In a broken world, a world in which things do not always go as we wish them to, a world marked by tremendous joy and tragedy alike, we humans are prone to long for control.  Why can we not control the affairs of our lives? Why can we not ensure that we are not surprised by darkness?

     In this season of Lent, we have opportunity to rethink our longing for control.  Lent is all about giving up.  We give up our time, we give up our pursuits, we give up our lives, we give up control.  We recognize that we live in a world beyond our control.  We acknowledge that if we try to control everything, we will inevitably end up creating a world of us and us alone, a world without any real point except poor little us.  We reduce ourselves to a collection of atoms spinning madly in a nexus of space and time, avoiding everything but ourselves.

     Lent is one of God's ways of telling us that though we are remarkable creatures, entirely capable of directing the course of our lives, we will never understand and control it all.  We are finite, we have limits; our marvelous attributes can only take us so far.  Sooner or later, we encounter a bump:  we realize that we are not so remarkable that we in ourselves can decide what we are or what existence means. How could we?  We are only us.

     We are like the "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog," standing before the world, watching, planning, and waiting, yet bereft of ultimate control over that which we see.

     And that's precisely God's point:  in order to gain control, we must give it up.  We must give up who we are now to find whom we are destined to be.

  

    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 whom we may not really believe we are.

    But what we will one day be.

     

      Perhaps few people have been so convinced of the greatness of humanity (and the absence of God) as the twentieth century anarchist Emma Goldman, whose fiery speeches and voluminous literary output spurred on countless movements to set workers and, in truth, all humanity free, free from its oppressive bosses, free from its restrictive governments, free from its social conventions and, most importantly, free from religion.

     An unrepentant atheist, Ms. Goldman once wrote in The Philosophy of Atheism, which she published in 1916, that, "Atheism in its negation of gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty," and that, "Under the lash of the Theistic idea, this earth has served no other purpose than as a temporary station to test man's capacity for immolation to the will of God."

    

    On the one hand, it's not difficult to disagree with Ms. Goldman.  Wrongly interpreted, religion does tend to reduce our existence on this earth to a way station, a stepping stone to something much greater but which, absent a direct vision or attestation, cannot be fully proven.  In addition, religion, as it has sometimes been interpreted, tends to denigrate the human being, claiming that humans are little more than the spittle of the divine.  Also, needless to say, religion has, alas, been responsible for countless pain and wars throughout 

     On the other hand, rightly interpreted, religion has brought immense joy and happiness and meaning to millions, perhaps billions of human beings.  It has also provided many answers to ultimate questions.  Religion has brought hope.  While this of course doesn't make religion true, it certainly proves its worth in the human experience.  Religion is not wholly without merit.

     Ms. Goldman asserts that atheism is the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty.  Countless adherents of religion would assert this about religion, too.  But we can't have it both ways.  If humanity is solely material, how can it have eternal longings?

    It's hard to escape eternity.

    

     Shusaku Endo was a prolific Japanese author who passed away in 1996.  A life long Catholic, Endo wove religious themes into everything he wrote.  One of his most memorable novels was Silence.  Silence tells the story of an American priest who comes to Japan to evangelize one of the least Christianized nations on the planet.  Unsurprisingly, the priest encounters much apathy, even antagonism, as he attempts to carry out his mission.

    Eventually, the priest is arrested.  He subsequently endures what I can only describe as spiritual torture.  Slowly and steadily, his captors force him to confront the full import of the silence of God, to ask himself why God seems to be doing nothing to help him.  Why God seems absent and gone.  Why God has abandoned him.

    Subsequently, the priest appears to change his perspective. He rejects the Christian God and embraces the Buddhism of his captors.  His life is good.  Along the way, however, he sees numerous Christians, native Japanese who have converted as a result of Western evangelism, choosing to endure horrendous torture and painful deaths rather than abandon Jesus.  Even if God seems to do nothing for them.

    Even if God seems silent.

    Many years later, the priest dies.  Per custom, his body is placed in an urn to be burned.  As his material self slowly immolates, however, we read that he still has  one thing in his hand:  a crucifix.

