If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you may know that today, December 21, is the winter solstice.  The "shortest" day of the year.  Or as Robert Frost puts it in his "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "the darkest night."  Happily, although it may not seem like it, the winter solstice is actually the grand turning point of the year, the day and night in which time and light begin to grow.  It's the end of the light, yes, but its genesis, too.  We lose, yet we win, moving, ever so slightly, toward the greater light to come. 

    I love the winter.  I love how it masks and shrouds, I love how it engages reflection, I love how it sends us into places we would not otherwise go.  And I love how winter helps us "see" what sight can be.  As we trek through these darker days, we come to understand that light is not illumination only.  Light is rather the underlying rhythm of all creation, a continuity of divine favor, a favor that speaks in gloom as well as joy, a favor that underscores the fact of a purposeful planet:  "The Light of the world."

      

     

    Step into the darkness, treasure the light.  Enjoy the marvel of a remarkably consistent--and persistent--personal creation.

       

      Defining spirituality is difficult.  If we attribute it to a god, we miss that many unbelievers attest to having spiritual experiences.  If we assign it to a nebulous immaterial presence, we encounter the problem of making something amorphous and undefinable into something that is physically real.  And if we say that spirituality is thoroughly human, we run into the perennial dilemma of understanding how consciousness can emerge from inert matter.

    Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian surrealist painter, thought much about spirituality in regard to art.  He did so as a way of explaining how art overwhelmed what he considered to be the spiritual darkness of Marxism.  In art, Kandinsky said, we feel hints of transcendence, intimations of things we cannot easily fathom, emotional insights that we do not experience otherwise.  We look into another world, a world of purer light, real or imagined, a world that eclipses the rigid (and, to him, meaningless) materialism of the Marxist worldview.

    Kandinsky's art reflects his words aptly.  It is sometimes difficult to grasp, but that's his point:  spirituality isn't supposed to be simple.  If it were, it would be no more than another product of our material human whims.

   

    Maybe that's why the Incarnation is so true yet so befuddling.

     

    

 

     "For the people who walk in darkness," wrote the prophet Isaiah, "will see a great light (Isaiah 9:1)."  Isaiah speaks of Messiah, the one who would come to illuminate an Israel darkened by disappointment, abandonment, and sin.  He speaks of the Christ (the Messiah, "the anointed one") who would enlighten and save all those who longed for him.  He speaks of the light that would come.
     

    On the third week of Advent, we remember this fact of Messiah's light.  We remember how, like the rising sun exploding over a frigid mountain ridge, Messiah--Jesus--has brought us light, the light of enlightenment, the light of hope and meaning that shines through the cold of an often Munchian existence.  It is a light that, if we embrace its rising, embrace it as fervently and without reservation, will change our lives forever.
    

    Though we may struggle with the idea of eternality, though we may question the presence of God, we all long for light. We all long for hope and meaning.  We all long for a window into a richer existence.
    

    In an accidental universe, however, richness is impossible, for value and morality cannot be.  Only in the light, the light of transcendence, a transcendence made known in Jesus, Jesus the image and person of God, can hope likewise be.
    

    The light of the world.

       What can we say about Ludwig von Beethoven?  This famous portrait of him captures how many of us see him:  a brooding, brilliant composer.  Beethoven's music comes to us as a force of nature, barreling and twisting its way into our hearts, breaking our souls apart, forcing us to grapple with and contemplate the deeper forces that drive human existence.  We swoon over the viscerally of Beethoven's melodies, we wonder about the power of the humanness and universe which his songs describe.  A Romantic in the purest sense, Beethoven reminds us of other worlds and other things, of the presence and possibilities of transcendence.

    I thank God for Beethoven.  I thank him for giving him to us, for giving him to show us as we are, beings of mind as much as creatures of heart, living, personal, dynamic entities made to step bravely and meaningfully into the weighty potential and contingencies of life, to take hold of everything that is before us.

