"Midnight Sky" tells the story of a scientist living alone in a research outpost in the far North who is one of the only people to survive a global catastrophe that killed most of the planet's inhabitants.  As a result of the catastrophe (whose precise nature is never fully explained), the planet's air is toxic and unbreathable.  No one will live above ground again.

    One day, however, he hears from a spaceship, Aether, on its way from Jupiter back to earth.  He tells them to go back to Jupiter's inhabitable moon.

     

    At this point, only two crew members, a man and woman, are still on the ship.  She's pregnant.  What to do?

    

    They turn back to Jupiter.

    

    On this New Year's Eve, on a day in which many of us reflect on the year that is almost finished and ponder what lies ahead, and wonder, sometimes with optimism, sometimes with trembling, what the New Year will bring, it's a question worth thinking about:  how much are we wiling to trust the unknown?

    

    Put another way, what are we most willing to trust:  where we know we've been or where we do not know we're going--but must go anyway?

    Happy New Year!

     Unless you've been living in a cave, you likely know that Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, passed away yesterday, December 30th.  Regardless of how we feel about him, his presidency, even his post-presidential years, we can agree, I think, that Carter lived an exemplary life of service and dedication to the dignity and welfare of humanity.  The world is a poorer place in the wake of his passing.

    In 2015 I was privileged to attend a conference at the Carter Center in Atlanta.  During my time there, amidst the meetings and seminars, I met Jimmy Carter.  I'll not forget it.  He was a thoroughly kind and humble human being.

    Let us give thanks for Jimmy Carter.

     Have you ever read Revelation, the last book of the Bible?  It's a wild book.  After walking through a forest preserve the other day, I decided to read it, again.  As always, I wondered about its precise meaning.  How will John's vision of the end of the world really be expressed in the span of human history and time?  Will there really be massive lights and flames in the sky?  Will there really be angels sounding trumpets across the planet?  Will there really be a plague of some type of locust that will kill one third of humankind?  Are there really glassy seas in heaven?

     No doubt, some of these descriptions are figurative, and no doubt that the person who had this vision lived in a very different time from our own, many historical miles from the abundant scientific technology we possess for exploring cosmological variants today.

    Yet maybe that's not the point.  I think most of us can agree that the world will one day end, as will all of us.  And I think that all of us can agree that when we die we will no longer be physically attached to our earthly achievements.  Death is thoroughly black and white.  We're either alive, or we are dead.  There's nothing in between.

     So what do we really know?  Two things.  One, life means more, right now, because it ends.  We do not know our time.  We therefore strive to make every minute count.  Two, if God, in some way, is working through the world, this end means more than itself.  Each moment rests in the tangible vision of a personal and infinite God.

    Although Christmas has dominated the holiday news lately, we cannot overlook that today, the day after Christmas, yesterday, marks the first day of Kwanza.  Based on a Swahili term meaning "first fruits," Kwanza, its principles grounded in African culture, celebrates  harvest, bounty, and human diversity.

        Kwanza lauds the beauty and meaningfulness of this world, its harvest, its bounty, its joy of a year rightly lived.  The happiness of living in a world whose wonder speaks constantly to us, the beauty of the rhythms of the planet:  a call to treasure the immensity of existence.

     Christmas's celebration of God's presence in the world is essential, yes, but Kwanza's rejoicing in the munificence which this presence ensures is worth remembering, too.

   

    For the first time in many years, Hanukkah (Chanukah) begins today:  Christmas Day!  Although Hanukkah is a minor holiday on the Jewish liturgical calendar, its proximity to Christmas has, historically, tended to magnify its meaning in the Western world.

    And what is that meaning?  Hanukkah commemorates the rededication of the Second Temple after it had been profaned by the Seleucid emperor Antiochus Epiphanes (he sacrificed a pig on the inner altar) in the second century B.C.E.  It is often called the "Festival of the Lights."

    Indeed:  the Light.  The light and faithfulness of God, the Creator's continuing gift and bestowal of life and illumination to human beings.  Hanukkah reminds us that each day we walk in the grace of an infinitely remarkable light, a light without which we would not be.

    The light of a personal God.

    To our Jewish brethren:  enjoy the eight nights of lights!

   

    Most of us have heard the "Christmas story" countless times.  Across the world for thousands of years, people have read and pondered, over and over, Luke's account of Jesus' birth.  One might almost think that there is nothing new to find in it.

    But there always is.  As I was reading it this year, I found myself struck anew by the thought that the first people to hear about Messiah's birth were shepherds.  In Jesus' day, shepherds were despised, viewed as the lowest of the low, the modern day equivalent of the Roma of Europe.  Few wished to associate with them.  They spent their days--and nights--largely apart from the rest of the people, living lonely lives in the fields and hillsides of the nations.

   But the shepherds were the first to know.  They were the first to be told.  Before anyone else knew, the shepherds knew about the birth of Messiah.

    God remembered those whom the world had forgotten.

    Christmas reminds us that when all is said and done, we should understand that God, the vastness of personal transcendence, is not about greatness.  He's about humility.

    And love.  Love for a humanity who had dismissed and fogotten about him.

    Merry Christmas!

