The Argentinian novelist Jorge Borges once observed that the most important work, the work of the written word, is that which, as he puts it, has an "infinite and plastic ambiguity."

   Though given the rather mysterious nature of much of Borges's work, interpreting what he means here is, well, an exercise in ambiguity, he makes this observation in light of what he called sacred texts.  Texts of spirituality and religion, texts that embody and communicate verities not confined to purely material boundaries.

    Put another way, it is sacred texts, texts that speak of transcendent and metaphysical issues and questions, that, although they endeavor to present timeless truths, will also, necessarily, be texts that are open to a certain plasticity of interpretation.  Why?  Because they discuss ideas that, in our finitude, we cannot easily address or resolve.

     Yet as Borges saw it, this ambiguity is also the sacred text's strength.  If we could understand such a text fully, we would not need it to interrogate or grasp reality.  It is only because a sacred text is subject to a certain degree of ambiguity that it is a text which the human being does well to examine.  It meets the finite being with an infinite set of possibilities.

     And that's the point.  Frail beings in a convoluted world, we recognize that it is only by admitting to a degree of uncertainty about the meaning of existence that we find what existence is really all about.

     As Plato and the apostle John realized millennia ago, it is only in the infinite that we find the point of the finite.

       We in the West live in the shadow of such tremendous disparity.  A few days ago, my wife and I attended a wedding.  It was a beautiful affair, full of life and wonder, overflowing with joy and good will as several hundred people gathered to honor two young people (and their families) who were preparing to join their lives together forever.  It was a grand occasion.

     When, before my morning workout the next day, I picked up the newspaper and glanced at the headlines, my heart sank.  While we were celebrating the riches of an existence that only living in a relatively safe West can bring, across the world, Ukrainians and Russians are battling each other in seemingly endless and absolutely pointless war; two military factions in Sudan, vying for national hegemony, are forcing thousands of innocents into refugee camps; and floods and high waters are inundating several defenseless countries around the globe.

    "To those to whom much has been given, much shall be required," noted Jesus.  Those of us who have had the good fortune to live in reasonably safe parts of the world, while we may have the greater material blessings, we also have the greater spiritual responsibility.  What we have should become the foundation of who we are, what we do, and what we give.  After all, what else is good fortune for?
    

    Never do we want to be on our deathbed and wonder whether we could have given and done more.  By then it will be too late.
     

    Enjoy the gift.
    

     Perhaps you've heard of Chris McCandless, the young man whose quest for meaning became a best selling book, and movie:  Into the Wild.  If you are not familiar with Chris's story, I won't spoil it for you.  Find the book, read it, maybe see the movie, and then ponder the enormity of the human quest for lasting purpose.

    I do not write about McCandless today, however.  I write about another young man whose name was Carl McCunn. Born to American parents in Munich, Germany, McCunn in the summer of 1981 set out to trek alone through part of the massive Brooks Range in northern Alaska.  He hoped to stay at least three months. 

    Unfortunately, due to some miscommunications between him and a number of bush pilots, McCunn had failed to arrange for a pickup by plane.  He had also (foolishly, he later admitted in his diary) disposed of a considerable amount of his ammunition.

    In addition, although an Alaskan state trooper flew over the lake by which McCunn was staying, McCunn, apparently unaware of the protocol for a distress signal, mistakenly waved and whooped at the plane.  Thinking that McCunn was therefore in no trouble (when he in fact was), the trooper left and did not return.  It was an event whose tragedy was on a par with McCandless's not realizing that he was only a few miles from a hut with supplies.

    McCandless starved to death; McCunn shot himself with his own rifle shortly after Thanksgiving of 1981.  Both stories ended in tragedy, but the impetus for them lies in all of us.

    We all want meaning.  It is a desire that drives everything we do, a longing that spawns untold adventure and countless dreams.  It is the stuff of existence.

    An existence, however, frightfully dependent on an even bigger point:  how else could it even be?

     Amidst our rejoicing in the glory it bequeaths, I note that perhaps one of the most amazing places to experience the Summer Solstice is in the northernmost reaches of the continent.  There, be they nestled in the shadow of the mighty Brooks Range or perched on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, we find little villages, little Indian villages in which, for a couple of months, the sun will never set.  Never.

    It's quite remarkable, really, that the light is continuous, always present, always there.  Always ready to enlighten and bless.

    What a world in which to be.  What a world, a world in which we taste not just the ever present light of the sun, but the even greater light out of which this light has come.

    An eternity of moments, or as William Blake said, holding "Infinity in the palm of your hand."