    What of faith?  Even if God seems silent, be it for a moment or be it for decades, he is still there.  Transcendence may be elusive, but it is never gone.

 

     Did you fool yourself on April Fools Day?  Despite its frivolity, April 1 is also a day to remember one of the greatest of the Romantic pianists:  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 vast and unyielding import 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.  To put this in theological terms, 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.

      With the advent of Spring, we also remember the birthday of Johannes Sebastian Bach.  Wrapped in the rhythms of vernality and spring, Bach's birthday comes replete with the sounds of singing birds, greening forests, and 

 skies.  And his music fits the season.  Fresh, bright, and resonant with joy, Bach's music 

 the wonder of the newly born creation.

     We thank Bach for what he has shown us about life, wonder, and Spring.  We also thank Bach for giving us a glimpse of the unfolding mystery, and the mystery behind it, of this vast, vast--and loved--universe in which we revel.

     So did Bach write on every piece of music he composed, "Soli Deo Gloria" (All Glory to God Alone).  Bach knew very well from whence all things come, that we are not accidents.
     

    In this time of great uncertainty we can be grateful indeed that the world has a point.

    By the way, I'll be traveling for a couple of weeks and will not be posting.  See you upon my return.  Thanks for reading!

    

  

    Today is the day:  the Vernal Equinox,  the first day of spring.  For those of us who live in the colder climes of the planet, the Equinox is a day for which we wait, some of us patiently, others not, enduring or, for some, enjoying, a few or many months of snow, cold, and generally harsher meteorological conditions until, one day, it's over.  And we rejoice.

      

      In chapter thirteen of the third book of his Anna Karenin, Leo Tolstoy writes, 

    "Invisible larks broke into song above the velvety green fields and the ice-    covered stubble-land; peewits began to cry over the low lands and marshes, still bubbly with water not yet swept away; cranes and wild geese flew high across the sky, uttering their spring calls. The cattle, bald in patches where they had shed their winter coats, began to low in the pastures; lambs with crooked legs frisked round their bleating mothers who were losing their fleece; swift-footed children ran about the paths drying with imprints of bare feet; there was a merry chatter of peasant women over their linen at the pond and the ring of axes in the yard, where the peasants were repairing their ploughs and harrows.
    "Spring had really come."

    Indeed.  Enjoy the resurrectional character of existence!

        It’s “news from nowhere,” wrote nineteenth century artist and anarchist William Morris, "a new age that has come."  So his patterns and sketches state.  But unless we seek the well at the world’s end or, if we are so inclined, follow Charles Williams, he an Inking of Oxford fame, in his descent into hell, we look for this age in vain.  Like kainos, like chadash:  it comes out of nowhere.  

As it should.

     Many a theologian, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jew, and more, has told us that, well, it is God from which everything comes.  From this God, this hidden and omnipotent presence embedded in the circles of the universe, this immaterial yet material somethingness that somehow pervades all of reality, seen and unseen, they argue—in a variety of ways—comes all that is to be, as well as all that is to come.  What will one day be.  Even nowhere.  Once where, now nowhere, nowhere is where in disguise, a doppelgänger, a phantom, a voiceless voice of another world.

But that’s the point.  If, as the curious and inquisitive medieval thinker Hermes Trismegistus once contended, “God is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere,” then even if we know where “God” is, we really don’t.  Or as the Italian and allegedly, pantheist Giordano Bruno noted, building on Trismegistus’ words, “We can [only] state with certainty that the universe is all center, or that the center of the universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.”

Newness is our greatest unknown.

       If you're Irish or have some Irish in you, you may well be thinking about today:  St. Patrick's Day.  Patron saint of and missionary to the Irish nation, St. Patrick came into a remote and unsettled land dominated by various strands of Celtic religious thought and proceeded to teach and explain the Christian gospel.

     It seems that he did so rather successfully, too.  Despite what has historically been some very deep cultural rifts among the Irish populace, Christianity is still celebrated throughout the land. God and Jesus remain very important.
     

