Not as well known as Mozart, whose birthday we remembered a few days ago, Franz Schubert was nonetheless one of the most remarkable musicians in Western history.  Immensely productive and profoundly creative, Schubert wrote some of the most ethereal and haunting melodies of all time.  We listen to his music and feel transported, lifted above what is earthly and material, moved into transcendence.  Today, January 31, is Schubert's birthday.

     Schubert's music reminds us that if music only told us what we already know, we probably wouldn't get as much out of it as we do.  We do not need to be reminded of what is obvious and normal.  We rather need to be encouraged to ponder what is beyond the apparent, what breaks down the seen, what splits the visible apart.  We want to know what we, at the moment, cannot.

     And this is what Schubert's music does.  Descending into the darkest recesses of his soul, Schubert talks to us about the deepest mysteries of existence, how we walk in a wisp, a gossamer veil stretched between us and the other side of time.  He romanced eternity.
     

    As do we all.  Every day we balance, balance between presence and absence, perched on a slippery boundary dividing yet bridging present reality and ultimate destiny.

    

    And life becomes bigger than life itself.

      In the midst of the winter throes of the Midwest, I often take time to think about what lies beyond . . . In particular, I think about the mountains of the West, mountains which are, without dispute, my favorite place to be.

     In his Clouds and Storm, the French mountain guide Gaston Rebuffat, one of the most famous of all the guides of the Alps, writes eloquently of his affection for the heights and his love for all things remote and wild.  He offers poignant thoughts and insights into living life with mountains, and not.
 

    As he closes his book, Rebuffat writes, "It is raining in Paris, and I am dreaming of high hills."  He cannot wait to get back to his beloved mountains.  He knows that in the mountains he--we--encounter a deeper awareness of life, an awareness we cannot experience in the land below. He realizes, as did the famous American naturalist John Muir, that a day in the mountains, treading in the light of their heights, is like a day that we would have nowhere else.

     It is this sense of transcendence, this feeling of lilting and otherworldly beauty that draws people, including me, to the mountains.  The mountains, those lofty landscapes of tundra and rock that roam about the planet, speak to us powerfully about the promise of our human condition, our enduring hope for better and higher things.

     Do we therefore need God to experience this longing, this desire for some type of transcendence?  Mountains are indeed remarkable and amazing, but if they are our only source of transcendence, we miss the point of what transcendence is all about.  It cannot be real unless God is, too.

     Is spirituality really emergent?

       What we say about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (his birthday fell over the weekend)?  Although Mozart died, sadly, at the tender age of 35, he produced an array of musical expression that most musicologists agree is unmatched.  As a contemporary said of him, "He was like an angel sent to us for a season, only to return to heaven again."

    Confronted with Mozart's prodigious talents, we marvel.  We marvel at the nature of the human being, we marvel that we are creatures of such remarkable abilities, that we are gifted in a nearly infinite number of ways.  How could such a thing be?

    Such is something for which materialistic evolution has yet to give us a convincing answer.  Its inability to do so reminds us that, consciousness and sentience aside, we, and life, are far more complex than an inexplicably fortunate blend of chemicals.  

    

    Maybe we really are not alone in the universe.

        Tomorrow, January 27, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  It is a day that should cause all of us to stop, think, and weep.  How does one begin to grasp the deliberately engineered deaths of over six million people?  How does one connect with a person who lost the sum of his lineage in a concentration camp?  How can we possibly comprehend being the object of such virulent hatred and racism?

    And how can we categorize those who fomented this horror?

     We can't.  And that's the point.  God aside, evil has no explanation.  It has no point, it has no plan.  It is beyond our ability to fully understand.  Many Holocaust scholars insist, and rightly so, that the Holocaust is an event that surpasses the widest and deepest boundaries of our ken and imagination.  It's beyond intelligibility.
     

    Yet it happened.  Writing to me nearly three decades ago, an American then living in Jerusalem and who had made clear to me that he did not believe in God, allowed that the Holocaust caused even him to acknowledge the reality of the metaphysical.  Why, he reasoned, would anyone with a hatred other than one rooted in the tenebrosity of a twisted notion of the metaphysical--and personal God--engage in such horror?