    Given the many stories and legends that surround his life, we may never know exactly what Beethoven thought about God.  Regardless, he makes us think of him.

    Beethoven's music intrinsically  drives us to wonder about the mystery of life and the mind of its creator.

    I thank God for using Beethoven to open and unfold for us glimpses of what we, life, and God, can be.

 

    "For the grace of God has appeared," writes the apostle Paul in the third chapter of his letter to Titus, "bringing salvation to all people" (Titus 2:11).  As we remember the second Sunday of Advent, we can think afresh about the idea that in the historical person named Jesus, we see, in flesh and blood, concrete and visible expression of God's grace, the physical manifestation and display of his truest posture toward humanity.  Jesus' appearance tells us that, above all, God is love:  the grace of God.
    

    We grant each other grace every day, as we should.  Yet it is God's grace that elevates us above the senseless and confusing vagaries of the world in which we live.  It is this grace that tells us that there is hope, a hope that reality is more than what we see, a hope that frames and orders and grants meaning to all we do.  It is a hope that tells us that whatever else we may think about God, what we ought to think most about him is this:  God is loving, God is gracious, and God is for us, for us today, for us tomorrow, for us forever. 
   

    This may leave you nonplussed.  Fair enough.  However, do we really want to believe that this world, this magnificent and bounteous and amazing world, is nothing more than an accident?

Due to traveling and other holiday commitments, I've not been posting regularly.  Now that I'm here fora while, I hope to be more consistent going forward.  Thanks for checking in!

      It's been a big month:  Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Halloween, Reformation Day, and more.  But as we mark the passage of October into November, we have occasion to think about another big day:  Diwali.  It is a holiday sacred to over a billion Hindus 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.

    By the way, I'll be traveling for a few weeks leading up to Thanksgiving and will not be posting of a while.  Thanks for reading and see you soon!

  

    Around this time a few years ago, I wrote, using an excerpt from my book Imagining Eternity, about the moment in which I decided that Jesus Christ was undeniably divine, real, and objectively and subjectively true.  

    This week marks fifty years since that moment in the mountains outside of the tiny town of Jasper, Alberta, in the heart of the Canadian Rockies.

    The pivotal moment of my life.

    I find these fifty years difficult to fathom or measure.  They are fifty years of believing in and grappling with a person whose fullness I cannot in this life exhaustively assess; fifty years of following and listening to a being who has never made himself visibly known to me; fifty years of trusting in a invisible personal transcendence.

     So why believe?  Why live a life that, as the apostle Paul puts it, is one of faith and not one of sight?  Why be a rational being who is living a life devoted to the non-rational (but not irrational)?  Oddly, I live this life because I see that faith, believe it or not (no pun intended!), is, in light of everything that this life comprises, the most rational thing I can do.  Given the fact of my personhood; the fact of my mind and consciousness; the fact of the universes's incredibly complexity and order; the fact of the moral sense; the historicity and veracity of the Bible; and the millions and millions of people, including me, who have completely changed, in a positive way, their outlooks on themselves and existence in response to what they perceived to be a divine inbreaking or call:  I see no other way to understand existence.
    

    I believe because I cannot believe that, to borrow some words from Carl Sagan in his best selling Cosmos, the world is all that is and all that ever will be.

    Indeed:  if Sagan is correct, why do we all long for more?

    Zoya Cherkassy-Nnadi:  have you heard of her?  As the war between Gaza and Israel drags on, you may be hearing more about her.  Cherkassy-Nnadi is one of Israel's foremost artists of dissent, creating work upon work that seeks to critique some aspect of Israeli society.

    With the onset of the war, Cherkassy-Nnadi has turned to painting images of the effects of the war, be it Israeli or Gazan.  When once questioned as to why, she, a loyal Israeli and committed Jew, would grant each group rough parity in her artwork, she responded, sarcastically, "I am very, very happy that there are privileged young people from privileged countries that can know how everybody in the world can act."

