, beautiful and gripping poems of existence, I also know that unless we are poems set in a framework of transcendent purpose, destiny, and conclusion, we miss the whole point.

    Happy birthday to all.

 

    In addition to October 31st being Halloween, it is also what many people call "Reformation Day."  Five hundred years ago, on the door of a church in Wittenburg, Germany, a Catholic monk named Martin Luther posted ninety-five theses describing what he believed to be serious problems with the way the Catholic church (the only Christian tradition of the time) conducted its affairs.

     Undergirding these theses was Luther's contention that indulgences, rites of penance, sermons, and church attendance aside, what is most important about people and God is that people find God through faith.  He knew that in this material world, we cannot see God visibly.  Yes, Jesus came, died, and rose again, but he's no longer openly present on the planet.  If we wish to know God, he therefore argued, we must believe that, the historical veracity of the Bible notwithstanding, he is there.
     

    Luther's crucial insight was that despite everything people think they need to do, be it rituals, church attendance, asceticism, and the like, to find God, they really only need to do one thing:  believe.

    

    Sometimes, however, that's the hardest thing.

     If you are at all familiar with the history of art, you are aware of Pablo Picasso, the famous Spanish painter who is perhaps best known for introducing the world to cubism.  Much has been written about Picasso, and countless museums have mounted exhibitions of his art over the years.  He has achieved a notoriety, good and bad, and fame which few artists have surpassed.

     Prior to Picasso, art, despite its numerous divergences into Impressionism and Postimpressionism and the like, continued to present its images reasonably proximate to the object it was portraying.  But cubism broke up its images, fracturing them, twisting them up and down and around, bending them in ways that they would never be in real life.

     Although some people found Picasso's forays threatening and felt as if his art was making their world less secure, others welcomed Picasso's perspective.  It was simply another way of looking at the human condition.  It underscored that a world that was, oddly enough, wrestling with the ennui of modernity was looking for a way through it, a way to navigate the bewildering--and exciting--angst that it created.  Though Picasso's cubism didn't necessarily solve the problem, it more than made it plain:  we are significant people in, apart from loyalty to a divine being, an insignificant universe.
     

    When boundaries fade, we find new boundaries still.

     Sunday marked the beginning of the festival of Diwali.  It is a holiday sacred to over a billion people around the world:  a joyous occasion.  Diwali is known as the festival of lights, the lights of color, brilliance, enlightenment, and happiness:  all that which enters into the mystery and wonder of life and the God who gives it.

    It's apt.  Unless we celebrate life in the framework of higher purpose, its lights becomes little more than momentary confluences and coalescences of dust and plasma, things in which we have found ourselves, raw and unknown, and told we must live.

    

    Enjoy life, enjoy its lights.  Be happy for it.  And rejoice in the fact of purpose, the purpose of a creator.  Light won't shine long in a forgotten universe.

     About a week ago, as I was race walking through a forest preserve near my house, I slipped on some ice and, as timing would have it, landed directly on my face.  Then followed several hours in the emergency room, out of which I emerged with two stitches and a massive dressing.  Happily, no broken bones to speak of.  The upshot was that I was rather wiped out most of last week and am only now getting back on track.

    In the interim, I missed talking about Halloween, the Reformation and, perhaps, at least to me, a big moment, my birthday.  I hope to offer some perspective on these this week.  This notwithstanding, being laid up for a few days, as most times of being sedentary do, sparked a number of thoughts and meditations on the frailty of my (and our) humanness.

    How strong we suppose ourselves to be--until we are not.  In the space of a few seconds, as energized as I supposed myself to be, I was incapacitated.  While I managed to walk the remaining two and a half miles home after I fell, I was nonetheless far from normal.  But in a way, that was fine.  In my recovery, I had unexpected moments to actually stroll through the forest, to see, for instance, the evergreens, still shining and full even as their deciduous counterparts were losing leaves with every passing second.  It made me think about ultimate stability.

    We all long for an anchor, we all long for integration.  We all seek wholeness.  On this planet, however, we will never find it, at least in permanent form.  We will forever be seeking it.  If this world is to be a place where we can at least find wholeness in temporary form, however, it must be a world with meaning.

    And it must be a meaning we cannot assign to it.  Otherwise, it's no meaning at all.

    I'm grateful for a world whose meaning I can assign but never create.