        Ah, the Summer Solstice:  the apex of summer.   Beginning this afternoon, those of us in the Northern Hemisphere can now, once more, rejoice in the warmth and bounty that bursts out of this season of diachronic splendor.  Creatures of technology though we be, we still enjoy the changing of the natural rhythms of the planet.  That's who we are.

     The word solstice literally means, "the sun stands still" or "the sun doesn't move."  People who live in the Arctic know this firsthand:  for a couple of months during the summer, the sun never slips below the horizon.    Even though for people who live further south the sun rises and sets every day and night, time still seems to stand still.  Everything seems to shine, grass, trees, flowers, lakes, streams; the sky seems endless, not a cloud to be seen; and the air could not get any better.  The world is perfect, as if heaven, in the broadest sense, has come upon earth, as if a spell, a wondrous and glorious spell has been cast upon the land.    Despite its troubles, our planet remains remarkably predictable and resilient, the work, however hidden, of a God of love and grace whose fact of presence is beyond our imagination.  In this God is order, and in this order is us:  moral and free beings, free to move, free to seek, free to love.
        Enjoy your summer moment.
     

       June 19:  Juneteenth.  It is the date, in 1865, on which slavery officially ended in the United States.  As some of us know, President Abraham Lincoln issued, in September 1862, the Emancipation Proclamation, making it effective July 1, 1863.  In this document he stated that from this time forward all slaves were to be set free.  Unfortunately it was not until the end of the Civil War that this goal was actually accomplished.  Those who took up arms against the Union were not willing to manumit their slaves without a struggle.

      And what a bloody struggle it was.  So much suffering, so much pain.  So much blood spilled to defend and, alternately, vanquish a lifestyle built upon the forced labor of others.  It was one of the greatest tragedies in American history, one whose effects are still with us today. Prejudice and oppression die very, very hard.

     This is why remembering Juneteenth is so important.  It is good to remember, it is good to reflect.  It is good to recall George Santanya's prescient words that, "Those who can't remember the past are doomed to repeat it."

     It is also good to realize where we are from.  We're all from dust, dust made into the image of God, dust made to enjoy, to be, to love.  I pray that we will always live in profound awareness of our place, a place of humility and grace, a place from which we have absolutely no reason to oppress other human beings.

      

     Pancreatic cancer?  In too many cases these days, such a diagnosis is a death sentence.  Rarely does anyone who is diagnosed escape its clutches.

    When one of my oldest and best friends shared with me recently that he had been given a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, I cratered.  Why him?  Why now?

    There are no reasons, there are no explanations.  The timing and meaning is beyond anyone's ability to fathom.  So when he asked me to pray for him, I of course said I would, fervently and often.  And I told him that although I believed that God loved him, I had to be honest:  I do not always know what such love means, for anyone.  God's love, I said, is often difficult to penetrate and understand.

    But it's there.  When nothing else is there, God's love is there.  Claiming this in the face of a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer is, however, perhaps the supreme act of faith.

    Yet what else ought faith to be?

        It's a day worth thinking about:  Father's Day.  Some of us have poor memories of our fathers; some of us never knew our fathers.  Many more of us have really good memories of our fathers; indeed, our fathers may still be part of our lives.  

     I lost my father, very unexpectedly, many decades ago, to a heart attack.  It was shocking then, and it still is today.  Why did Dad have to go so soon?  Happily, however, I have many, many wonderful memories of my father.  I owe so much to him, not just for taking care of me materially, which he did graciously, but even more for being such a splendid picture of what life could be.  Dad embodied for me life's beautiful potential, always encouraging me to consider the nearly endless possibilities of existence.  With Dad behind me, I felt as if I could do anything.  His simple words, "Do your best," still resonate with me today.  He was a father, yes, but he was also a friend, a friend whom I miss every single day.

     I am so thankful for Dad, so grateful that he and Mom had me, so overwhelmed that God's loving vision bequeathed such a wonderful human being.  Having had Dad in my life underscores for me that although life can be thoroughly confusing, it is nonetheless a fountain of immeasurable joy.  The world is gloriously greater than itself.

     Indeed:  the remarkable beauty of an intentional and personal universe.

      It was my dear aunt Jeanne who introduced me to the art of Paul Gaugin.  Over twenty years ago, she and my mother traveled to Chicago to take in an exhibit of his work at the Art Institute.  I'm so happy she did.  Today, Gaugin is most well known for his depictions of the people of Tahiti, the island on which he spent his later years.  These paintings depict another world, a world very different from the frenetic world of the West, a world of rest and leisure, openness and unconstructed possibility, a world which people do not try to shape for their own ends, but a world they allow to speak to them.  And from which they learn.

