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.