"To be or not to be, that is the question:  whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them." 

    So wrote the Bard of Avon, otherwise known as William Shakespeare, generally acknowledged as one of the greatest playwrights who ever lived.  Ah, Shakespeare:  we marvel at his ability to write such striking and memorable poetry and prose.  We are awestruck at his insight into the human condition, at his ability to create such stunning portraits of humans at the peaks of triumph and the nadir of despair.  At his remarkable capacity for capturing life, for divulging the intimacies of what it means to be a human being.

     To be or not to be?  Do not we all ask ourselves this at some point?  Do not we all wonder why we are here?  What we should do?  Why will it end?
     

    Indeed.  We are only human, but ironically, that is all, Shakespeare constantly reminds us, we ought to be.
    

    And so, in this bewildering and astonishing world, is God.

     With millions of people around the world, I mourn the passing of Pope Francis.  Yes, he made some mistakes, and yes, he said some things he probably should not have said.  But Francis loved God, and he loved all the people he made.  He turned no one down, he turned no one away.  He sought to build a church that welcomes all, a church that is more concerned with inclusivity than doctrinal rigidity, a church that strove to, above all, let people know that God loves them.

    In addition, due to his position as the head of the largest Christian denomination on the planet, Francis had a degree of fame greater than all other spokespeople for religion.  He thus had extraordinary opportunities to tell the world that, whether people believe it or not, God indeed exists, and that he loves all people who do as well.  Francis kept the light of God at the forefront of the human imagination.

    For this, we should be grateful.  As the world continues on its merry (and no so merry, too) way, we all do well to remember the bigger picture.  That over and above all, there is a God who is infusing the entire cosmos with lasting point, purpose, and love.  Meaning prevails, hope remains.  Always.

    Rest well, Francis.

     “I have not an ounce of religious conviction in my body, yet I still feel the urge to fight with the forces of unknown walls.  It has almost become a necessary part of life for me, to always look for the next challenge, the next triumph, the next conquest, to feel happiness again, even if only for a moment, and think that, well, history may never have been, so shall we always remain suspended in the present.”  And "all that remains is to embrace the obstacle and the unknown, to fight for meaning, to encounter and fight through fear and dread, to conquer all."

    So said mountaineer Dougal Haston.  Born in Scotland, he learned to love mountains and climbing them very early in his life.  Strong, agile, and gifted with incredible stamina, he soon made his mark across the globe.  In the Alps, he joined an epic first direct winter ascent of the north face of the Eiger.  Later, he scaled the southwest face of Mt. Everest, the first person to do so (without oxygen), even spending, with his partner, a night just below the summit.

    And he survived.  But in October 1976 he left his house in Switzerland alone to ski a mountain face, a very dangerous mountain face, on which he had long set his sights.  While he was on it, the snow on the face avalanched, and he died.

    His body was found the next day.

    Some might see Dougal's words as the enduring human call to wrest meaning from a seemingly pointless reality.  Others will view them as the picture of futility, a senseless effort to find meaning when there is none to be found.  In a way, however, it's both.  We all live, we all die.  And we all look to make those years meaningful.

    Hence, the ultimate question is this.  Will we seek to encounter the meaning that is necessarily there, or will we strive to find the meaning that, absent viable genesis, will never be found?

        Today is Earth Day!  Established in 1970, Earth Day is a day on which we think anew about the wonder and fragility of the tiny globe on which we spin through this vast, vast cosmos. Earth Day is a call to attend to the ecological balance of the world.

    Many, however, deride Earth Day.  The reasons for their rejection are various:  religious, political, and economic.  And more.

     

    Perhaps Earth Day opponents should learn from the Greek mythological character Narcissus. So obsessed was Narcissus with his own image reflected in a stream, he bent down to look.  Enraptured, he continued to look, getting closer and closer until he put his head in the water and drowned.
    

    Are we so enraptured with ourselves that we do not pay attention to any other creatures?  if we ever suppose that we, we little human beings, are kings of the planet and therefore answer to no one, the world will drown us, metaphorically and, perhaps actually, too, in the effects of our ecological follies.  We will lose everything God has given to us.
    

    As the psalmist writes, "The earth is the Lord's and all within it" (Psalm 24:1).  Let's use our gift responsibly.

 

     "If there were no death, there would be no rebirth," the German artist Anselm Keifer once said.  Quite.  Keifer's observation recognizes the embedded rhythms of the universe.  Throughout the breadth and depth of the cosmos, nothing, be it a star, lion, or human being, can be born without someone or something, somewhere and somehow, experiencing death, of some kind.