    Rarely do we find clean divisions in political convictions or religious loyalties.  Furthermore, as Cherkassy-Nnadi implies, those who insist on drawing such black and white pictures of oppression inevitably trip over their baggage of their privileged circumstances and upbringing.  Put another way, they do not always know what they are talking about.

    Or what they are saying really means.  The Israel-Gazan conflict has rocked countless epistemologies and metaphysical viewpoints around the world.  It has caused immense cultural and political upheaval.  Yet as Cherkassy-Nnadi insightfully points out, a good deal of this upheaval has been caused by people who, broadly speaking, rarely know the deeper implications of what they arguing.

    We must all tread very carefully.  Particularly if we claim to know and love God.

      Free speech?  We all appreciate it; we all, in principle, endorse it.  That's why I am troubled to read about various protests mounted to prevent speakers of both political persuasions from speaking on college campuses.

     Regardless of whether someone else's political beliefs align with mine, we all are beings who are loved and magnificently designed.
     

    Therein is our dilemma.  We appreciate what God has made, yet we recoil at how it often seems to be so wrong.  That's life in a fallen world.  Just as Psalm 19 states that the heavens "are telling the glory of God," so let the earth on which we live speak with the confusing cacophony of the human creation.

     After all, it's only us--and God.

      A few years ago, I backpacked through a part of the Rockies with two dear college friends.  As I reflect on our trip, I am struck that, in an eventuality of which I had no inkling beforehand, we ended up following a trail on which my wife and I had hiked forty years before.  It was mind boggling, really, to revisit a trail so full of memories, a trail that represented our first foray into the wilderness together, all those decades in the past.

     But the mountains had not changed.  The peaks were as jagged as ever, the meadows still overflowed with wildflowers, and the lake, our destination, as lovely and serene as it was forty years before.  It was a picture of timelessness, really, a picture of the incredible ability of a landscape, when untouched by human hands, to sustain itself, presenting fresh wonder for every successive generation of backpacker to tread its depths.

     

    One of my Colorado companions believed in God; one did not.  The one who did not often struggled to balance his sense that something spiritual ran through this world with the notion that, on the other hand, this could not possibly be.

    Who is right?  Well, it seems odd that we humans believe we can entertain thoughts of the ineffable without also entertaining thoughts about why we, material and finite beings.

    Many years before, as I backpacked through Alaska's Brooks Range in 1972, I emerged from a thicket of willow bushes to see a grizzly sow and her cubs some fifty yards away.  Happily, the sow didn't seem to detect my presence.  As I quietly slipped away, however, I thought of how wonderful it was that this family of grizzlies was able to continue its ways, unbothered by human intrusion:  all sense of time and chronology vanishes.

      International Stuttering Awareness Day, 2024.  I'm willing to say that this is a day with which you are not familiar.  It happens today, October 22.

     Although stuttering affects only about one percent of the global population, for those who endure it, it is pivotal.  Stuttering, that is, the inability to verbalize fluently, can be debilitating.  While a stutterer knows what she wants to say, she cannot say it easily.  She will "block," that is, she will not be able to voice her words without running into physical difficulty in saying them.  She cannot just say what she wants to say when and how she wants to say it.  Stuttering can be very frustrating.

     Many famous people have stuttered.  One of the earliest recorded instances is that of Moses, the Moses who, many centuries ago, led the Hebrews out of captivity in Egypt into the land of Canaan.  Another is Demosthenes, the ancient Greek orator.  More recent examples include the actress Marilyn Monroe and U.S. President Joseph Biden.

     What's my point?  I've stuttered for many, many years.  Overall, it's been quite a ride, and I could probably talk about it at length.  For now, however, I will say this.      

    Broadly speaking, stuttering is a very little blip on a very big screen of human adventure.  Yet like any physical difficulty, it troubles as much as it teaches and grows us.  It also underscores the riddle of our humanness, capturing at once our grandeur as well as our fragility.  It reminds us of how challenging and complicated it is to wrestle with a broken existence in a finite world.