     

     Many Christians point to God's commands, as they are recorded in Genesis, to Adam and Eve to "rule and subdue" the world as justifying anything people might do to survive on this planet.  This is risky exegesis.  To rule well is to care and steward that which one rules, to let the world be as it should be.
     

    And not to twist it into what we think it should be.  The freneticism of the West often blinds it to what life really is:  a gift from God.  A gift, moreover, not to be taken lightly.
    

     Thanks, Monsieur Gaugin.  Happy trails.

      Perhaps you've seen photos, perhaps you've seen his actual art.  Either way, I doubt you have forgotten it.  I speak of the Bulgarian born artist Christo (his full name was Christo Vladimirov Javacheff), most famous for the gargantuan sized art projects which he and his wife Jeanne Claude staged around the world.

    Christo and Jeanne Claude focused on covering buildings, bridges, parks, even islands with enormous swathes of brightly colored cloth.  Buildings include the Reichstag in Berlin, bridges the Point Neuf in Paris, parks Central Park in New York City, and islands Monte Isola in Italy.  Some of his projects cost nearly thirty million dollars.  Christo and Jeanne Claude financed every one of them with their own money.

    Curiously, both said that, on balance, their projects contained no deeper meaning or transcendent truth.  They viewed their work as pure aesthetic expression, gifts to those who enjoy beauty and new ways of framing the obvious and familiar.  Steps beyond that are rooted in what is already there.

    Some laughed at Christo; others lauded him.  But that, I think, bears out the point:  art is made to provoke, to provoke imagination, controversy, longing, and dream.  Be it covering islands in massive sheets of cloth or producing a wood carving of a dog that looks like Santa Claus, art expresses, expresses profoundly, the marvel of the human being.  Born to stay, born to roam:  born to always create a new home.

      Fear is a powerful thing, sometimes for good, sometimes for ill.  I think about this whenever I hear or read about a municipality or, worse, national government enacting measures or making decisions which have the net effect of denying adherents of religions other than those which they pursue the freedom to enjoy the various expressions of those beliefs.  We see this when France outlaws a so-called a  "burkini"; we notice it in America when municipal governments from Illinois to Georgia to Massachusetts deny Muslim groups permits to build a mosque or, oddly enough, a cemetery; we see it when assorted factions of a religious worldview seek to prevent members of other factions from exercising their propensities in worship or practice.

     Ultimately, these responses to expressions of religious belief are driven by fear, fear of physical harm, fear of ideological tarnish, fear of political upheaval, and more.  As I said earlier, fear can help, and fear can harm.  In these instances, I believe it to be harmful. Yes, differences, particularly religious ones, make many of us uncomfortable.  On the other hand, we should recognize that we will never agree on everything, nor will we ever live in a world in which everyone thinks exactly alike. Jesus was not born in a monotone world, nor did Mohammad or Buddha emerge in a homogeneous culture.  But their beliefs thrive to this day.

    It seems that the power of God, should we choose to trust it, is more than able to surmount and overcome and resolve the fears of human beings.

    We're not called to deny; we are called to believe.
    

    And we should--in every way.

      Are you familiar with Christopher Hitchens?  Before he passed away in 2011 at the age of 62, Christopher Hitchens was one of the so-called "Four Horsemen" of the (equally) so-called "New Atheists."  In book, column, interview, and debate, he did everything he could to argue against the notion of God.  His most popular book was titled god is not Great.

     A book that appeared recently, The Faith of Christopher Hitchens, written by an evangelical Christian, seems at times to convince us otherwise.  It presents another side to Hitchens, a side that leads some to think that he was not so stridently anti-theistic after all.

     Larry Tatum, author of the book, states unequivocally that Hitchens didn't convert to Christianity before he died.  However, he cites a number of episodes in which Hitchens seemed struck by expressions of sacrificial love.  In these episodes Hitchens appears to be moved greatly by his observations of people who are acting totally selflessly on behalf of others.  He wonders out loud why anyone would do such a thing.

    Quite.  In the end, people will not believe in God because they are afraid of him.  They will believe in God because they believe he loves them.

    Doctrine is important, yes, but Jesus didn't preach doctrine.  He told stories about God's love.  For love, a simple yet at times bewildering love, is what God is most about.

     As many people know, today is the 80th anniversary of D-Day.  For those who lived through it, D-Day was the day on which the Allies made their decisive assault on the Third Reich, a day of immense carnage and pain that led, after many more months of deadly and sustained warfare, to the fall and collapse of Adolf's Hitler's ambitions of a 1,000 year Aryan empire.  It is a day that the West should never forget.  We should never forget to honor and remember those who gave their lives, for they died without knowing the outcome.