    For anyone familiar with the second law of thermodynamics, which tells us that the total amount of matter and energy in the universe is constant, and that therefore when energy is lost, matter gains, and vice versa, this may not be a big surprise. On the other hand, the immutable factuality of this law simply affirms Keifer's point:  unless we live in a completely static universe (and what kind of a cosmos would that be?), we will confront, every moment of every day, this cycle of death, in some fashion, and, in some similar fashion, rebirth.

    Is some process of resurrection therefore imprinted into the fabric of the cosmos?  Absolutely.  Resurrection between matter and energy, however, is one thing; resurrection into an totally new life is quite another.

    Therein is the greatest mystery of all.  One in which, however, we all can rejoice. There really is, as one commentator once said, "Life after life after death."  Absent this, it's a pretty empty world. 

    "I went down to the countries beneath the earth, to the nations of the past; but you have brought up my life from the pit, O Lord, my God."  The Hebrew prophet Jonah, he of being swallowed by a whale fame, understood life well:  so is the fate of all nations.  None will last forever; none will endure indefinitely.

    Neither will we.  One day, we, too, will descend to the lands beneath the earth, slip out of this existence into another one, one far darker than this present experience, fade from all that we know and love, never to return.

    As I try to come to grips with the fact of Good Friday, the day of absolute nadir and blackness, the moment in which time itself ran away, the point when all that we love tumbled into the heart of the lingering darkness that it ultimately is.  It's a heartbreaking picture of the underbelly of all form and evanescence.  So I wonder about Jonah's words.  We will not know what death is like until we die.  And we will not really know life until it is gone.
    

      It can seem a cold world, a cold and insensate world, a world that for too many of us often seems to not care one whit who we are.  Or whom we one day might be.  We may tremble, we may leap.  We ponder our joy, we avoid our ephemerality.  But we are both.
    

    And what will we do?

     It's Holy Week.  Holy Week is about suffering, helplessness, and pain.  It's also about joy, pure and holy joy.  Holy Week takes us into the deepest of darknesses, yes, but it also takes us into the most profound of all light.

    Holy Week tells us that the end of the story is that on which we must focus most.  Indeed, pain is part and parcel of our lives.  But only part.  In Jesus' suffering, we see ourselves.  And he us.  But it is in Jesus' resurrection that we ought to see ourselves even more.  It is in that pivotal moment, that epochal moment in which God conquered death that we must look.  For it is in it that we see our future best.

    Consider the Modern Museum of Art's description of the painting to your right:  "The Disaster Paintings eternalize the real-life modern events we are faced with daily in contemporary society yet quickly forget when the next catastrophe occurs."
    

    Maybe, however, we're focusing on the wrong thing here.  Jesus' death presents a God who is bigger than disaster, a God who is bigger than the very darkest of pain.  Jesus died, yes, Messiah slain, but God lives.  And Jesus rose.

     And God is God.  Though disaster fills this world, God's power fills it even more.

      Last Saturday night was the first night of Passover.  It is a solemn moment, yet one filled with rejoicing.  At its core, Passover is about the faithfulness of God.  It remembers how, many centuries past, God liberated the Hebrews from a four hundred year captivity in Egypt, delivering them, eventually, into the promised land.  For this reason, around the world, millions of Jewish families gathered for the seder meal, the meal whose various components point to  liberation.

    And what is liberation?  It is to be free.  Physical freedom, yes, but more significantly, spiritual freedom:  redemption.

    It is redemption that lies at the heart of Passover.  And in this is an object lesson for all of us.  Though we treasure physical freedom, unless we experience spiritual freedom as well, we are spinning our wheels:  we can win the world, but we cannot win ourselves.

    There is more to us than we think.

     "We must keep dreaming, for dreams are what we use to celebrate life."  This is a line from Giacomo Puccini's opera La Boheme, which he wrote in the late nineteenth century.  Do not we all have dreams?  Do not we all use our hopes?  Do not we all dream to magnify our joy of life, to move ourselves forward to more good times as we live out our days?

    Absolutely.  Alone among the animals, human beings have the capacity to think beyond themselves, to imagine beyond their boundaries, to summon thoughts that do not seem logical at the moment, thoughts and longings that move them to strike ever deeply into the many unknowns and possibilities that life lays before them.  To celebrate life constantly.

    Dreams are the essence of life.  Remove them, and we implode and crater; we become less than human.  Ironically yet so fittingly, however, continuing to dream also leads to great frustration and angst.  When we cannot fulfill our dreams, we may crater, too.  But better that we dream than not, for as Puccini's character reminds us, the moment we stop dreaming, we stop living.

    Bottom line, we cease to recognize the power of the living imagination from which we have come.

      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.