    But a world infused with God.

       This week, as my siblings and I reminded each other, marks another year, another year since the passing of our father forty- years ago.  Despite the span of those decades, we still miss him, and our mother as well.  Time may heal some, yes, but time will never fully overcome the scars its events imprint on our lives.  There are losses that, try as we might, we cannot completely assuage.  Although we learn to live with them, though we may even come to develop a measure of acceptance about them, we will never totally erase them from our hearts.  For always and forevermore, they are embedded in the innermost patterns of our soul.

    In 1983, as my siblings and I prepared to leave our mother to return to our lives after saying our final good-byes to Dad, one of our uncles remarked, "Everyone is going back to their lives."  True enough.  But we'd never look at our lives in the same way again.  Nor should we.  We're personal beings who respond to our lives in personal ways.  Our lives continue, yes, but take on more furrows with every passing year.
    

    Yet God and the universe remain, nearly inscrutable mysteries, the one never ending, the other its ultimate destiny in the first.  As are we.  And what then?
    

     Thank you, Dad.  Thank you for everything.  

 I'm Back!

"Now is the wind-time, the scattering clattering song-on-the-lawn time early eves and gray days clouds shrouding the traveled ways trees spare and cracked bare slim fingers in the air dry grass in the wind-lash waving waving as the birds pass the sky turns, the wind gusts winter sweeps in it must it must."  (Debra Reinstra, "Autumn")

    It's here:  the autumnal equinox.  It's a good day, a fun time.  Turning leaves and brilliant colors; cool, crisp nights and rich blue skies; the rising of Orion, his three star belt shining resplendently; light and dark woven with liminality and change:  life displays its glory once more.

    In the ancient near east, the land of Egypt, Assyria, Sumer, and Babylon, the coming of autumn was a significant moment.  It marked the time of harvest, of thanksgiving, a season of expectation--the life giving autumnal rains were imminent--and days of ingathering and celebration.

    So it can be for us.  Amidst our technology and worldly disenchantment, we can learn from our long ago brethren, our many ancestors who placed such faith in the certainty of the seasons, ordained, as they saw it, by the gods.  It's good to remember the ceaselessness of the rhythms that ripple through the cosmos.  It's good to think about the certitude embedded in a mercurial and capricious world.

    It's good to think about what really lasts.

     A few days ago I wrote about the wildfires that threatened to consume the little town of Jasper in the heart of the Canadian Rockies.  Since that time, tragically, wildfires did indeed move through and envelop Jasper, consuming, by some estimates, up to half of its buildings and rendering what many Canadians considered the crown jewel of their country a place of blackened desolation and abject ruin.

    It's unbearably heartbreaking.  And it's difficult to find words to say.  How does one comfort the forest?  The people who have lost their homes?  The tourist industry facing immense loss?

    I don't know, really, I just don't know.  Jasper is a special place to me, the place where, fifty years ago, I found Jesus.  But now it's a place of immolation.  Is God good?  He is.  Are we good?  We are.  Is the earth good?  It is.

    It's a purposeful world, it's a purposeful cosmos:  meaning remains.

    Thanks be to God.

    By the way, I'll be traveling for two or three weeks.  Talk to you when I return.  Thanks for reading!

         A musician, an artist:  colorists consummate, each painting 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, 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.

     Perhaps you know, perhaps you don't.  As I write this, the little town of Jasper, Alberta, has been evacuated and Jasper National Park has been closed due to encroaching wildfires.  Emergency personnel estimate that over 25,000 people have been forced to leave the area.  It's awful in every way:  awful for the residents of Jasper, awful for the vacationers in the area, and horribly awful for the forest itself.

    At the root of this conflagration is the effects of climate change:  a rapidly warming planet.  While many of us in the West can retreat into our air conditioned cars and homes and, relatively speaking, insulate ourselves from, at least for a time, the impact of intensely hot weather, the mountains, lakes, forests, and animals of Jasper cannot.  They are suffering immensely from the unwillingness of many people, principally in the West, to mitigate their use of fossil fuels.