    How difficult it is to measure the net worth and effect of our actions.  Likewise, how arrogant it is to assert what we do today means in the counsel of God.

     

    In the end, all we can be is thankful.  Thankful for many things, yes, but supremely thankful that however difficult it is to understand what such pain means, purpose remains.  Vision prevails.  Wisdom continues to reign.

    And how good it is that it is not our own.

     One of the recent issues of Outside magazine was titled "The Meaning of Life."  Though it seems a grandiose title, its sentiments certainly fit the life perspectives of most of those who read it.  After all, the editors argue, as long as we are here, here in this magnificent world, why should we not maximize our enjoyment of it?  Why should we not pursue everything this existence has to offer?

    Fair enough.  Even Ecclesiastes says, in chapter nine, "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might."  Yet Ecclesiastes also reminds in its final chapter that, "Whatever else you do, remember God."  I love adventure as much as anyone.  I've devoted a good deal of my life to pursuing it.  Nearly fifty years living on the other side of faith, however, has made me put adventure in a much different light.  

    Adventure and a zest for life are like candles.  They burn brightly and wonderfully, but eventually they go the way of all candles:  they burn out.    Remembering God is like a candle, too.  It burns brightly and wonderfully, illuminating and framing all we do. 

    Unlike adventure, however, God's candle will always be there for us to remember.

 

     Omphalos?  What is an omphalos?  A Latin term that appeared often in the annals of ancient Rome, omphalos is best translated as "the center of the world" or the "navel of the universe."  As the proud Romans saw it, their empire was an omphalos, the center, hub, the undisputed integration point of the known world.  For them, Rome was the zenith, the highest, the beginning and end of all civilization.

    Let's look at omphalos as a center, yes, but center as a home, a home that is the beginning of our life journey, a home that, in some way, is also the end of our existence.  A home as that which runs through the entirety of our lives, shaping, influencing, building and, sometimes, tearing apart.  A home that is always there, home that though it may at times not seem present at all, steadfastly weaves itself into the currents of our days.  Home as the center of our world.

     

    Long ago, poet William Yeats asked, "Will the center hold?"  One day, our home, our center, will be gone, as will we.  Shorn of its cohering life force, the center itself will vanish, too. Our omphalos will be no more.  
    

    Yet omphalos cannot be the center unless centering is possible.  And in an ordered yet allegedly meaningless world (an oxymoron for sure), how can centering, a centering of thought, meaning, and belief, be?
    

    It almost makes one want to say there is a God.

        Have you read Howl?  It's not for the faint hearted.  Written by Allen Ginsburg, one of the so-called Beats of the American Fifties, Howl is a singularly memorable slice of literature, a titanic coming out of the American culture, an honesty about feelings and viewpoints that had rarely heretofore been expressed.

 

    While some have rued the day Ginsburg broke into the cultural scene, in truth, America, and the world, may well be better off that he did.  Yes, Ginsburg penned some rather bizarre, even, by some standards, obscene literature, yet there is no doubt that he and his Beat compatriots shook up the staid world of the lily white American Fifties.  Though they probably didn't intend to do so, they reminded any who looked between the lines that, although a personal and pervasive sense of love and purpose exists, humanity must always seek to interpret, and re-interpret, this love and purpose for changing times.

    The challenge is understanding the balance:  the infinite in a finite world or the finite in a finite world?  Whatever else of which Howl may be accused, Ginsburg and his fellow Beats created, again, likely unwittingly, a path for, in the long run, a profoundly new window into understanding the meaning of God.

    And isn't this the most important thing?

    

    As I was reading a review of a book about owls recently, I was reminded, again, of the lingering human feeling that owls, for a variety of reasons, are paragons of wisdom, more inscrutable, incisive, and perceptive than most other animals.  Silent denizens of the night, owls, many people believe, their wings moving aphonically through the darkened skies, harbor an intelligence and insight we all need

    We all of course need wisdom.  We all need the ability to see more deeply, to look between the lines, to perceive and grasp things we do not readily understand:  to make rational and informed decisions.

     The ancient Greeks viewed their goddess Athena (Minerva to the Romans) as a fount of wisdom,  So did the Hebrews write of wisdom as a woman in Proverbs 8.  For the Greeks as well as the Hebrews, wisdom was vital to good living, the creation of God.  Wisdom, they both believed, is for this reason embedded in the fabric of the universe.

