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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

    

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Sometimes we have to deal with the whale first.

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

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

     When we were touring Nova 

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     It's the choice of a lifetime.