In an interesting new book, Our Mathematical Universe, physicist Max Tegmark suggests that ultimately we and our universe are simply parts of eternal mathematical structures.  What is an eternal mathematical structure?  According to Tegmark, it is the ground of what is real; everything comes from them, everything happens in them.  They have always existed, in fact, they always will exist in this universe (unless this universe slides into a parallel universe, of which Tegmark believes at least four exist, and they become different structures).
     Curiously, Tegmark insists that although we can assert the fact of these structures, we cannot describe or fully understand them.  We know, believe, and affirm they are there, but we cannot begin to really grasp what they ultimately are.  It is beyond our current capabilities.
     After reading this book and finding great intrigue in how Tegmark builds his case, as he posits the ideas that "everything that can happen happens somewhere;" that there is an physical reality independent of the human mind; and that the theory of multiverses (multiple universes) solves the problem of infinite regress by presenting an infinite number of possibilities for what can be; and other fascinating thoughts, I came away thinking that he had simply solved one problem by raising another.  This has to do with what I will call the necessity of eternality.  Eternality is insuperably difficult to grasp, be it of God, mathematical structures, or otherwise, yet an eternal "somethingness" remains our only option for explaining how anything came to be.  Though Lawrence Krauss in his Universe from Nothing, asserts that something indeed "came out of nothing," we still cannot explain why there was even "nothing."  One way or the other, we need an eternal or endless starting point.
     And then we have the same question:  how did this get here?  There is either an endless personal or an eternal impersonal.  What to do?  Look at yourself, look at the world, and decide:  which eternality best explains how incredibly--and unbearably--orderly, complex, and complicated you, the world, and the universe, are?

     What if we could make a person?  Although the science of genome and cloning may well be on the verge of doing just this, and despite that many of us can now, if we are willing to spend enough money, come very close to deciding which genes we would like for our children to have, to date no one--at least as far as we know--has cloned or manufactured a human being.
     A few people, people like Mary Shelley in her novel Frankenstein, or Aldous Huxley in his book Brave New World, have dared imagine what the world might be like if we could indeed make a human being.  A movie I saw recently, Ruby Sparks, though I doubt it was intended as a commentary on this issue, made me think anew about it.  The movie is about a young and lonely and successful novelist who dreams of a woman, Ruby, then proceeds to write a novel about her.  One day, to his surprise, he walks into his apartment and who should he see but Ruby!  The woman about whom he had dreamed had suddenly come to life, behaving exactly as he had described her in his nascent manuscript.  He of course is very happy:  she loves him totally and without reserve.
     Eventually, however, he sees that Ruby is beginning to wander, to explore the world outside his.  After fretting about this, he realizes that by returning to the novel and adding new information about Ruby, he can make her be or do precisely as he pleases.  Soon, Ruby is caught in the crossfires of the lonely and frustrated novelist's life vision, a parody of what a human with choice making capacities should be.  She is no longer her own person.
     Like Frankenstein in Frankenstein, like the rulers of the Brave New World, like every other person who has attempted to make a human being, the lonely novelist stumbles into the fundamental crux of humanness.  Whenever we try to make a person be whom we want this person to be, this person ceases to be the person we ought to most want her to be.  People without choices are not people at all.
     The philosopher Frederick Nietzsche may have gotten many things wrong, but he was right on one thing.  It is our will that defines the essence of what it means to live as a human being.  God made us, yes, but he made us with the will and capacity to "make" ourselves.  God understands that if we cannot exercise our will, we are no longer human beings.
     We live, and die, with astounding liberty.

     As Lent continues apace and spring continues to surface, rejoice.  Rejoice in the wondrous blend of paucity 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 as well in the inevitability and mystery of being human, in remembering God's picture of its perfection, for us, in us, in Jesus, God's son.  It's a marvelous world.  But rejoice as well in the privations of existence, that life is by its very nature incomplete, though we so desperately want it to be otherwise.  It is in life's fractures and splinters that we see its true character, that we see that although life is indeed astonishing, it is ultimately the greatest and most vexing mystery we will ever encounter.  Though it's all we know, we will never solve its puzzle, the ever lingering--and pestering--question of why, existence.
      That's one reason to think about Lent.  Not to say that we should not keep trying to fathom existence, but to say that when we stand before a door into what we know in our hearts we will never fully understand, we in fact open a window.  We open a window into the tumult, the confusion, the conundrum.  And we learn that we will never grasp life and existence unless we grasp that which makes its denouements and end.
     Creatures of space and time that we be, we stumble before the maw of purpose and eternity.  But we can still rejoice in the greater good to come.