 

    And this is the point.  Wisdom is calling, multiple Hebrew proverbs say, calling to you, calling to me, calling us to follow her, to follow her as a way of life.  It is everywhere.
    

    As Greek and Hebrew alike understood, however, such wisdom would not be unless there is God.  Wisdom can only be in a personal universe, and a personal universe can only be if there is a personal God.

    Candida Royalle.  Unless you are a scholar or aficionado of X-rated movies and films, this name is likely not familiar to you.  One of the late twentieth century's biggest porn stars, Candida (given name "Candice") carved a bold path through the Sexual Revolution and the many controversies it subsequently spawned about the effects of pornography on women, controversies that, in many ways, are still with us today.  A highly creative spirit, although Candida began as an entertainer, in her later life she had a bit of a "conversion" and endeavored to make pornographic films that celebrated not necessarily the raw mechanics of sexual congress but rather the beauty of sexuality itself.  Unfortunately, she died of ovarian cancer in 2015 at the age of 65.

    Why do I mention Candida's name?  In a recently published biography, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution, author Jane Kamensky paints a rich and largely sympathetic portrait of Candida.  She presents Candida as a person of great artistic insight but, at the same time, a person who constantly wondered what she and her life were really all about.  With unfettered access to the voluminous diaries that Candida kept throughout her life, Kamensky continually unfolds the ambivalence and existential questioning in which Candida engaged all of her days.  Candida emerges as a person who was usually happy, but also as a person who always wondered who she was.  It's both tragic and fascinating.

    And that's my point.  We cannot measure the ultimate value of our lives.  All we know is that we live them, love them, and, one day, lose them.

    Wow.  Without a larger framework of meaning, maybe all really is vanity.

 

Yesterday, in America anyway, was Memorial Day.  In addition to the many barbecues and gatherings this holiday spawns, it also births numerous displays of patriotism, even, dare I say, jingoism, among the American populace.  Lots of flags, lots of parades, lots of honoring of veterans.

    Although we may differ on what justifies sending troops into combat, and though we may debate how a war should be fought, we can agree, I think, to be grateful for those who, whether through conscription or voluntarism, put themselves on the line for people, people like you and me, people they may never meet or know, for causes both clear and ambiguous.

    The price, however, is high.  Military cemeteries around the world testify to this amply.  It's tragic and unspeakably sad.  So many lost and broken lives.  And this does not include the even more numerous civilians who, through no fault of their own, are trapped and die in the middle of military conflict.

    But most of us want peace.   Peace in our families, peace in our nation, peace in the world, and peace in our hearts.  Although some wars might seem necessary, they are never absolutely good.

    As countless religions attest, we do not grow by seeking our own welfare and safety only.  Over and above it all, we are called to seek the common good and not solely our own.

    And to remember those who have enabled us to do so.

    

      Have you seen Tartuffe?  A play by the French playwright Moliere, Tartuffe is a study in the dangers of religious hypocrisy.  Although Moliere was directing it at the Catholic Church (the dominant religion of sixteenth century France), his observations are relevant to any religious tradition today.  Besides the problem of evil (briefly, if God is omnipotent and good, why do evil and suffering exist:  cannot God do something?), nothing pushes people from religion, of any sort, more than hypocrisy.  Why can't people of faith live in a way that is consistent with what they preach?

     It's a worthy accusation and, unfortunately, all too true.  There is not a person of faith anywhere on the planet whose behavior always aligns perfectly with what she believes.  And it doesn't do to say, well, this person is forgiven by God.  While this may well be, it does not resolve the pain that poor behavior causes for those who experience it. 

     

    What is a person of faith to do?  The psalmist had a useful observation in this regard.  He wrote, "Relax, let go, and know that I am God" (Psalm 46:10).  Indeed.  We all stumble, yes, religious and faith-based or not.  We're only human.

    What matters, however, is how we stumble. Do we stumble in an accidental world, a world in which we have no real way to define what is true, no good way to determine right and wrong; or do we stumble in a purposeful creation, a creation of a vision which undergirds all things?  In the former, remedy is difficult.  In the latter, though remedy is also difficult, it is a remedy that, as Tartuffe's accusers found, lasts.  It is rooted in the point of God.

    How much will a person do to survive?  It's an age old question.  I thought of it anew when I read Stephen Crane's Maggie, A Girl of the Streets recently.  Most of us know Stephen Crane as the author of the Civil War drama, Red Badge of Courage.  In Maggie, however, Crane presents us with a very different dimension of human experience.

out.    Maggie chronicles the sordid life of a girl named Maggie who, with her mother, father, and brother, try to survive in New York City's underside during the Industrial Revolution. It describes an extremely difficult world, one of poverty, pain, and despair, a world that, like the world of Emile Zola's Germinal, leaves one wondering why anyone in it even bothers to live.  It is a world without hope, a lonely and arduous world into which one is born with absolutely no way out.

