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.

      As mug I inherited from my mother always reminds me, March is Women's History Month.  It is a month that reminds us that for too long, historians tended to overlook women and the role they played in moving humanity forward.  Conditioned by the social nuances of their times, and driven, perhaps, by various levels of chauvinism or myopia, such historians, traditionally male, dismissed the contributions that women have made to the human adventure.

    If we are to hold that men and women are both made in the image of God and are therefore of equal worth, we err seriously, when we ignore, reject, or pass over the many ways that women have shaped human history for its good.  In truth, we are forgetting the framework, physical as well as metaphysical, in which the universe functions.  We're failing to realize that the notion of male and female are woven deeply into the created order.

    Moreover, as we all know, without women, none us would be here today.  Say what one will about the so-called "ills" of feminism, but realize that, as far as the Creator is concerned, every human being is of equal value and worth and should be treated as such.

    Absolutely.  The fullness of our humanness is a remarkable--and delightfully inscrutable--thing.

      Ramadan, one of the greatest events in the Muslim calendar, began last night.   Thirty days of fasting, culminating in the feast of Eid al Fitr, Ramadan is a time for every Muslim to take time to celebrate and reflect on his or her relationship with Allah and the world.  It's a season of hope, wonder, mourning, and contemplation, a slice of the year in which Muslims, like most people of faith, take time to focus more intensely on why they live as they do.

    You may not agree with the tenets of Islam; you may not like the beliefs most Muslims hold; you may be uncomfortable with Islam in general; you may even be frightened of Islam.

     

    Either way, do use the fact of Ramadan to remind yourself that we live this life as a gift, that we spend our days in the aegis of a personal transcendence.  We live in the umbra of a beautiful (and often exasperating) wave of experience, balancing what we see and what we cannot.  Ramadan tells us that we are not alone. It says to us that we live in a vision, an intensely personal vision in which all things find purpose and meaning, the full truth of what is.

    There's much more to believe than what we see.

     If you live in the U.S., perhaps you watched the State of Union address last night.  Without speaking to the merits of its content, I wish to highlight one point that Joe Biden made.  He said, "You can't love your country only when you win."

    If we view power as only being about having the upper hand and sniffing contemptuously at those over whom we have "triumphed," we miss the point.  Completely.  

    Power is only as powerful as the humility with which we express it.  And love is not love unless it is unconditional.

    Pray for the U.S. as we enter this election season.  Very difficult times lie ahead.

        Who was George Frederic Handel?  Born in Germany, Handel spent most of his life in London.  He is perhaps most famous for his Messiah, a glorious paean to the salvific love of God.  We frequently see Messiah performed around Christmas and Easter.  Another of Handel's most well known works is his Water Music, a delightful set of processionals often heard at weddings or graduation commencements.

     As I listened to Messiah's "Hallelujah Chorus" recently, I reflected, again, on its power, spiritual as well as political.  As the story goes, when George II, then the British king, heard its opening strains he stood up.  In an era when people sought to emulate, out of respect, what their king did, the rest of the audience stood up, too.
     

    Perhaps the king stood out of reverence, perhaps not.  Either way, a tradition was established.  To this day, even the most hardened unbelievers will, if they attend a performance of Messiah, stand up for the Hallelujah Chorus. 
    

    On the other hand, given the tragedies unfolding around the world, the glories which Messiah explicates seem counterintuitive.  Why are we talking about divine glory amidst these wave upon waves of human suffering despair?

    We do so because as we continue to deal with the results of human flaw and the limits of our mortality, we can only find meaning if we acknowledge the fact and presence of transcendence.  In itself, however wonderful it is, the world cannot define its own meaningfulness.

    God's glory can be confusing, yes, but it's worth listening to.  It's worth noting, it's worth embracing.  It's worth the transcending clarity it sheds upon a bewildering universe.

 

     Do artists paint life as it is or as they feel/believe/sense that it is?  Or as it should be? Although art in antiquity focused on reaching a point where artists  painted closely to the object under observation, as art moved into the nineteenth century, artists began to paint not as things necessarily were but as an object "impressed" them, as they reacted to their experience of it.

    One of the most famous Impressionists was Pierre-Auguste Renoir.  Born in Limoges, France, in 1841, Renoir celebrated beauty.  He celebrated the beauty of the world, the natural world, yes, but he particularly celebrated the beauty of human beings.  In this, Renoir saw the world not so much as a work of divine creation but as a playground of existential flourishing, a playground into which people had come.  Come to live and enjoy.  Renoir strove to capture this vision of existence, to picture the richness of the lived experience, to render his impression of life into meaningful form.

    Renoir died in 1919, a year after the end of the Great War.  His years had been filled with an astonishing amount of movement and change.  From Romanticism to the Industrial Revolution to modernity to the cultural ennui of World War One, he experienced much, enriching, tragic, and not.  Yet his paintings were studies in optimism, the optimism of the fullness of a remarkable, though sullied creation.

    It's a lesson for us all.

     It is a sad day in Russia today.  It is day of the funeral of long time dissident Alexei Navalny.  We are told that Navalny died of natural causes in a Siberian prison camp.  Really?  I feel as if very few people outside Russia believe this.  A thorn in the Kremlin's side for many, many years, Navalny fearlessly challenged the authorities in Russia over their autocratic and corrupt ways with speeches, videos, and more.  Even after being poisoned by Russian authorities and getting treatment in Germany, he still chose to return to Russia to advocate for the cause of freedom.

    Small wonder that the Russian authorities had him killed.  Pray for Navalny's family:  he left behind a wife and two children, all of whom continue to live in Germany.  And pray for the Russian people, many of whom continue to live and labor under the iron fist of a man whose power to oppress increases by the moment.

    Even though some counsel gently accepting one's lot as the appropriate response to systematic oppression, it yet seems as if there's another side to the story:  no deserving person should have to live without freedom.

    God didn't make us to live in chains.

Rest well, Alexei Navalny.  Rest well in the hands of God.  And thank you.

    

 

    One of the most dazzling musicians of the Romantic Era, Frederick Chopin in his too short life (he died at the age of 39) composed a host of memorable pieces for the piano.  His works are marked by an exuberance of life that bursts with the sounds of memory and contemplation.  We listen to them and think about how his modest Polish origins blended with his relatively cosmopolitan lifestyle (he was well acquainted with Hungarian composer Franz Liszt and the novelist George Sand) to produce melodies that speak to many parts of our souls.

    As Lent continues apace, we find special call to remember Chopin.  We remember his creativity, we remember his vision.  We remember his angst and his too brief existence.  And we realize, again, that we live in a beautiful yet tragic world, that we dance on a very narrow line between being here and not, and that we, human beings, magnificent creators though we be, find our humanness most profoundly when we submit to the mystery of who we may not really believe we are.

    But what we will one day be.