In many parts of the world, this week marked the beginning of Daylight Savings Time.  Historically instituted for the benefit of farmers and others who made their living by the light of the sun, today Daylight Savings Time functions more as a boon to commuters worldwide, enabling them to enjoy more of the day, primarily after working hours.
     Although it is still early March and much of the West still lies in the throes of winter, Daylight Savings Time is a signal, a sign.  It is an indication that spring will really come, that the vernal and verdant will really soon reign.  As God promised Noah after the flood, as long as the earth stands, so the seasons will come.  Winter may be difficult at times, but it is not forever; summer may be overpoweringly hot, but autumn will come.  Nothing stands still, nothing remains unchanged.  Life is bigger than its parts.
     As Tolstoy writes in his masterpiece War and Peace, when the light rises and the grass greens, when the flowers bloom and the birds sing, when the land awakens to its destiny, spring has come.
     So does the psalmist write of God, "You open your hand and care for every living thing."  Even us.  We live in the heart of divine promise.

     For those of us who follow such things, yesterday marked the first Sunday of Lent.  As a result, repentance and circumspection dominate the religious imagination, 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 becomes a road to its meaning.  Lent, however, demands that we look for ultimate meaning in that from which life came and not life itself.  As spring seems increasingly in the air of the northern climes of the world, it's easy to rejoice in life's wonder without also wondering why life is, why we have it, why this existence has been given to us.  To what end do we live?
     In its call to slow down, to meditate and consider, to let go of the immediate, at least for a while, Lent carves multiple inroads into this question, dissembling the perfunctory and expected and normal.  It calls us to not blast life apart without knowing what we are blasting it into, to cease striving for what will not last, and to relax, as the Psalmist says, in the reality of God (Ps 46:10).
     Need we really acknowledge larger realities in our earthly existence?  Only you can decide that.  One truth, however, will remain.  We will never escape the fact of our mortality.  Lent reminds us of our contingency.  It also reminds us that if the world is contingency only, the universe would never have had a reason to be.  And neither would we.
     Enjoy the journey.

     If you are a pianist (I, by the way, am not, although I do play the piano on occasion), you may have heard about the recent passing of Alice Herz-Sommer.  Believed to be the oldest known living Holocaust survivor, Ms. Herz-Sommer died in London at the age of 110.  In addition to noting that she survived the Nazi death camps, what people have found notable about Ms. Herz-Sommer is that she credits her love for the music of Fredrick Chopin for enabling her and her son to endure their years in the concentration camp at Terezin in Czechoslovakia.  As an accomplished musician, Ms. Herz-Sommer was invited to perform with the camp's orchestra, making music that, as she recalls, lifted everyone's heart, helping them stay alive.  Even her guards fell under the spell of her music.
     So is music to the human being.  To make melody, to sing songs, to listen to both:  these are the joy of billions of people around the world.  Music moves us as nothing else can.
     Psalm 19 says that the heavens are telling of the glory of God, that day and night, the heavens are speaking to us of the presence and wonder of God.  The creation is constantly singing of its creator, constantly infusing the universe with the fact of his presence.  When we do or hear music, when we tap into the musical rhythms of existence, we step into the heart of what is really true.  We touch the foundation of the cosmos, the active and continuous note of the loving movement of God. 
     If the world didn't sing, neither would we.

     Some things, good and bad, never seem to die.  Although Adolf Hitler has been dead for many years, his legacy, in too many ways, lives on.  I refer to the existence of various Nazi parties in different parts of the West, groups of people who call themselves National Socialists and who insist that their respective nations are to be filled only with pure white Aryan people.  Anyone else is not welcome.
     Aside from the patent intolerance such attitudes convey, their existence carries a deeper message.  Though we in the West may pride ourselves at creating a world better than the one into which we came (and several studies done in recent years conclude that, on balance, the West is becoming progressively less violent), we cannot escape aberrance altogether.  We will struggle with it until the day we die.  We will struggle with it within ourselves, and we will struggle with it as a human community.  For all our wondrous glory, we remain deeply flawed beings.
     What to do?  We surely do not want a world like Aldous Huxley's 1984, a world of perfect test tube people, nor do we want a world like B. F. Skinner's Walden II, a world of people trained to respond to commands without thinking.  We want a world in which all of us can be ourselves while we look out for each other.
     We will never, however, find it in full.  But we keep trying.  And we should.  Nazi or not, we should keep trying.  Yet we should remember where we really are.  We live in a material world, yet a material world into which the immaterial, the spiritual, has irrupted and broken through, a material world whose fullest meaning we therefore only experience when we look to its deepest ground and agree with Jesus' words, as recorded in the third chapter of the gospel of John, that, "Unless you are born again, you shall not see the kingdom of God."
     This world will be as good as the extent to which we believe in the power of its richest meaning.

