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 . . . .