As most people who have studied such things know, the notion of resurrection is fundamental to Christianity (as it is, in some form, for other religions as well).  The dimensions and implications of the resurrection are of course varied and profound; today, I'd like to talk about its connection to the idea of restoration.  God talks repeatedly in the Bible about his ability to restore us, to restore what we may have lost, be it years, meaning, vocation, direction, hope, loved ones, and on and on.  This is not to say that God will bring these things back, for he understands that we cannot fully undo the physical effects of lost time.  It is to say, however, that God can, by virtue of his inexhaustible power and authority, renew and overcome the pain of anything we may have lost.  He can restore our hope and revive our vision.
     We could not believe this unless we also believe in resurrection.  Without resurrection, without the possibility of another day, we are lost.  Ironically, although we all want to believe in renewal and restoration and, consciously or not, place our trust in the cause and effect construct of the cosmos to do so, we often overlook that every dream of newness depends on physical laws whose origin we cannot fully fathom or explain.  We dream, as it were, in a myth.
     Put another way, unless God is real, restoration means nothing, absolutely nothing at all.  Why do we otherwise dream? 

     Can something be wild yet still be good?  Of course.  As I was walking through a newly established forest preserve recently, I noticed, as the path wound into the forest, a neatly manicured lawn, spreading expansively around a rather large house, standing in stark contrast to the wildness of the meadows, lakes, and trees just beyond it.  The difference was striking:  on the one side, all that is safe and secure; on the other, everything that is wild and unknown, separated by an arbitrary property line.
     As I looked at this divide, I thought about a line from the British writer C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia.  In it, a character is talking about the lion Aslan who, as readers of the Chronicles know, is an image or picture of the Christian God and his love for humanity.   Aslan, the person says, "Is not safe, but he is good."  How true.  Like the forest preserve, with its mystery and challenges, perhaps God is not wholly safe; perhaps he is a more harrowing adventure than the safe and ordered manicured lawn.  Perhaps.  On the other hand, we could wander through manicured lawns, of any kind, all of our lives, and never really understand what life is about.  We might not know disturbance and pain, but we would also not know the more fundamental dimensions of this finite existence.
     So it is with God.  Not believing in him seems safe.  We do not need to change our world in any way.  Yet given life's puzzles and conundrums, maybe we should consider that it is better to embrace the "unsafe" in order to find the deeper goodness in this existence we share.  It is only in the challenges of the wild that we find what is truly good.

     Ever since Saddam Hussein, the once and now gone president of Iraq, proclaimed, before the beginning of the Gulf War, that the war would "be the mother of all wars," countless people have employed the phrase, modified to fit their situation, to underscore what they alleged to be the gravity or importance of their claim, saying, "the mother of this or that," etc.
     To say that something is the "mother" of all similar things that preceded it is to implicitly acknowledge that for every thing, there is a larger thing on which this thing based.  A mathematician might say that every set is a subset of a larger set, the "mother" of all sets.  As Aristotle pointed out long ago, however, to view reality in this way means that we could wear ourselves out, physically as well as intellectually, trying to determine when we have found the "set" or "mother" of everything else.  It's endless.
     This reminds me of what many consider to be one of the logician Kurt Godol's greatest insights, that there are axioms, that is, laws of numbers, that cannot be proven.  We simply accept them as they are.  To link this to the idea of a "mother" of all things, whatever those things might be, we might say that, in the end, we either accept the existence of a starting point or framework (a "mother) whose existence we cannot definitively prove, or find ourselves in an infinite regress from which there will never be any return.

     Recently I was talking with a friend, who has been a practicing psychologist for decades, about some dimensions of her profession.  Many psychologists, she said, believe that the only valid or testable psychological phenomenon is one that can be examined analytically.  It must have physical evidence for its presence, a physical evidence that can be explored and tested in an empirical way.
     However, she added, this does not leave room for explaining an experience that may elude ready physical form, definition, or testability.  It omits something that cannot be measured by conventional means or methods.  Such an experience may include the spiritual.
     Therein lies the problem.  Someone who has had a spiritual experience knows that she has had one.  But she cannot necessarily explain it in physical terms.  It is something that conventional science cannot therefore easily verify nor, and this is critical, readily deny.  It exceeds the boundaries of the analytical.  And it cannot always be attributed to an errant or unusual psychological twist and turn.
     Maybe that's why Jesus remarked many centuries ago that, "Unless one is 'born again' [from above], she cannot see the kingdom of God [in other words, fully experience God]."  The spiritual bursts our analytical categories, yes, but to deny its existence is to affirm that we are ultimately nothing more than a collection of molecules and dust.  If there is nothing more than this world, then we are nothing more than what the world is, that is, without any reason to be here.
     Make room for what you cannot always analytically understand.  You never know what you will find.