     Weep for our Jewish brothers and sisters, and pray for those who persecute them.  And believe.  At all costs, believe in the ultimacy of God.

      Do you remember the Bee Gees?  Although they perhaps achieved their greatest fame during the run of disco music in the Eighties, they had been making  music for many other years before.  Yet for all their success, their lives have been marked by familial tragedy.  Out of three brothers, only one is left today:  Barry (at the top of the photo). His brother Maurice passed from a heart attack at age 53.  Robin died of cancer in London at the age of 62.

     Although many observers have cited bodily abuse—alcohol and drugs—as the principal cause of these premature deaths, this doesn’t take away the pain.  Who wants to lose two brothers?  Life can be supernally wonderful, but it can also be insuperably tragic.

    But who thought of life?  Certainly not us.

    So how will we explain it?

     If you live in a part of the world where snows falls, you have probably seen it by now.  Maybe you like it, maybe you don't.  I do!  So when I awoke a few days ago to see snow falling from the still dark sky, I resolved to go outside immediately:  to catch the silence.

    As many a mystic will tell us, it is in silence that we find voice:  the voice of transcendence, the voice of infinite mystery.  The voice of meaning into which we can fit all else.  When, as the Hebrew scriptures tell the story, the prophet Elijah found himself on the slopes of Mt. Carmel, dejected, discouraged, and absolutely alone, God didn't speak to him with voice.  The mountain shook, a fire blazed, but no voice came forth.  Only at the end of these astonishing theophanies did God speak with voice.   

    But he spoke, as the Hebrew verb used here indicates, with absolute silence.  And that's the point:  if we really want to hear, we must be prepared to not hear.  

    Only then will reality speak.

     Recently, I read a blog written by a woman who lives in arctic Sweden.  This means that for two and a half months of the year, she and her partner live in darkness, total darkness twenty-four hours a day.

    But they love it.  She and her partner find the winter arctic darkness fascinating, a delightful melding of mystery, silence, and intrigue.  In it, they encounter polar bears, and in it, they see caribou.  They also see the Northern Lights.  Often:  the show is unending.  And they make huge fires in their home and drink lots and lots of tea.

    She, the blogger, walks every morning, every noon, and every evening.  She always finds something new.

    Although I've experienced the endless sunlight of the arctic summer, I've not tasted its counterpart.  But I should.  There is something about the darkness, a cold and frigid darkness, that sets it apart, well apart, from all other experiences.  Winter darkness can be cleansing, scouring, even enlightening.

    Out of deepest darkness can come the brightest light.

    Of all kinds. Whether we see it or not.

       Today, many Americans will take time to remember Roe v Wade, the 1973 United States Supreme Court that legalized abortion in the U.S.  Since the current Supreme Court recently overturned that decision, however, such remembrances have been taking on different hues.  For those opposed to abortion, it was to vow to carry on so as to make abortion illegal in every state.  For those who support a women's right to choose to have an abortion, it was to continue, state by state, the quest to keep the option open.

    I'd be hard pressed to find anyone who likes the idea of abortion.  I certainly don't.  Few of us are necessarily delighted to have an abortion.  On the other hand, I say to the anti-abortionists that if you wish to abolish abortion altogether, walk the talk.  Work just as hard and just as fervently to ensure that states and interested charitable organizations have the funds, and the desire, to provide pre--and post--natal care to those who need it.  If you claim to be "pro-life" (whatever this means), then seek to convince states, relevant organizations, and the federal government to work together to ensure that women who, for whatever reason, find themselves pregnant, receive proper care.  In addition, work to ensure that they and their child receives proper care AFTER birth.  Do not reject public programs that attempt to help women who find themselves in this situation, do not oppose efforts to cut off funding for the many public programs that offer aid.  Churches cannot do it all.

    Nor can individuals.

    Love the mother, love the child.  Abortion is an immensely complex issue, and we do ourselves no favor when we distill it to empty shibboleths and simplistic sloganeering.