    When Maggie comes into puberty and realizes that her father will never be able or willing to take care of her, and that her alcoholic mother will soon drink herself to death, she, like too many other young women of the time, leaves home to make her way on the streets.  Though the novel doesn't state this explicitly, we are given to understand that she eventually resorts to prostitution to survive.  It's ugly and demeaning, but it is the only way that Maggie, whom the novel repeatedly indicates is an extraordinarily pretty woman, seems to think she can get by.

    As the novel draws to a close, the reader is asked to weigh all the factors in Maggie's situation--the unrelenting poverty, her emotional darkness, her parental abandonment--and ask herself whether she has done the right thing.  Some will insist that Maggie is being pragmatic; others will say that everyone has a choice and Maggie could have done something else; still others will point to the novel's lack of mention of God and say that perhaps God would have provided a way out.  Unless we stand in Maggie's shoes, so to speak, however, we may not really know.  Ethics become highly opaque when we face seemingly closed situations; precise knowledge of certainty is difficult.
    

    So should we always ask ourselves:  what would we do?  How would we integrate our sense of ethics and morality with situations that seem beyond hope or change?  We will not change without hope, yet we will not hope unless we believe in change.  Yet even though I believe in a hope in God, I would say so to Maggie with tremendous caution.  It's hard to see outside the belly of the whale.

    Sometimes we have to deal with the whale first.

     Many years ago, when the church we were attending was preparing to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, I was asked to write the script for the video presentation a committee was developing to commemorate the occasion.  After some thought and prayer, I settled on the initial verses of Psalm 90 as my opening.  They read, "Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations.  Before the mountains were born or You gave birth to the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God."

     Big picture, we little humans have no clue as to how things appear when they do or why things happen as they do.  Usually, all we see are the effects and results.  In like manner, when our church began those fifty years ago, no one knew what would happen.  All they knew was that they believed that their efforts were in the hands of God.

     When we were touring Nova 

Scotia a few years ago, one Sunday we decided to attend church.  It was a little white building on a lonely road in the Cape Breton highlands.  Like many Canadian churches, it was in the United Church tradition.  It had been established in 1832.  I have no doubt that its founders believed precisely what the founders of our Stateside church did:  their efforts were in the hands of God.

     And still are.  The threads of belief are lengthy; we cannot measure their full effects.  But their longevity should tell us something about the nature of belief:  if it is rooted in truth, it will endure.

 

      Fireflies?  The other day I was looking at the work of New Mexico artist Kit Lynch (we own one of her paintings).  One of her current works depicts a night sky, shot through with falling stars, hovering over a river on whose bank we see enormous clouds of fireflies.  The total effect is mesmerizing.

       In studying this painting, I was reminded of a time a few years ago when my wife and I were staying at a cabin in the mountains of Albania.  When darkness finally arrived (it was the night of the summer solstice), all we could see were fireflies:  massive swarms of light filling the sky.  It was a remarkable sight.  All the more because there was very little ambient light to distract our largely citified eyes:  a vision of another world.

     Which is my point.  Broadly speaking, the life of a firefly is rather evanescent.  A firefly appears for a couple of months at the peak of the summer, then disappears, not to return for another year.  When the firefly's lights shine, however, it captures all that is confounding, amusing, and amazing about existence:  lovely yet transient,  pointless yet entirely not, rippling with beauty and wonder that overwhelms all before it.

     That's life.  It's also why life is:  the personal experience of a personal creation.  And creator.

    As our Jewish brethren remembers Yom HaShoah (the day of the Holocaust or Catastrophe), which commemorates the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, today,  I think about a movie which I've watched several times,  God on Trial.  Towards the end of the movie, one of the actors, all of whom are inmates at the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, contends that God is not good, but merely "on our side."  In other words, the only reason a Jew might say that God is good is because he has made them his covenant people and is therefore "for" them.  If God wasn't on their side, then perhaps he would not be good.

    If this is true, are those who do not believe in God simply doomed to be born and die, eternally separated from their creator?  What is the point of their lives?

    On the other hand, if there is no God, if there is really just you and me in a vast and insouciant universe, how can we assert that anything is good or, for that matter, bad?  How can we know?  In an accidental and indifferent (to use Albert Camus's words) universe, we have no way to determine such things.  We can insist that certain things are good, but we do so in a moral vacuum:  there's no reason why we cannot just as easily say that these things are bad.  It's an exercise in epistemological futility.