     What's so important about Ash Wednesday?  As billions of people around the world come together today to commemorate the beginning of what the Christian church calls Lent, all of us, whether we are religious or not, can learn something from their devotion.  Ash Wednesday is a call to humility.  It is a call to recognize that we are, indeed, ultimately no more than collections of chemicals which, one day, will be dust.  Ash Wednesday is a sign to all of us that life is not so much about getting what we want, for we did not cause ourselves to come into this existence, but about learning what we should from this life that we have been given.  It is a reminder that we are not to take from life as much as we are to give to it.  In Ash Wednesday and the forty day period of Lent that it initiates, we see that humility and circumspection and repentance are the foundation of what is most important in being human.  In contrast to the vapid frivolity of the Oscars a few days ago, Ash Wednesday underscores what many philosophers have labeled as humanity's central concerns:  guilt and death.  It is guilt because we live a life that we did not manufacture or make, a life that owes everything about it to forces infinitely beyond our control, a life that is lived in the grip of a morality we did not devise, and it is death because as we all know, regardless of how long we manage to postpone it, one day we all will die.  We cannot escape our mortality.
     Even if you do not celebrate Ash Wednesday, savor what it means.  Savor the goodness of humility, taste the joy of circumspection.  Bask in repentance and forgiveness, human and divine, and revel in resolving to admit humility, to know your place, to let go and move on.  And delight in Ash Wednesday's journey, its journey to the joy waiting for us at the end:  the remembrance and celebration of the reality of resurrection.
     God will yet win.

     If you are at all familiar with the history of art, you are aware of Pablo Picasso, the famous Spanish painter who is perhaps best known for introducing the world to cubism.  Much has been written about Picasso, and countless museums have mounted exhibitions of his art over the years.  He has achieved a notoriety, good and bad, and fame which few artists have surpassed.
     It is in the thinking behind cubism, however, that Picasso perhaps made his most significant mark.  Prior to Picasso, art, despite its numerous divergences into Impressionism and Postimpressionism and the like, continued to present its images reasonably proximate to the object it was portraying.  But cubism actually broke up its images, fracturing them, twisting them up and down and around, bending them in ways that they would never be in real life.
     Picasso dared to break boundaries, dared to dream in ways that others either could or would not.  Although some religious people found his forays threatening and felt as if his art was making their world less secure, others welcomed Picasso's perspective.  It was simply another way of looking at the human condition.  It underscored the fact of human magnificence in the midst of a world which, wrestling with the ennui of modernity, was looking for a way out.  Though Picasso's cubism didn't necessarily solve the problem, it more than made it plain:  we are significant people in a, apart from loyalty to a divine being, insignificant universe.
     When boundaries fade, we find new boundaries still.

     As most of the world knows, last night the Oscars came to Hollywood.  For those who follow and enjoy such things, the parade of "celebrities" on the red carpet adorning the entrance to the auditorium prior to the ceremony was a veritable feast for the eyes.  One after another, the most famous stars of film passed by, smiling, waving, preening, displaying themselves for the adoring crowds.  All of them expect it, all of them know it is good for the movie business, and all of them know that this night is, for them and their successors, one of the most important evenings of the year.  They literally cannot afford to miss it.
     I've never been one to swoon over "celebrities."  I'm happy for them, happy that they found their vocational niche, and happy for them that they've been able to make a good, indeed a very good living from it.
     This notwithstanding, what I find interesting, even intriguing about the adulation some people heap upon these "celebrities" is the extent to which it represents, to me, a longing for heroes, for people to look up to, for people who have risen above the fray and who seemed to have found a happiness others do not have.
     But happiness, as so many of us know, is not something we find.  Happiness is what happens to us.  Happiness is what we experience when we have resolved not our vocational angst or material paucity but our innermost longings, our deep seated longings for meaning.  Our greatest heroes need not be those who are materially successful, but rather those who have been successful in matters of the heart, those who have found what the Hebrew Bible calls "integrity" and what Jesus calls "perfect," a completeness of body, spirit, and soul.  Happiness is grounded in the present necessity of God.