    One of the beauties of St. Patrick's Day is that although it is a commemoration of the saint's supposed day of death, it is on the other hand a day of celebration.  Sure, some people celebrate to excess, but usually even this is done with every good intention:  life is beautiful!
    

    Amidst the revelry, however, we sometimes overlook the profundity of what Patrick had to say.  Consider one of his meditations on Psalm 46:

     "Be still and know that I am God.
      Be still and know that I am.
      Be still and know.
      Be still.
      Be."

     Amidst the "beingness" and celebration, Patrick is saying, remember from whom it all comes.  "Be" in the fact of the creator.  Understand what life is really all about.

       As a 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 the human being as both male and female is 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.

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

     "Don't be indifferent.  Do not be indifferent when you see historical lies.  Do not be indifferent when any minority is discriminated against.  Do not be indifferent when power violates a social contract.  If you are indifferent, before you know it another Auschwitz will come out of the blue for you or your descendants."

    So said Marian Turski, a Holocaust survivor who died a couple of weeks ago at the age of 98.  At a time when some of those who hold public office act as if the rule of law means nothing, or when they try to rewrite history to suit their own narrative of why things are the way they are, we do well to heed Turski's words.  More than almost anyone else today, he knew the immense danger of projecting indifference to abuses of power.  Turski reminds us that the less we object to rulers taking liberty with the law, the more they will be encouraged to keep doing it.

    Far fetched?  Not really:  democracy only survives when those living with it work actively to sustain it.  Democracy cannot last without constant scrutiny of how it is being manipulated or abused--and people respond accordingly.

    What does this have to do with God?  Absolutely everything:  humans are made to be the fullest expressions of humanness they can be.

     This past Sunday marked the first Sunday of Lent.  Repentance and circumspection dominate, as those so inclined spend ever more time pondering the exigencies within their lives, the fleeting puffs of materiality in which we have life and breath.  Life looks more remarkable than ever:  a befuddling experience, yes, but the only experience, at this point, we have.

    Given the wonder of the world, it's easy to rejoice in life without also wondering why life is, why we have it, why this existence has been given to us.  To what end do we live?
 

    This is Lent's call.  Lent invites us to look at what matters most.  Who will we really be when we leave this world:  ashes or creatures of eternity?

    How do we know the will of God?  As Christians, particularly those living in the U.S., wonder how to respond to the actions of the new presidential administration, their feelings are mixed.  Some support his actions unreservedly, believing them to be of God.  Yet others oppose them just as passionately, and reject any notion that they reflect the will of God.

    Who's right?  Let's consider Jesus' words in the Garden of Gethsemane, words recorded in all three synoptic gospels--Matthew, Mark, and Luke--to God, namely, "Father, if it is possible, let this cup [his impending and certain crucifixion] pass from me; yet not as I will, but as you will," and ask ourselves this question:  can we be this unreservedly committed, too?

    Unlike us, Jesus knew all too well what God's specific will was for him.  And he wished that he could avoid it.  Yet Jesus told God he accepted whatever would come.  As should we.  We wander in this world as largely blind creations, really, confused and bewildered creatures who, through no choice of our own, find ourselves with sentient existence, find ourselves with lives of hopes, ambitions, passions, and dreams.  But we do not know what will come next.

    And we never will.  We'll never see everything.  In his humanness, Jesus didn't, either.  But he submitted; he opened himself to what he couldn't know.  Then he knew.

     "I am not afraid of chaos because chaos is the womb of light and life."  So said the Haitian artist Franketienne, who passed away recently at the age of 88.  Many of the creation stories of the world picture an earth that emerged from some form of chaos, disorder, or void to become a living entity.  That what we now see only exists as a result of processes that somehow wrested what was meant to be alive from an inert substance or condition that would never come to life.  That is, what is alive somehow emerged from what was not.  And what would never be.

    The larger question, then, is why?  Why do many creation accounts point to chaos as the womb of light and life?  Maybe because in positing a chaos out of which come life and being, we acknowledge that nothing can be meaningful apart from a greater meaning still.