       If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you may know that today, December 21, is the winter solstice.  The "shortest" day of the year.  Or as Robert Frost puts it in his "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "the darkest night."  Happily, although it may not seem like it, the winter solstice is actually the grand turning point of the year, the day and night in which time and light begin to grow.  It's the end of the light, yes, but its genesis, too.  We lose, yet we win, moving, ever so slightly, toward the greater light to come. 

    I love the winter.  I love how it masks and shrouds, I love how it engages reflection, I love how it sends us into places we would not otherwise go.  And I love how winter helps us "see" what sight can be.  As we trek through these darker days, we come to understand that light is not illumination only.  Light is rather the underlying rhythm of all creation, a continuity of divine favor, a favor that speaks in gloom as well as joy, a favor that underscores the fact of a purposeful planet:  "The Light of the world."

      

     

    Step into the darkness, treasure the light.  Enjoy the marvel of a remarkably consistent--and persistent--personal creation.

       

      Defining spirituality is difficult.  If we attribute it to a god, we miss that many unbelievers attest to having spiritual experiences.  If we assign it to a nebulous immaterial presence, we encounter the problem of making something amorphous and undefinable into something that is physically real.  And if we say that spirituality is thoroughly human, we run into the perennial dilemma of understanding how consciousness can emerge from inert matter.

    Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian surrealist painter, thought much about spirituality in regard to art.  He did so as a way of explaining how art overwhelmed what he considered to be the spiritual darkness of Marxism.  In art, Kandinsky said, we feel hints of transcendence, intimations of things we cannot easily fathom, emotional insights that we do not experience otherwise.  We look into another world, a world of purer light, real or imagined, a world that eclipses the rigid (and, to him, meaningless) materialism of the Marxist worldview.

    Kandinsky's art reflects his words aptly.  It is sometimes difficult to grasp, but that's his point:  spirituality isn't supposed to be simple.  If it were, it would be no more than another product of our material human whims.

   

    Maybe that's why the Incarnation is so true yet so befuddling.

     

    

 

     "For the people who walk in darkness," wrote the prophet Isaiah, "will see a great light (Isaiah 9:1)."  Isaiah speaks of Messiah, the one who would come to illuminate an Israel darkened by disappointment, abandonment, and sin.  He speaks of the Christ (the Messiah, "the anointed one") who would enlighten and save all those who longed for him.  He speaks of the light that would come.
     

    On the third week of Advent, we remember this fact of Messiah's light.  We remember how, like the rising sun exploding over a frigid mountain ridge, Messiah--Jesus--has brought us light, the light of enlightenment, the light of hope and meaning that shines through the cold of an often Munchian existence.  It is a light that, if we embrace its rising, embrace it as fervently and without reservation, will change our lives forever.
    

    Though we may struggle with the idea of eternality, though we may question the presence of God, we all long for light. We all long for hope and meaning.  We all long for a window into a richer existence.
    

    In an accidental universe, however, richness is impossible, for value and morality cannot be.  Only in the light, the light of transcendence, a transcendence made known in Jesus, Jesus the image and person of God, can hope likewise be.
    

    The light of the world.

       What can we say about Ludwig von Beethoven?  This famous portrait of him captures how many of us see him:  a brooding, brilliant composer.  Beethoven's music comes to us as a force of nature, barreling and twisting its way into our hearts, breaking our souls apart, forcing us to grapple with and contemplate the deeper forces that drive human existence.  We swoon over the viscerally of Beethoven's melodies, we wonder about the power of the humanness and universe which his songs describe.  A Romantic in the purest sense, Beethoven reminds us of other worlds and other things, of the presence and possibilities of transcendence.

    I thank God for Beethoven.  I thank him for giving him to us, for giving him to show us as we are, beings of mind as much as creatures of heart, living, personal, dynamic entities made to step bravely and meaningfully into the weighty potential and contingencies of life, to take hold of everything that is before us.

    Given the many stories and legends that surround his life, we may never know exactly what Beethoven thought about God.  Regardless, he makes us think of him.

    Beethoven's music intrinsically  drives us to wonder about the mystery of life and the mind of its creator.

    I thank God for using Beethoven to open and unfold for us glimpses of what we, life, and God, can be.

 

    "For the grace of God has appeared," writes the apostle Paul in the third chapter of his letter to Titus, "bringing salvation to all people" (Titus 2:11).  As we remember the second Sunday of Advent, we can think afresh about the idea that in the historical person named Jesus, we see, in flesh and blood, concrete and visible expression of God's grace, the physical manifestation and display of his truest posture toward humanity.  Jesus' appearance tells us that, above all, God is love:  the grace of God.
    

    We grant each other grace every day, as we should.  Yet it is God's grace that elevates us above the senseless and confusing vagaries of the world in which we live.  It is this grace that tells us that there is hope, a hope that reality is more than what we see, a hope that frames and orders and grants meaning to all we do.  It is a hope that tells us that whatever else we may think about God, what we ought to think most about him is this:  God is loving, God is gracious, and God is for us, for us today, for us tomorrow, for us forever. 
   

    This may leave you nonplussed.  Fair enough.  However, do we really want to believe that this world, this magnificent and bounteous and amazing world, is nothing more than an accident?

Due to traveling and other holiday commitments, I've not been posting regularly.  Now that I'm here fora while, I hope to be more consistent going forward.  Thanks for checking in!