    God is still there.  Let's listen to his love.

 

     Writing about the French Impressionist recently, an art critic remarked that Cezanne drew his "religion from his art."  In other words, as this critic saw it, in contrast to some people who formulate their art on the basis of their religion, Cezanne reversed the equation and instead formulated his religion on the basis of his art.  It's rather akin to a person who draws her religious inspiration from walking through a forest:  on the basis of her experience in the forest, she develops her religious perspective.  Yet Cezanne's art is something that, unlike a forest, he himself created.  Hence, as I am to understand the critic's argument, it is in the doing of his art, in the work of his creation, that Cezanne finds his religious moment.

     

    I find this idea particularly compelling when I consider the work of some artists with whom I am currently collaborating on an art/writing project.  As they do their art, these artists find themselves and, usually, a new facet of their spirituality.  It's not too far from existentialism's creed that what we do makes us who we are.  On the other hand, although I find various levels of validity in this perspective, I also note that, in the end, it makes us the end and beginning of our spirituality.  Yes, as human beings, we are inherently spiritual.  As I see it, however, it is our movements toward the spiritual that underscores that we are not alone in this vast cosmos.  If we are spiritual, there must be spiritual presence.  A presence that we did not make.

    Otherwise, we're just spinning our wheels.

    On some days, days when we are feeling particularly overwhelmed with the difficulties of existence, many of us may feel as if we are people who, like Virginia Woolf observed in her "Lives of the Obscure," are "advancing with lights in the growing gloom," heading toward obscurity, the obscurity of a life lived, a life enjoyed immensely but a life one day to end, never to return.

    Sounds grim, doesn't it?  Yet consider Emily Dickinson's observation that, "This world is not conclusion."

    Obscurity no more.

      If you are familiar with the writer J. J. R. Tolkien, you may like knowing that the thinking of William Morris, a famous artist (and anarchist) of the late nineteenth century, exercised a significant impact on him. In his reflections on his craft, Morris talked about the notion of a Second World (Tolkien discussed this, too).  This is a world apart from present reality, a world completely unto itself, a self-contained world with its own laws, beliefs, and reality:  a world of fantasy. Tolkien's famous Lord of the Rings trilogy is a case in point.  Those familiar with this remarkable work know that Tolkien presents its events in a world that he has created and which has no connection to the world the rest of us occupy.  It's a fantasy world.

    Although we could make all kinds of parallels with other things with this, I mention it in relation to, predictably, the supernatural.  Part of the reason some of us have trouble grasping or accepting the supernatural is that it appears to function in a way that seems at odds with the world to which we are accustomed.  It does not always evidence a credible connection to what we currently know.  The perfunctory response to this is of course, "Well, one must have faith." 

    While no doubt this is ultimately true, if it is all that is true, then we are left with intimations of a world that we will never really know.  It's easy to reject the validity of such a world:  of what value can it possibly be to us?
    

    On the other hand, if the Second World, i.e., the supernatural, is accessible to us, its credibility magnifies considerably.  We can know it, feel it, hear it, and see it in our experience.  We connect.

     And the Second World becomes the First.
     

     Now that Epiphany (and an expected illness that sidelined me for about a week) are over, and as many of us enjoy the fruits of the recent holiday season, I hope that we, me included, do not overlook the suffering that is so rampant in the world. In particular, I am thinking about the thousands of people who were killed in the earthquakes that struck first, Turkey; and next, the Atlas Mountains and Morocco.  Although the world's attention has long since shifted elsewhere, the survivors of these natural disasters continue to deal with the devastation that these events wrought in their lives. 

    I also think about the thousands upon thousands who have been killed in Gaza as well as the hundreds who were killed in Israel.  Or the long suffering people of Ukraine who continue to feel the blows of the megalomanic who rules Russia.  Tragedy is everywhere.

    In addition, closer to home, I think about the first homicides of American cities and the families whose New Year has been shattered irreparably and forever.