    Birth, death, and life again.  In chaos we are born, yet not in chaos do we die.

  

    Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent.  It's a day that reminds us that we are ultimately no more than dust.  When we die and pass out of this life, what remains of us will soon be no more as well, returned to the earth from which it has come.

    The illustration on this page is of Jesus during his forty days in the deserts of Israel.  After his baptism but before he began his public ministry, Jesus spent forty days and nights in the desert.  While we do not know exactly what he did in that time (other than fending off the temptations of Satan), we can be sure that he meditated and prayed.  Of what he prayed we cannot be certain, but we can probably be safe on assuming that he, like many of the Jewish prophets before him, found profound solace and insight in the desert.  Being in the desert is an apt picture of journeying through Lent.  It's a constant reminder of who we, frail and fragile humans, really are:  ashes and dust.

    Before my siblings and I scattered my mother's ashes atop her favorite mountain in the San Gabriel Mountains of California in October of 2011, we opened the box that contained "her."  All that Mom ever was had been reduced to a small pile of ashes.  All her years, all her love, all her joy, all her meaning, all her hopes and dreams now no more than a bag of ashes.  It was sobering.

    Even more sobering is that one day, every one of us will be exactly the same.  Happily, however, even as it reminds us of our mortality, Ash Wednesday also reminds us to acknowledge that we are not dust and ashes only. We are spiritual beings, physical creatures with spiritual form and transcendent vision, created by a spiritual and eternal God.  We are not, as the psalmist once wrote, "phantoms" (Psalm 39).

    There is more to us, and existence, than what we see.

    And in this is our hope.

  

     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 as closely to the object under observation as possible, as art moved into the nineteenth century, artists began to paint not as things necessarily were but as how an object "impressed" them, as how 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 and tragic both.  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.

     Almost all of us have read a tale compiled by the brothers Grimm.  Some are funny, some are romantic, some are simply horrid.  We often wonder what the point was.  The sad truth is that these tales, drawn from a wide range of tales from many parts of the world, in fact underscore humanity's propensity to delve into all of these things--humor, romance, terror--and, despite it all, to keep going.

    In general, despite any misgivings about them, we love the tales:  they are us.  Our fears, desires, and longings are embedded in a cast of characters no one person could have created.  We're all there.  All of us.

    Significantly, however, although we see in these tales hints of the ethereal, mysterious, and maybe the supernatural, we never see words about God.

    Maybe that's the point.  Absent God, we flail in vain.  We flail in vain to define what we mean, what we mean by good, what we mean by evil.  What we mean by existence.

    And life, its joy, its challenge, its good, its bad, goes on.  And on.  And on . . . .

       Back from my time away (about which I will have more share next week) to urge everyone to pray for our Muslim brothers and sisters today.  Ramadan, one of the greatest events in the Muslim calendar, begins tonight.   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.

       Although in many ways Valentine's Day, which some of us are remembering today, has become (or, I might say, degenerated into) a Hallmark holiday, it actually has a measure of legitimate historical origin.  Its name comes from St. Valentine, one of many martyrs in the early years of the Christian Church.  Valentine gave his life for what he believed to be the greater good of God.

    Subsequently, however, as the early Church faded into history, the name Valentine morphed into a day associated with earthly love and romance.  Nonetheless, it's still a good day.  What harm can come from thinking about love?

    

    Years ago, the Beatles sang that, "All you need is love."  In more ways than the Fab Four likely thought at the time, this is one of the truest statements in all the world.  In an impersonal universe, a beautiful but empty cosmos, love remains the greatest thing.

    

    But we must ask a question:  how can love exist in a universe without meaning and therefore no words for it?

    Maybe that's why Valentine was willing to die:  he knew that, ultimately, love cannot be without the fact of God.

    By the way, I'll be traveling for a couple or so weeks and will not be posting.    Talk to you upon my return.  Thanks for reading!

      A few months ago, an old friend, a college friend, of mine posted a clip of Joni Mitchell singing her anthem "Woodstock."  In posting it, my friend stated that, in this dark age (politically, culturally, and otherwise) listening to this song gave her hope.