     Recently installed on the streets of New York, Ursula von Rydingsvard's "Ona" is a singularly curious work of art, a massive "glob" of cedar and bronze that, as one views it, quickly veers into a curious stream of whim and imagination.  Polish for "she" or "her (like the Hebrew "ima" for mother and "oma" for grandmother), "Ona" is anything but feminine.  She is essentially shapeless, heavily layered and textured (though some might compare this to the many levels of makeup that some women put on themselves), and by most assessments almost garish in appearance.
     On the other hand, with its enormous, almost hulking presence, and untold permutations of metal and wood, "Ona" reminds us of the utility of looking at life and its expressions in diverse and multiple ways.  For some, "Ona" is comforting, a sort of eternal warmth to which they are drawn; for others, she is inspiring, a monument to possibility; and for still others, a highly evocative moment in an otherwise staid and nondescript day.  Like life, "Ona" has something for everyone.
     "Ona" also underscores to us the importance of looking at people with, as much as possible, open eyes.  In the constricting caldron of our individual desires and ambitions, we often look at people not as they are but as whom we wish for them to be.  We miss things, we overlook things, we stumble over what we should see most.  And we fail to understand who our fellow humans really are.
     Perhaps that's the biggest thing that "Ona" can teach us.  If we really want to grasp the picture of who we are and what we really mean, we must be willing to step into that which we don't always understand.  We have to let go of what we have assumed, give up what we know.
     We remember that because we are made in the image of an infinite and inexhaustibly creative God, we will find marvelously new worlds every time we open our eyes.

     In one of the many tributes to the Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who passed away last week at the age of 74, a writer quotes from one of the poet's observations about his way of writing that it is "a journey where each point of arrival" has "turned out to be a steppingstone rather than a destination."  A new insight does not mark finality, but foundation and ground for one more.  Nothing is ever resolved fully, nothing is ever the ultimate word.  It is a journey without end, yet a journey in which fresh wonder surfaces with every new moment of putting thought and pen to paper.  Life is an endlessly open book.
     It's a glorious way to look at existence, isn't it?  We never arrive, nor do we want to; we are always exploring, learning, and growing to the fullest extent that our capacities allow, confident that with each new dawn day we will find something else that speaks to us.  To use an oft quoted phrase from the religions of the East, it is the journey that is important, not the destination.
     But why is this?  If God, the divine presence that is presiding, in various and mysterious ways, throughout and everywhere in the cosmos, is eternal, which he must be if this world is to be a credible experience at all, then all things in this creation will function as such.  That is, we can experience them in a potentially inexhaustible way.  Life does indeed become a journey without end.  Until it ends, that is.  For it is then that we must ask:  what is next?  If there is nothing, then the world, journey or not, meant absolutely nothing at all.  It has been a line with no form or point.
     The journey only happens when the universe is on a journey of its own.

     Ah, work!  Given a choice, many of us would not work, at least not at the job in which we are engaged currently.  On the other hand, given a choice to work at a job which we genuinely enjoy, we would probably not mind working.  If we like what we do, we will not mind getting up to do it.  And we will not always mind the time it may take away from other things we enjoy doing.
     In the end, however, most, if not all of us, would like it if we did not need to work, if we did not need to get up each day to labor, if we did not need to insert ourselves into a tiresome world of competition, supervision, and activity simply to earn a living and pay our bills.  We might enjoy a life of continuous and unrequitted leisure.
     Or would we?  Unless we are properly retired (and retirement is not an altogether undesirable experience), we, the human species, are made to work.  From the very beginning, since the day that God set Adam in the garden and instructed him to work, to till and cultivate the land before him, people have worked.  To work is to be human, and to be human is to work.  Working enables us to discover our humanness most fully.  It challenges us, involves us, enables us, fills us.  Working gives us a more complete grasp of who we are in our world.
     So why do so many of us dislike working?  Unfortunately, once Adam and Eve plunged the world into a state of entropy and disrepair, the existential meaningfulness of everything their descendants (you and me) would do would not be as meaningful as it was originally intended to be.  Though humanity continues to work, we do not find it to be as meaningful as it could be.  It never completely satisfies.
     Should we weep and wail over this?  Perhaps, to a point.  But we should also remember that regardless of what we do with our time in the workplace, we do so in the knowledge that, whatever we do, it has a point.  God created it, God endowed it with meaning.  We need to realize that however we may feel about our jobs, by doing them we, believe it or not, become most fully human.  We come closer to becoming whom we are created to be:  people who are meaningfully involved and purposefully enmeshed in this remarkable world, people who are gainfully and mightily contributing to the common history of humanity, people who are eloquently and passionately doing and communicating what they have been given to further the greater good of us all and, of most significance, to find more deeply what enables it all.
      Thanks for working.