    And then I wonder, given the divinely bestowed goodness and purposefulness of the world, how to put it all together.  So it is that I must daily seek to remind myself how the day on which the the recent holiday season is based and, for those who care to look, its potent expression of God's presence, underscores that although we continue to look aghast at the pain and turmoil of the planet, and walk, as it were, "in a riddle," we do not walk without light.

    And, in the biggest picture, very little more.

    It's the greatest challenge.  Yet it's the only one worth pursuing.

 

    

    A king.  As they studied the Zoroastrian and biblical prophecies about a coming king, the magi--wise men--of  ancient Persia realized this king would be a special king.  In him, the magi saw, God would really come to earth.  Small wonder that they made the arduous journey over the Zagros Mountains, across the arid expanse of Arabia, and onto the international trade routes that coursed through the Levant, to enter Palestine.  Who would have imagined such a thing?

    Epiphany demonstrates that only when we decide to allow inklings of the divine into our hearts will we understand what the world is really all about.

    

    God is there, yes, but we are fallen human beings.

    Physical sight is only the beginning.

     Have you seen Edward Munch's The Scream?  A piece that has puzzled and cajoled people for decades, The Scream seems to exemplify the alienation that seems to run through the West.  Overwhelmed by a world that offers them everything but meaning, countless people in the developed world cry out for help, some help in making sense of what seems to be a pointless reality.

     Affluence reigns, yes, but without any foundation other than the assumption that life is worth it, and this only because those who decide this have nowhere else to go.  For if the world is a closed system and we are therefore born only to die, then life, however wonderful it may be, ends before it begins.  So we scream:  why must this be?

    As we move ever further into the new year, we owe ourselves to think afresh about the world we occupy.  It is material, yes, but it is also transparent and open, open and streaming into a reality in which it finds ultimate meaning.  In this, life is grounded in a transcendence that has spoken, a transcendence that has made itself known.  Life is more than itself.  And we are more than who we think we are:  we're images of the transcendent.

    And in contrast to Munch's bleak perspective, we scream not why must this be, but rather how can such wonder be?

     This past Sunday, I delivered the morning message at the church we attend.  For today's blog, I'm sharing it.  It is based on Luke 2:21-28.

Light Illumined

 

 

Isaac Newton, one of the most influential figures in seventeenth century Western Europe’s Scientific Revolution, is perhaps most famous for his “discovery” of gravity, his seminal insight that within, throughout, and everywhere in between all the processes and machinations of the cosmos there is an invisible force, a silent but irresistibly compelling energy and dynamic holding all things together.  

 

Yet Newton is equally revered for his insights into the nature of light.  Light, he concluded, after repeatedly refracting light through a glass prism, is more than just a “flow” of “white” rays.  Indeed, he observed, it is the precise opposite. Light is a spectrum, a spectrum of many and multiple colors.  In fact, in its deepest core, light is actually formed from color.  When we look at “white” light, we are therefore actually only skimming the surface of what light really is.

 

Newton unpacked light.  He revealed light.  Newton illumined light.

 

As will we.  Let’s look at the story before us.

 

As Luke tells it, after their time of purification (as prescribed in Leviticus12, a forty day period of seclusion following childbirth which included, for a male, circumcision), Mary and Joseph brought their new son to the temple.  In line with the regulations set forth in the thirteenth chapter of Exodus, they had come for the formal dedication of Jesus, their first born son, to God.  Because they were a family of little means, per Leviticus 5, they brought a pair of doves—not a lamb—to be sacrificed for the offering.  It was a fairly routine ceremony.

 

Fairly routine until a man named Simeon, a long time and, according to the text, devout and righteous resident of Jerusalem, strode into the temple.  Seeing Jesus, he takes the child into his arms and, after thanking God that God had indeed allowed him to live to see Messiah (in Hebrew, the “anointed one”), speaks, first to God, then to Mary.  What he says forms the heart of our time today.

 

Simeon tells God that he, Simeon, sees, in Jesus, God’s salvation.  What does he mean?  Running through the entirety of the prophetic narratives of the Hebrew scriptures (the Old Testament) is a story.  It is a story of liberation, it is a story of release. It is a story of promise, it is a story of hope.  Bottom line, it is a story of memory and commitment, Israel’s memory, its zakar, of God’s covenant with them, and God’s commitment, his everlasting commitment to the fulfillment of this covenant:  one day, Messiah will come.