     Maybe not all of us believe we are living in dark times.  But all of us can connect to the thrust of Mitchell's song, that we are "stardust and golden," and that we've got to "get back to the garden."
     Are we golden?  Absolutely.  We shine with wonder and marvel.  Are we stardust?  A literal six day creation account notwithstanding, yes, we are stardust, our origins buried deeply in the primordial plasma out of which the cosmos came.  Although we are made in the image of a creator, we are, as countless religious traditions attest, ultimately dust, be it from the earth, the stars, or both.

     Why do we long for the garden?  Amidst the technological and cultural fracturing of our age, we long for an experience of something pristine, something untouched, something beyond the chaotic machinations of our day.  We long for restoration, we long for greater meaning.  And somehow, for many of us, we sense that this is to be found in a garden, a paradise (the Persian word from which the English word comes) of floral verdancy, equanimity and abundance, harmony and rest.
     

    And why not?  Created and personal creatures that we are, we long to be connected with that out of which we came:  infinite abundance.

         Born into a Jewish family (although his father separated himself from Judaism before Felix was born) and later baptized as a Christian, Felix Mendelssohn composed in a wide range of genres, choral to orchestral to chamber to operatic, each work distinguished by its melody, passion, and attention to detail.  Some of his most famous works is "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing," 

"Overture to a Midsummer Night's Dream," and the "Wedding March."  He was acknowledged as a prodigy early in his life, most notably by Goethe, writer of the timeless story of Faust.  People found his music uniquely captivating.

     As I think about Mendelssohn, I realize, again, the remarkable fact of music.  To form sound, to frame melody, to write song:  there is nothing quite like this  in all the cosmos.
    

    Before composers like Mendelssohn, we can therefore only stand in amazement, astonished that we can emulate, albeit in shattered form, the timeless and ageless marvel of that which empowers and expresses what is.

    We live in a dynamic, porous, and transcendent world.

     If you lived in Southern California during World War II (I did not, but my parents did), you likely remember the Japanese-American internment.  As the war raged on, the U.S. government forcibly evicted roughly 120,000 Japanese-Americans from their homes and locked them into various internment camps around the state of California.  It was cruel, it was illegal, it was a travesty.  It left a dark stain on America, the supposed land of the free and home of the brave.

    That notwithstanding, I recall my parents talking to me about the injustice of it all, and how much we should work to avoid such a thing ever happening again.  Agreed.  That's why as I read Mananzar, a widely praised memoir of a young girl's (Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston at the time of her death earlier this year at the age of 90) time in the camps, originally published in 1972, with a very heavy heart.

    I was particularly moved by the author's account of her return visit to Manzanar,  decades after her confinement.  She wandered through the silent and decaying camp (it is now a national historic monument), remembering her time there.  Then she came upon a barbed wire enclosure containing about a dozen graves, the final resting places of those who had died in the camp.  Inscribed on a stone in the enclosure was “A Memorial to the Dead.” 

    We humans are capable of much material greatness, but it is perhaps only when we grieve and remember that we reflect most poignantly and acutely our creation as personal beings in the image of God.

    Grief is meaningless in an impersonal world.

    I had not thought much about obelisks until I recently read a lengthy and detailed book about them.  Who would have supposed there was so much to these singular spires of stone?  Although I remember reading, in graduate school, Hammurabi's Laws as they had been inscribed in Akkadian on the Stele (obelisk) of Hammurabi, I didn't think much about the stele itself.

    As I pondered obelisks more, however, I recalled the famous ziggurats of ancient Sumer, along with the biblical Tower of Babel (which most scholars believe was a type of ziggurat).  One purpose of these structures was to set humans closer to the gods whom they believed resided in the capacious skies above them.  A modern counterpart might be the many cathedrals built in medieval Europe.