    Yet if God is there, even if we cannot physically, apart from the person of Jesus, see him, weaving moral fabric and order in the cosmos, then, and only then, can we know what is genuinely good.
    

     It is perhaps in the Holocaust that we see this most clearly.  If God wasn't there, if God wasn't there upholding the fact of purpose and point amidst the horrors of its suffering, then why do we even claim to know its evil?

    Pray that all of us will grasp the necessity of a covenantal God.

    How much do you know about Siberia?  Although the writings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about Stalin's Gulags have tended to create, for many of us, feelings of dread about the region, the land itself remains magnificent.  Remote, largely pristine, and perched on the edge of forest and tundra, an enduring gateway to the deepest Arctic, Siberia is a spectacular place.

    As I have been reading George Kennan's (yes, he is related to the twentieth century American diplomat) account of his journey through the region in the late nineteenth century, I have thought much about the irony of how sometimes places of the most remarkable beauty become places of the most chilling horror.  It's tragic.

    But redemption persists even in the darkest of darknesses.  As Solzhenitsyn observed after his release from the Gulag, “Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”

    Well put.  What, really, is the most important thing?

     Perhaps you've heard of Richard Dawkins.  Dawkins is one of the so-called "New Atheists" who have, in the last ten or so years, made quite a name for themselves in their, somewhat shallow I might add, critiques of religion and all things religious.  The other day, I listened to a brief interview with Dawkins.  The interviewer was soliciting his views about Christmas.

    Dawkins said that he loved Christmas.  He loves singing the carols, loves the warmth of family that the holiday tends to generate, loves the decorations; in fact, he loves everything about Christmas.  Except the original reason for its existence.

    Moreover, in reply to a question about Islam, Dawkins acknowledged that he would rather not see it become more popular in Great Britain (he is British, as was the interviewer).  Why?  For him, Islam promotes violence, demeans women, tends to encourage hate, and more.

    Although any number of Christian and Islamic scholars could easily point out the ignorance and limits of Dawkins's critique of Islam, that's not the point.  What I found most intriguing was that he was willing to draw a distinction between two worldviews whose foundations he totally rejected.

    I must therefore draw a page from Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein who observed, in a well known phrase, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"

    Do enjoy Christmas, Mr. Dawkins.  Be willing, however, to understand why we even celebrate it in the first place.

      I've always wondered about the penchant of those who ascribe a totally material origin to the universe and who consequently believe it to be without meaning to nonetheless insist that purpose is to be found in it.  Somehow, it doesn't add up.

    In a book (Purpose and Desire), he published a few years ago, physiologist and biologist J. Scott Turner wonders why, too.  Why do we believe we have purpose in what Darwinian evolution decrees to be a meaningless world?

     On the one hand, every living thing behaves as if it has purpose.  Be it a purpose to eat, to seek safety, to live, or even to consider the nature of existence, living beings seem to reflect purpose.  Yet on the other hand, why would wholly material beings come to think of such things?  Can chemicals desire?  Can chemicals think?

     A thoroughgoing Darwinian evolutionist, Turner does not see how.  He does not see how mentally inert matter can exercise purpose.  Yet he believes in the Darwinian picture of existence.  Moreover, although he believes in God, he is careful in the course of the book not to use such belief as the way to answer his question.

     And maybe that's his point.  Unless a bigger purpose is afoot, unless a larger vision is working through the cosmos, we strive in vain to prove it has purpose.  How can we?  We are essentially inert matter.  We have no reason to wonder.

     But we do.  Every day.  We can therefore choose to live with the puzzle of God or we can choose to live without ever being able to explain why we really want to live in the first place.

     It's the choice of a lifetime.

      Last night was the first night of Passover.  It is a solemn moment, yet one filled with rejoicing.  At its core, Passover is about the faithfulness of God.  It remembers how, many centuries past, God liberated the Hebrews from a four hundred year captivity in Egypt, delivering them, eventually, into the promised land.  For this reason, around the world, millions of Jewish families gathered for the seder meal, the meal whose various components point to  liberation.

    And what is liberation?  It is to be free.  Physical freedom, yes, but more significantly, spiritual freedom:  redemption.

    It is redemption that lies at the heart of Passover.  And in this is an object lesson for all of us.  Though we treasure physical freedom, unless we experience spiritual freedom as well, we are spinning our wheels:  we can win the world, but we cannot win ourselves.

