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.