As Lent continues apace and spring continues to surface, rejoice.  Rejoice in the wondrous blend of privation and plenty through which God shapes us, his creation, rejoice in those remarkable twists of unfathomability and clarity that come from believing in the splendor of an intelligence more vast than the widest sea.
     Rejoice in the inevitability and mystery of being human, rejoice in remembering God's picture of its perfection, for us, in us, in Jesus, God's son.  It's a marvelous world.

     With its steadfast assertion of the duty of every human being to live to the absolute fullness of her capacities, Ayn Rand's Fountainhead has encouraged countless people to maximally invest themselves in the story of their own existence.  Rand calls it "the virtue of selfishness," not selfishness in the sense of keeping one's toys from another, but selfishness that focuses foremost on developing oneself to her most complete.
     From this comes a famous idea, best summed up as, "I'll die for you but I won't live for you."  On the face of it, this seems a worthy way to view one's relationship with one's fellow human beings:  be ready to sacrifice oneself for others, but understand that everyone must live her own life, and that to the fullest.
     As far as we know, Rand went to her grave not believing in God.  Ironically, however, this thought provides an interesting twist to the Christian message.  Through Jesus, God, Christianity tells us, died for humanity's sins, taking on himself the penalty of humanity's guilt and wrongdoing so that he might grant people new life.  But in order to do that, God had to first live as a human being, to live as every human lives.  He had to live before he could die.
     Although we should be willing to die for our loved ones, and although we should live fully aware of each person's responsibility to be herself, we should also strive to live for each other, for the good of the humanity community, the welfare of the planet, its past, its present, its future.  Like God, we should live--and die--for the greatness (despite all our faults, flaws, and sin, but that's the point) of who we, beings with eternal purpose and meaning, are.
     We're in this together.

     Snowshoeing stories, redux . . . as I continue to spend some of my free time snowshoeing through the forests of the upper Midwest, moving quietly through the lingering stillness of winter, I am always struck by the unabashed freedom of the trail, the openendedness of trekking through the world as it most is, untouched by human building or appurtenance, alone, unscathed by mechanical noise and sound, pristine and apart.  I could snowshoe for days, really, each morning waking to the receding brumal darkness, the ever present challenge of snow and cold, breaking camp and moving on once again, stepping into new horizons and visions of natural wonder.  It is a feeling of eternality.
     Then I catch myself, reminding myself that this world is far from eternal.  But we still think about eternity, don't we?  We still tend to frame life in terms of eternity.  And it's hard for me to see how this wonder and longing is stimulated by things purely chemical:  how can the material produce thoughts of something which it is clearly not?  Does a rock ponder its lifetime?
     It's difficult to see how we material beings think about the immaterial without there being something in us that leads us to do so, something that is, well, immaterial and eternal, a necessarily personal eternal.  It's difficult to see how we come to ponder the eternal unless there is an eternal that is speaking itself to us.
     So psalmist says:  "The heavens are telling of the glory of God" (Psalm 19).

    Writing toward the end of his short life, the medieval theologian Boethius, most famous for his Consolation of Philosophy, observed of his reading audience that they "have forgotten [their] true nature."  They have forgotten, he claims, who they really are.  Although Boethius wanted his audience to pursue the good, the beatific vision of heaven and God, they had instead, he lamented, chosen to seek after the impermanent and transient, the evanescent things of this present world.  In short, they had missed the point of why they are here.  They were to live in the here and now, yes, but to live it for what it really is, the existence through which they would obtain, one day, eternal life.  They had forgotten their real destiny.
     Boethius' words beg the question:  who are we, really?  In an interesting new book called The Space Between, author Eric Jacobsen observes that, bottom line, we are creatures of community.  We are made to be in communion with other human beings.  But he also notes that we are more than that, for if we constitute ourselves solely on the basis of our social relations, we still do not know who we really are.  To know who we are, we need to be who we are as we are, as we are as individuals in community.  Communities without individuals are no more than cults.
     Yet Boethius is on the mark.  While it is true that we often find ourselves and individual completion in community, it is equally true that unless we participate in this community as people who are pursuing more than the evanescence of ourselves, we will find ourselves creating a spiral of fellowship and activity that, however fun it may be, in the end, misses the real point:  humanity is only fully complete in the God-filled eternity beyond it.

     Do miracles really happen?  It depends on what we mean by miracle.  For most of us, a miracle is an event that seems so totally amazing, so totally wonderful that we feel as if we cannot explain how or why it happened.  We're in awe.
     But we might not be willing to attribute it to God.
     For those of us who are religious or harbor religious sensibilities, however, a miracle, that is, an event beyond belief, is a work of God.  When a loved one suddenly recovers from a life threatening illness, so suddenly that it leaves even the doctors puzzling, or when, as a pair of missionaries once related to me, some people who broke into their home somehow failed to see them even though they were standing behind a glass door, we conclude that this is something that only God could do.
     Not that I would dispute that God could behind these things, but I observe that more often than not we believe these to be miracles because we believe in God.  If we didn't believe in God, we probably would not call them miracles.  Hence, at some point, our perceptions become subjective.
     Or do they?  One of the great gurus of Sikkhism once noted that, "The greatest miracle of all is the name of God.  The 'True Name' is the miracle of miracles.  I know of no other miracles."
     The guru had a point.  If we believe that God is the greatest miracle, that the name and fact of God is the most wondrous thing of all, then we have every reason to conclude that the extraordinary events of this life have an extraordinary origin.  We have every reason to suppose that they are of God.
     And why not?  Without the fact of God, we would have no perception of extraordinary, no measure of content or wonder, for nothing would mean anything, anyway.  Miracles affirm the presence of hope, confirm the fact of meaning, establish the idea of a living and active and loving God.  And that, as the guru wisely noted, is indeed the greatest miracle of all.

 

     Imagine a world without sacrifice.  Imagine a world in which no one, absolutely no one gave up even a second of her energy, money, or time for another human being.  Imagine how that be.  Would it not be a very dark world?  Would it not be a world in which you probably would not want to live?
     As you go forth today, ask yourself this:  why do I live, even for a second, for another human being?  Then ask yourself this:  why would anyone do the same for me?
     We really are more than chemicals.
     Now:  ask yourself why.

     "So you think you can tell Heaven from Hell?" asked the British rock band Pink Floyd many years ago, for, it continues, "we're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year . . . "
     We are all happy we are here.  But if we're all in a fish bowl, swimming but really going nowhere, moving along but never being able to stop, living because to do otherwise is to die, how do we indeed assess the value of anything we do?  We're trapped in a world of our making, happy, but not knowing why we are here, not knowing what it all means, much less being able to conceive or fathom the existence or difference between heaven and hell.
     Yet we all wonder.  We all wonder, at one point in our lives, what might be beyond us.  But we won't get any answers in a fish bowl.  We will only learn the limits of our limits.  We will only know if we can somehow, like the protagonists in Plato's famous allegory of the Cave, break out of our limits, topple our boundaries.  Then we will see, really see the nature of the beyond about which we all wonder.
     What will we see?  While we may well see whatever we are expecting to see, if we have really broken out of everything we know, we will, logically, see something that we do not expect to see, possibly something that defies and exceeds all our expectations.
     Why else would we look?  Revelation, that is, transcending material and information we previously did not know, will only appear to those who believe they have exhausted every other limit of knowing.  We won't see unless we decide we will.