   Either way, be it as monument or temple, obelisks seem to have exercised a curious hold on the human imagination.  In their own peculiar way, obelisks express humanity's astonishing proclivity to remember even as it looks ahead.  To celebrate what has been, what is now, and what might come.  Creatures of memory that we are, we love to commemorate.  Yet being creatures of vision as well, we can't suppress an innate desire to prognosticate.

    Commemorate, prognosticate:  can either of these happen in an impersonal world?

    "Without revelation, the people perish."  Translated as the first part of Proverbs 29:18 in the King James version of the Bible, these few words say volumes about the state of reality.  From the Bible's standpoint, revelation is communication, communication from God.  Revelation describes the fact of God, presents the words of God; revelation discloses who God is.

    Without revelation, as the writer says, we miss the point.  We live in a closed world, a terminal system.  We cannot see beyond ourselves.  Revelation is the higher ideal, the greater meaning without which we cannot make sense of who we are.  Absent revelation, we wallow in the speculations of our finitude, even while we remain fully aware of our tendency to look beyond it.

    Despite the efforts of so-called "anti-foundationalists" to prove that we do not need any guiding ideal to function rationally, we all need a higher vision to make sense of our lives.

    So whose revelation is right?  All of them?  None of them?  If we strip religion of its supernatural dimensions, we are left with a revelation of ourselves and our ideals, ideals which we and ourselves, and only we and ourselves, assess and judge.  And how do we ultimately know?  It seems that revelation and greater vision are most meaningful if they reflect the vision of a reality out of which this present one comes.

      

     Many years ago I had a conversation with a young man on his way to the Burning Man Festival in the desert of Nevada.  At the time, I happened to be in South Dakota, working on an Indian reservation.  As we talked, it became clear to me that even though this young man didn’t appear to have any use for conventional religion, Christianity in particular, he had decided to journey to the Festival because he had “to find my spiritual roots.”  Although he wasn’t sure what those roots were, he was pretty much convinced that the Festival was the place to look for them.  He was persuaded that amidst the cacophony of cultural expressions he would see there, he would eventually step into a place, a place of spirit, however he defined it, he had not been before.

     

    As we talked, I thought often about the opening pages of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  The person before me seemed a mirror of the young man Joyce so insightfully describes, a person alone and apart, untrammeled and free, someone standing on the cusp of his destiny, poised to find his path forward.  

    In the end, however, this young man told me that although he had definitely heard a call, a deeply compelling internal directive to find himself, he didn't want to learn about it in the framework of the Christian God.

    It was that fact of framework, he said, that held him back:  spirituality, he said, has no boundaries.

    

    Fair enough.  If an infinite God is there, however, it seems as if whatever spirituality we encounter will be grounded ultimately in him.

    We will only know if God makes himself known in ways we understand.

          In the U.S., February is Black History Month.  In truth, one finds it rather odd that we must set aside a month to celebrate a history of a people whose lineage is considerably longer than that of the more dominant race in the world today, that is, white people.  In fact, as Nell Irvin Painter points out in her 2011 The History of White People, it is the white skin color that, from a genetic standpoint, is the more "aberrant" of human skin colors.  Moreover, whether we believe that humanity began in southern Iraq vis a vis the Garden of Eden, the savannah and gorges of central and southern Africa, or some combination of the two (which, given geological shifts many eons ago, seems likely), we must admit that our earliest ancestors were anything but lily white.

     Due to racist behavior perpetrated by other races and ethnicities in the course of human history, the virtues of Black culture have often been ignored, suppressed or, worse, abused and destroyed.  This has been at our peril.  We can only enjoy and appreciate humanity when we can explore and experience all of its manifestations.  That we realize that, over and above us all, is a God who has created us to be, in the world he has made, together.

     This month, and every month, celebrate the marvel of our amazingly manifold humanness.

      In the heat of existence, on the days when we are feeling particularly overwhelmed with the exigencies of being alive, we may feel as if we are like people who, as Virginia Woolf observed in her "Lives of the Obscure," are "advancing with lights in the growing gloom," heading toward obscurity, the obscurity of a life lived, a life enjoyed immensely but a life one day to end and be gone, never to return.

      Believing in more than life is hard in the morass of the material present.  We cannot see it, so why put our trust in it?