 

And now he has.  In its Greek and Hebrew roots, salvation means “rescue”:  Jesus, Simeon is announcing, is Israel’s eternal “rescue,” its lasting redemption, the redemption for which, to paraphrase Amahl’s mother’s words to the travelers from the East in Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” Simeon has “been waiting all his life.”

 

There’s more.  Simeon goes on to explain that God has not just prepared this salvation—the advent of Messiah—for—and before—the Jews.  He has prepared it in the presence of all peoples.  God, he is saying, has prepared and, significantly, will accomplish Messiah in the course of all human history, in the course of all human adventure, folly, and endeavor.  Messiah’s coming will be the completion of a full orbed, comprehensive, and transcending outworking of the purposes of God in and for all the cosmos.

 

So does Paul note in one of our other lectionary texts for this week, Galatians 4:1-7, that in the fullness of time (the kairos, the precisely right moment), God sent forth his son.  Not any earlier, not any later, but in a perfectly completed (pleroo) point of time.  In his sovereign movement and design, God ensured that all human story, narrative, space, and time will find its ultimate and culminating purpose in the birth of Messiah.

 

For as Simeon well knew, perhaps thinking of Psalm 148, another of this week’s lectionary texts, reads, God has “established [all things] forever and ever; he has made a decree which not pass away.”  What God had promised to Abraham over fifteen hundred years before, he will absolutely and totally bring to pass.

 

And, Simeon notes, we will all see it.  Even if we do not think we do:  Messiah will be born in full view of all humankind.  So did Isaiah predict in chapter forty of his lengthy prophecy, “Then the glory of the Lord [Messiah] will be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

 

Then Simeon says even more.  Digging ever deeper into the Hebrew redemption narrative, Simeon proclaims that this Messiah is light, the light, the light of Genesis 1:3, the firstborn light of creation; the light of John 1:4, the light from which life comes; the light in which, as 1 John 1:5 declares, there is no “darkness at all.”  For every human being.  As his use of Isaiah’s songs of the Servant—specifically, Isaiah 42 and 49—make clear, Simeon is unreservedly stating that Messiah’s light is the living light of God:  the essence of the creator.  And it’s not just for Israel.  It is for everyone.

 

For Simeon’s audience, this was a radically new development.  Messiah is for Gentiles, the nations, the goyim?  How can this be?  Yet it can be no other way.  Revelation necessarily is, as apokalupsis, the Greek word from which it is translated suggests, something totally new, something supernally unexpected, something that discloses and unfolds things heretofore not seen, things not even conceived or imagined.  This light of revelation, Simeon is saying, will ineluctably and singlehandedly rupture what is, splinter and crack what seems to be, and speak of and present things beyond what seems possible.  It will be more real than reality itself, singularly and powerfully compelling, drawing its hearers into realms of understanding infinitely beyond their present ken.

 

This light is light that splits light apart.  This is light that overpowers all intimations of earthly futility and vanity, the light that conquers and vanquishes every challenge of worldly darkness.

 

This light is the face of God.  This light is light illumined.

 

But as Simeon notes, this light is also the glory of Israel.  Glory, kabod, means many things in the Hebrew scriptures.  In this instance, however, in the same way that it is used in Psalm 16 to point to the human essence of the writer, here it is used to point to the essence of a nation.  Simeon is suggesting that in Israel is the salvation, the rescue, and, most importantly, the healing of every human being on the planet.

 

As Judaism has always seen it, Israel’s messianic calling is not just to heal itself, but to in fact heal the entire the planet, to be, as Rabbi Yechiel Leiter, in the funeral eulogy he delivered for his son after he was killed in Gaza in November, put it, the balm of all nations, the illumined light of all humanity.  Tikkun olam:  “the healing of the world.”  Messiah of all.