    There is more to us than we think.

       Today is Earth Day!  Established in 1970, Earth Day is a day on which we think anew about the wonder and fragility of the tiny globe on which we spin through this vast, vast cosmos. Earth Day is a call to attend to the ecological balance of the world.

    Many, however, deride Earth Day.  The reasons for their rejection are various:  religious, political, and economic.  And more.

     

    Perhaps Earth Day opponents should learn from the Greek mythological character Narcissus. So obsessed was Narcissus with his own image reflected in a stream, he bent down to look.  Enraptured, he continued to look, getting closer and closer until he put his head in the water and drowned.
    

    Are we so enraptured with ourselves that we do not pay attention to any other creatures?  if we ever suppose that we, we little human beings, are kings of the planet and therefore answer to no one, the world will drown us, metaphorically and, perhaps actually, too, in the effects of our ecological follies.  We will lose everything God has given to us.
    

    As the psalmist writes, "The earth is the Lord's and all within it" (Psalm 24:1).  Let's use our gift responsibly.

    Do you enjoy history?  Many schoolchildren do not.  Many do not enjoy memorizing names, places, and dates connected to times that, to them, seem too long ago, spending many hours listening to lengthy lectures about subjects that seem wholly foreign to their experience, or working on various essays about selected dimensions of a past that, to them, is not worth their time, so far removed they are, it seems, from the year 2024.

    Maybe, however, this is the problem.  The past will never be the present.  But without the past, we would not have the present.  We cannot be creatures of the present without understanding the past, cannot be here without once being "there."  On the other hand, taken out of context or thrust into the present with no boundaries, much of the past can indeed seem irrelevant to the present moment.

    Consider our lives.  Are they not akin to a story?  Are they not like a narrative of moments, days, months, and years, a narrative that we weave, consciously or not, each passing second?  So it is with history.  Though those who lived many years before us do not know it now, what they did, how they spent their time each day, however long ago, laid the groundwork, in a number of ways, large and small, for how we spend our time today.  Everyone is important, everyone matters, everything counts.
    

    And that's the point.  Everything counts.  It is not "history" that we are after, but rather the stories that comprise it.  We are stories, eternally significant stories, in the making.  In addition, we are stories within other stories, stories within a grander narrative still, the narrative of creation, time, and eternity, the narrative of God.
    

    That, in the long run, is what history is all about.

      Being gone for a couple of weeks, I realize I missed acknowledging a number of events and remembrances.  Because his birthday occurred only a couple of days ago, however, I do want to take time to remember Sergei Rachmaninoff.  Born in Russia, eventually emigrating to America and, shortly before his death in 1943, becoming an American citizen, Rachmaninoff (my wife's favorite musician) composed some of the richest music ever written for the piano. His work blends intense and mournful melody with powerful and intricate chords and keyboard movements, beautifully capturing the deepest spirit of the Romantics. 

    Rachmaninoff's music gives us a poignant window into our perennial struggle with the joyous bewilderments of sentient existence.  It shows us that however intellectual we may suppose ourselves to be, we are, in the end, creatures of heart and imagination.  We live as sensual beings.

    Rachmaninoff helps us realize that although reason is an essential part of who we are, we make our biggest decisions with our heart.  Put another way, although we may believe, as a matter of intellectual assent, in a particular religious tenet, we can only trust its truth for our lives with our heart.  Trust is the wellspring of rational belief.

     As much of Rachmaninoff's music tells us, though we live for the moment, we flourish in the eternal, however we conceive it to be.  We affirm transcendence even as we live in the immanent.

    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.

    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.

     By the way, I'll be traveling for the next couple of weeks.  See you after Easter.

    Thanks for reading.

      For those of us who lived through the civil rights movement of the Sixties, James Baldwin's recollections of those times ring frightfully true.  It was a highly tense and volatile time in America.  Too many people died, too many people were hurt, too many people lost everything.  And regrettably, way too many people emerged unchanged, racists still, even today.

     Although the whites who participated in the movement were thoroughly committed to its goals, they--and they readily admitted to this--would never be able to fully understand what it felt to be a black person in America.  Nor do they today.  People who are born into what I will call white privilege, though they may do their best to expunge it from their psyche and worldview, will never be able to shake it off completely.  Like it or not, its legacy endures.

     When we therefore consider Baldwin's points about the Black experience, we do well to view them not through the prism of our often misshapen perspective, but through the lens of a loving transcendence that defines, undergirds, and frames the rhythms of the cosmos.  That we set our hope in something bigger than ourselves:  that we appreciate people for exactly who they are.