    Fair enough.  Yet as William Yeats reminds us, "And God stands winding his lonely horn, and time and the world are ever in flight."  Though time wears on and the years drag by, unyielding, sometimes burdensome, and, ever changing, something permanent remains.

    It's hard to see the end of a road at its beginning, yes, but if the world is to have any point, any point at all, there is always a road to follow.  And there is always an end.  An end rooted in the permanence of the necessarily personal ground of existence.

   

    Franz Schubert was one of the most remarkable musicians in Western history.  Immensely productive and profoundly creative, Schubert wrote some of the most ethereal and haunting melodies of all time.  We listen to his music and feel transported, lifted above what is earthly and material, moved into transcendence.

    Schubert's music reminds us that if music only told us what we already know, we probably wouldn't get as much out of it as we do.  We do not need to be reminded of what is obvious and normal.  We rather need to be encouraged to ponder what is beyond the apparent, what breaks down the seen, what splits the visible apart.  We want to know what we, at the moment, cannot.

    Every day we balance, balance between presence and absence, perched on a slippery. boundary dividing yet bridging present reality and ultimate destiny.  We walk in a wisp, gossamer veils stretched between us and the other side of time.

   Then we bump into eternity.  And life becomes bigger than life itself.

     

     Perhaps you can identify with a longing for outdoor adventure, a visceral urge to step out of the regular and normal, to break away from the staid rhythms of quotidian existence. You might wish to be tromping through an uncharted wilderness area hundreds of miles from anyone or anything else.  You may want to seek the deepest unknown there is.

    American novelist Jack London wrote profoundly on this spirit of adventure, this thirst to explore, to topple boundaries, to abandon everything in quest of inner fulfillment.  His Call of the Wild captures this urge perfectly:  the lonely yet determined human pitted against the forces of the distant and remote wilderness, the former seeking meaning, the latter inundating him with it.

     There are many wilds, there are many unknowns.  Although London focused on the wilds of the material world, it's not difficult to see that in seeking the wilds of this world, we cannot help but find the wilds of another.  Finite creatures wandering in a nearly infinite cosmos, we humans need the wilds of transcendent mystery to really see who we are.

        What we say about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (his birthday was yesterday)?  Although Mozart died, sadly, at the tender age of 35, he produced an array of musical expression that most musicologists agree is unmatched.  As a contemporary said of him, "He was like an angel sent to us for a season, only to return to heaven again."

    Confronted with Mozart's prodigious talents, we marvel.  We marvel at the nature of the human being, we marvel that we are creatures of such remarkable abilities, that we are gifted in a nearly infinite number of ways.  How could such a thing be?

    Such is something for which materialistic evolution has yet to give us a convincing answer.  Its inability to do so reminds us that, consciousness and sentience aside, we, and life, are far more complex than an inexplicably fortunate blend of chemicals.  

    

    Maybe we really are not alone in the universe.

 

        Today, January 27, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  It is a day that should cause all of us to stop, think, and weep.  How does one begin to grasp the deliberately engineered deaths of over six million people?  How does one connect with a person who lost the sum of his lineage in a concentration camp?  How can we possibly comprehend being the object of such virulent hatred and racism?

    And how can we categorize those who fomented this horror?

     We can't.  And that's the point.  God aside, evil has no explanation.  It has no point, it has no plan.  It is beyond our ability to fully understand.  Many Holocaust scholars insist, and rightly so, that the Holocaust is an event that surpasses the widest and deepest boundaries of our ken and imagination.  It's beyond intelligibility.
     

    Yet it happened.  So does 1986 Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel ask, "How can you not believe in God after Auschwitz?"

    Precisely.  Though the Holocaust overturns all convention notions of who God is, it also affirms him.  Take away God and all we have left is ourselves, our confused and meaningless selves in a dreadfully empty universe.

     Weep for our Jewish brothers and sisters, and pray for those who persecute them.  And believe.  At all costs, believe in the ultimacy of God.