 

Yet as Simeon adds, though light illumined can be blindingly bright, it can also be overwhelmingly difficult and challenging.  As he tells Mary, Jesus “has been appointed for the fall and rise (or anastasis, “resurrection”) of many in Israel AND for a sign to be opposed.”  Before we can rise, we must fall; before we can be resurrected, we must die.  Israel, whose name actually means “the one who struggles with God,” and the goyim, the nations, will experience hardship and pain before they can experience the grace of light illumined.  As Jesus was to come to know, although he had come to redeem, he could not grant this redemption earthly permanence until he had tasted opposition, the opposition of those who, not yet having experienced light illumined, did not fully understand who he was.

 

And, as Simeon goes on to say to Mary, “A sword shall pierce your heart to the end that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.”  Light can only be illumined if it is pierced, if it is fissured and is broken apart.  Only then will we see its color, see it as it most is.  In his 1960 movie “Virgin Spring,” Ingmar Bergman tells the tale of a couple whose daughter is, tragically, abducted, raped, and killed.  It’s not a happy plot.  At the end of the film, however, when the couple locate their daughter’s body, and her father lifts it off the ground to prepare it for burial, a most startling thing happens:  water bursts out of the earth.  Out of death new life comes.  Out of shattered light revelation emerges.  Out of the piercing of our hearts comes deeper insight into the meaningfulness of God.

 

When he published his groundbreaking novel about the astonishing and otherworldly artistry of Michelangelo in 1961, author Irving Stone titled it The Agony and the Ecstasy.  Why?  He knew that, as Simeon had observed centuries before, eternality and finitude do not easily mix:  we do not see light illumined without embracing the aching immensity of inspired brokenness and transcendent pain.  In this, we wonder whether had not Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi endured the tragic deaths of his wife and their two young children, would he have been able to taste the tangled and gestational depths of human despair out of which his music came.  Light had to be broken before it could show its color, before it could fully shine.

 

But that’s the point.  As the fourth of our lectionary texts for this week, Isaiah 61:10-62:3, announces to its readers, “The nations will see your [Israel’s] righteousness, and all kings your glory; and you will be called by a new name which the mouth of the Lord will designate.”  When we step into light illumined, the illumining light of Messiah Jesus, we are made new, radically new, kainos, made new in a way that we cannot possibly have known or experienced before.  Moreover, as John 1:11 attests, we are given a new name:  children of God.

 

When this happens, as Galatians 4:9 and Psalm 25:14 state, not only will we know God but even more importantly, we will come to be known by him.  God will love us as his dearest child, his closest friend.  And we can then join with Paul, per Galatians 4:7, and call God abba.  Abba is an Aramaic word (Aramaic was the lingua franca of the New Testament world), a word that suggests a particularly close familial relationship, a richly intimate connection with one’s male parent.  Some translate as it as “deeply loved father,” others as “Daddy.”

 

In this life, we cannot get much closer to God.

 

Isaac Newton refracted earthly light and showed its colors; Jesus refracted divine light and showed its heart.  Jesus’ light is indeed light illumined, light that probes, pierces, and challenges, yet light that also blesses and reveals.  Jesus’ light stretches us, it heals us; it takes us apart, it puts us back together.  Jesus’ light makes us completely new.  Step into this light, open yourself up to its revelatory power.  Learn from it, grow in it.  Find God as you have not found him before.  Step into the illumining light of God.

Have a great day!

     Christmas has come, and now it is gone.  People are taking their ornaments down, stores are offering their after Christmas sales, travelers are going home.  It's over for another year.

    Or is it?  If Christmas means anything, anything at all, it cannot possibly be contained in one day.  If the Creator has come, how can anything--and any of us--ever be the same?  History, and everything in it, including you and me, has irrecoverably changed.

    

    What has made has come to what it has made.
    

    Christmas reminds us that we live in a universe of meaning.  And that we could not live otherwise.  Christmas also tells us that this meaning's fullness can only be real if it is birthed in a spoken origination of space and time, a definitive genesis of all that is real and true.  It is only then that it can be.
    

    Christmas is only the beginning of what we see.