    It should not be their problem.  But it is.  And the results are tragic.

    Pray for Jasper.  Pray for its landscapes, pray for its wildlife, pray for its people.  And pray for humankind.

 

    In a letter he wrote in 1888, Vincent Van Gogh remarked about the deeply felt capacity of the stars to speak about God.  Indeed.  When I look at the starry abundance of a  mountain landscape, I remain awestruck by the mystery implicit in creation's dance of life.  And it is this mystery, this mystery of simultaneous presence and absence, that pushes me beyond the black and white categories of my humanness.  It is this mystery that makes me think that although we may know the universe, we'll never know, fully, life.  It is, perhaps, these stars, the "starry night" that opens our eyes to what life is--and can be--the door to God.

     We're always looking for more.

     Saxophonist Marshall Allen is now 100 years old.  And he's still playing music.  He's still finding harmony, he's still finding rhythm.  He's still playing with the chords of human creativity.  It's remarkable.

    Creativity is a fascinating phenomenon.  Difficult to fathom, difficult to define.  Are humans uniquely creative?  In some ways, yes; in others, no:  creativity is the fabric of the cosmos.

    I recently had a conversation with a person who, although he believes in God, has trouble accepting that he is truth.  I get that.  Yet she also observed that unless there is a God, we cannot explain why we are the way we are.  For instance, we both noted, is creativity a work of immateriality?

    Hardly.  If so, from where does it come?

    Marshall Allen is living proof of creativity's utterly divine mystery.

 

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."

    The end.

         In his 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 for understanding the world.

    After many months of wandering, the prince arrived at a river, a peaceful, flowing river.  He was struck by the river's steadiness, its gentle rhythms and lingering quiescence, the way it seemed to flow unhindered, unbidden, ever and always free.  Yet it always remained the same.  

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

    You may agree with the young prince's conclusion, you may not.  Either way, we all ought to acknowledge that if truth does indeed exist, it is likely not something that we humans create.

    That would undermine the entire point.  If a river is all that life is, we'll never really know it, for once we do, we don't.

    Maybe we really do need a God.

     Another poem of World War I:

    "The darkness crumbles away.  It is the same old druid Time as ever, only a live thing leaps my hand, a queer sardonic rat, as I pull the parapet's poppy to stick behind my ear.  Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew your cosmopolitan sympathies.  Now you have touched this English hand you will do the same to a German.  Soon, no doubt, it will be your pleasure to cross the sleeping green between.  It seems you inwardly grin as you pass strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes, less chanced than you for life, bonds to the whims of murder, sprawled in the bowels of the earth the torn fields of France.  What do you see in our eyes at the striking iron and flame hurled through still heavens?  What quaver--what heart aghast?  Poppies whose roots are in man's veins drop, and are ever dropping; but mine in my ear is safe--just a little white with dust."  ("Break of Day in the Trenches" by Isaac Rosenberg)

    As much of the world continues to believe that war is the ultimate solution to our political problems, we can learn much from Rosenberg's astute observations.  Of all of war's terrible manifestations, one of its most horrific is that it makes us forget who we most deeply are:  image bearers of God.

    No one is just a statistic.

     In a recent interview, Mikhail Baryshnikov, the famous Russian (actually, Latvian) ballet dancer who defected (or as he puts it, "selected" himself) to the West in 1974, talks about the flow of his life and how he has come to this point in it (he is 76).  "What I have done," he said, "is called a crime in Russia.  But my life is my art, and I realized it would be a greater crime to destroy that."

    If we deny people the freedom to create, we commit the greatest crime of all.  We make what is a wonderfully amazing fount of imagination into something that is no more than an object, an object  whose worth is measured not by its potential but by our whims, categories, biases, and predilections.