    In a blast from the past, I recently watched the movie The Company You Keep. It's a movie based on a novel, which is in turn based loosely on a real life incident in the lives of the Weathermen, the radical faction of the Students for a Democratic Society who, for a brief period in the early Seventies, perpetrated a campaign of bombings and other violence to bring down what they viewed as the oppressive and established order in the United States.

    Central to the plot is that one member of the Weathermen who had eluded capture for over thirty years and is now a settled and productive member of society is exposed by an intrepid newspaper reporter.  He immediately goes even deeper underground.  As he does so, he makes contact with another former comrade whom he knows can clear his name (it turns out that contrary to what the FBI thinks, he was actually not present when the incident in question, the killing of a bank guard, occurred), a person who, like he, has been living underground for all these years.  So the question becomes this:  will she decide to turn herself in and exonerate him even if it probably means spending the rest of her life in prison?

    Writing some decades ago, a theologian named Francis Schaeffer observed that the protesters of the Sixties were correct about the decadence of Western government and the corporate obsession with individualism and material bounty.  But their methods, he went on to say, were flawed.  On the latter point, it is hard to disagree.  Though many protests were orderly and peaceful, many were not. 

    Later in his life, Schaeffer, who died in 1984, wrote that in the coming years people living in the West will be concerned with only two things:  personal peace and affluence.  As we look at Western society today, it's difficult to disagree with him.  People in the West want their peace, and they want their affluence.  The irony of this, as the protesters pointed out, is that if we value personal peace as much as we do affluence, we will never be satisfied.  If we want personal or spiritual peace, we must set aside our interest in material wealth and consider the ultimate questions of existence.  If we want affluence and wealth, however, we must do just the opposite.
     

    That's why, as I look back on the Sixties from the other side of spiritual conversion, I see that after all these years, the same problem remains.  How do we determine and enjoy what matters most?  Put another way, how do we balance living to meet our material needs (not wants!) with living to understand why we live in the first place?  As many religions have demonstrated, such balance is possible.  It is only possible, however, if we agree, before we do anything else, that there is a reason, a reason beyond our finite and limited scope of purpose and ken, to see life as more than a random accident or quantum whim.  Only when we let go of the immediate will we see essence of our deeper existential purpose.

     Speaking of freedom (as I did Monday), one of the ironies of MLK day was that on that same day America inaugurated a new president who, as far as I can tell, has, historically, paid little attention to the notion of freedom for all.  Although some may say that he is attempting to remedy that, I believe that he will not do so at the expense of the landed and wealthy class whose donations to his campaign helped propel him back into power.

    That aside, one of the most unnerving statements, at least from my standpoint, that the new president made in his inaugural address is, "Just a few months ago, in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin's bullet ripped through my ear.  But I felt then and believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason.  I was saved by God to make America great again."

    Really?  History is littered with people who have made similar statements.  People who emerged amidst the flotsam of the human adventure, "shone" briefly, then faded away, buried in the dust to which all human beings will one day go.  What did God think about their assertions?

    Though I cannot say, I believe I know enough about the ways of religion and history know that to claim that one is divinely chosen to "save" a nation is an exceedingly dangerous thing to say.  How can anyone know, absolutely know, the "will" of God?

    As a minister acquaintance of mine told me last week, "American Christians do not know that they have unleashed by voting for Donald Trump."

    Carry on.

    As many of you may know, today the U.S. remembers the birthday of civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr.  Central to this commemoration is King's belief, a belief he shared with millions of others, that freedom, the ability to do what one chooses, when one chooses to do it, is one of humanity's greatest privileges and blessings.  We all deserve to be free.

    Freedom is wonderful, and freedom is intoxicating.  But freedom can be frightening.  We often do not know what to do with it.  We frequently do not know what its fullness really means.  We frequently miss the point.  We abuse it terribly.    

    King, however, grasped the larger point:  freedom is only meaningful if it is grounded in something bigger than itself.  It is more than a release from physical bondage, a slip of one material experience to another. 

     We are not free in an accidental universe, a cosmos without definition; we are free in a universe made real by truth itself.