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.