    This is something that Russia's current leader, Vladimir Putin, ignores regularly.  As Baryshnikov says, "He's a true imperialist with a totally bizarre sense of power."

    Power is not strength or aggrandizement.  Power is doing what we can to enable people to be who God created them to be.

    To glorify our incredible capacity to create.

 

    Yesterday was Bastille Day!  Yesterday, French people the world over celebrated the day in July 1789 when cries for freedom from the tyranny of the French monarchy (and its minions) finally erupted for the latter to see.  Long the symbol of the monarchy's iron grip on power, the Bastille was a fitting place for the Revolution to begin.  And begin it did.

    Yes, the French Revolution was rather bloody, and yes, it killed many innocent people.  No argument there.  Inspired as it was by the American Revolution, however, the French Revolution signaled to the "powers that be" (as the late David Halberstram put it) that from this day forward the lower classes would no longer simply accept their lot and move through life accordingly.  From this day forward, they would seek a greater destiny.  After all, they asserted, they, too, are beings of immense marvel and potential.

    The French Revolution also served notice to the oligarchies of the world (which continue to rule the world today), that their mission was not to simply increase their own wealth.  They should rather direct it to the common good.

    After all, we are not here for ourselves.  We are here for each other.

     "Streaked with immortal blasphemies, betwixt His twin eternities the Shaper of    mortal destinies stirs in that limbo of endless sleep, some nothing that hath shadows deep.

    "The world is only a small pool in the meadows of Eternity, and men like fishes lying cool; and the wise man and the fool in its depths like fishes lie.  When an angel drops a rod and he draws you to the sky will you bear to meet your God you have streaked with blasphemy?"

    This poem, "Blind God," was written by Isaac Rosenberg amidst the depths of the tragedy of World War One.  From his vantage point in the awful conditions of the trenches in which millions of men were forced to fight, Rosenberg struggled mightily to reconcile God's sovereignty with human mortality.

    In short, if people are but mere wisps of mortal existence, wisps who didn't ask to be born, who didn't ask to live in nations at war, people whose lives are frightfully and painfully brief, why must they be punished for challenging the unilaterally determined dictates of an omnipotent God?

    It's a very hard question.

    By the way, I'll be traveling for the next week or more.  I'll catch up upon return.  Thanks for reading!

 

     Simone de Beauvoir, the famous French feminist and long time companion of the existentialist Jean Paul Sartre devoted much of a book, Force and Circumstance, to this very thing.  In one passage, she writes, "I loathe the thought of annihilating myself quite as much now as I ever did.  I think with sadness of all the books I've read, all the places I've seen, all the knowledge I've amassed and that will be no more [she then recounts a few of the remarkable things and places she has seen] . . . all of the things I've talked about, others I have left unspoken--there is no place where it will all live again."

    It's a rather sober reflection on the futility of existence, n'est pas?  But it's real.  One day, everything we know will end.  Though I'm not trying to be morbid, I am seeking to open us to thinking anew about what life means.  Because we are spiritual beings, beings fashioned by a creator God, however we wish to understand this, we ought to view and experience life as more than what we see at the moment.

    Memory is more compelling than a categorical end.

 

      July:  the month for celebrating independence.  Yesterday, July 1, Canada celebrated its Independence Day.  in two days, the U.S. will celebrate its Independence Day.  And on July 14, France will remember Bastille Day, its Independence Day.

    As I contemplate America's independence day, however, I am filled with fear and trepidation.  A U.S. Supreme Court decision yesterday leads me to conclude that, in the same way that Germany in 1932 made Adolf Hitler chancellor without shedding a drop of blood, so does America stand on the cusp of anointing and creating a dictator through entirely democratic means.  It's enormously frightening.

    And it reminds me of former president Richard Nixon's statement, which he made at the height of the debacle of Watergate, that, "If the president does it, it's not illegal."

    From a political standpoint, more unnerving words have rarely been said.

    To every would be dictator:  we're free, yes, but we're not free to be free.

    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.