     What's in a beating heart?  Karl Ove Knausgaard, in the first volume of his massive six volume Proustian-like autobiographical tome, asks this question, repeatedly and often as he takes the reader into the beginnings of his childhood.  It is a question well worth asking, for much depends on it.  When a heart beats, life reigns; when it does not, life ends.  When a heart beats, we move and breathe; when it stops, we do neither.  It is on the heart that all life depends.  It is on the heart that nations rise and fall, it is on the heart that history unfolds, it is on the heart that time itself is filled.
     For the ancient Hebrews, the heart was more than the physical organ.  It circumscribed the whole of intention and desire; the heart was the center of who a person was.  It invested and presented its holder in and to the world.  Though we moderns view the heart as foremost a physical organ, we cannot help but view it metaphorically as well, making it the instigator of emotion and longing, the seat of our deepest dreams.
     We all are poets of ourselves.  We survive with science, but we live with our hearts.  We need our brains, but we need our hearts to be fully human, in the broadest sense. for we  see with far more than our eyes.  If the universe were only a brain, it would still need a heart.  We are more than particles and chemicals.
     As the Romantics once observed, we err if we suppose we can live on reason and logic and materiality only.  We need the poetry of our hearts.  And we need the personal transcendence from which it can only come.

     I recently watched, probably for the fourth time, the movie Men in Black.  Have you seen it?  It's the amusing story of a team of two people (Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith) whose mission is to monitor aliens from taking over America.  Jones, who has worked for the "alien" agency for many years, recruits Will Smith to be his partner in his quest to deal with the aliens.  After Will Smith agrees to join the team, the agency head informs him that every record of him will be expunged from every database that has ever existed.  In other words, as the director puts it, "It will be as if you never existed."
     How would that be?  How would it be if you had existed, then you did not?  Sure, when people die, they cease to exist physically, but memories of them endure, sometimes for millennia.  They're gone, but they're not.  If someone had lived, however, and suddenly the world had no record that they had ever done so, what would be left?  There would be memories of course, but try to picture remembering a person who for all intents and purposes never even lived.  It would be as if this person had never been born.
     But of course this person had been born.  And of course this person had lived.  Only if memory, everyone's memory, had completely vanished would this person really be gone.  Yet if all memory had vanished, all time would, too.  And the universe really would be as meaningless as many people claim it is.  If there is no remembrance of or in time, we are nothing more than points of light, always shining, but pointing to nothing.
     Maybe that's why Genesis tells us that in the beginning, God made light and, consequently, day and night.  God knew that time without a foundation, time that just happens, is time that may as well never happened, as if everything in it had never existed.

     To live is to, unfortunately, suffer.  Part of living in a bent and broken world is experiencing misfortune, be it mental, spiritual, or material, misfortune that sometimes drives people to despair.
     The aftermath of World War I was no exception.  Although the West had entered the twentieth century optimistic about itself and its future, the carnage and pain of the War cruelly shattered these illusions, dashing them into the soil that by the War's end had absorbed the blood of millions of young men.  The future looked decidedly less hopeful.  Great despair ensued.
     In addition, though religion is, by most definitions, a call to hope or trust in something bigger than this world, even religion could do little to forestall the sense of hopelessness and ennui that swept through Western Europe.  It quickly pervaded every layer of society.
     What could religion do?  Buffeted by these forces of modernity, the conservative wings of Christianity and Judaism retreated into themselves, ensconcing their people in a box from which they were not to emerge for nearly fifty years.  On the other hand, the liberal sectors of these religions, though not fully agreeing with the tenets of modernity that undergirded this societal despair, chose instead to embrace and step into the pain of the planet.  They set aside moral uneasiness to bring their religion to those who needed it most.
     However, just as religion in the twentieth-first century does not always satisfy everyone, so did religion during this time period fail to fully mollify as well.  How could it?  Even if we believe, as most religions do, that God is present in suffering, this does not necessarily end it.  Nor does it always explain it.  Religion found itself caught on the horns of a dilemma, to believe in the light while embracing the darkness, to walk through the world's pains while speaking of a grace in and beyond it.
     In the end, it asked the West to trust, nothing more, nothing less, to trust in what it could not see to overcome what it could.  To recognize that although the world had closed in on them, God had opened it again.  Better to face the questions than pretend nothing had happened.

     April 1.  In many parts of the world, it's April's Fools Day.  But it's also the birthday of one of the greatest of the Romantic pianists:  Sergei Rachmaninoff.  Born in Russia later emigrating to America, and becoming an American citizen shortly before his death in 1943, Rachmaninoff composed some of the richest music ever written for the piano, blending intense and mournful melody with powerful and intricate chords and keyboard movements, capturing and expressing the deepest spirit of the Romantics.  His playing took his audiences into the fullness of their emotional imaginations; they left amazed.
     Romanticism speaks of emotion, sense, and imagination; the heights, and the depths of the full gamut of humanness, taking us to the peaks of ecstasy, dragging us through the nadirs of tragedy.  It is life.  Rachmaninoff gave us a glimpse of a human being struggling with what it is to be alive on this planet, what it is to experience, what it is to know, what it is to be a personal being, alive, emoting, and real as anything can possibly be.  His piano touched us all, for we all are, in the end, creatures of heart and imagination.  We live as sensual beings.
     So it is that we, people who delight in the poignant melodies of the Romantics, we today bask in the light of life, realizing that regardless of what we believe about its origins or meaning, we can surely believe in it as a fundamental miracle of being.  And though we struggle with our presence, we marvel at what it yields.  Like Rachmaninoff, we wrestle with as well rejoice in being alive.   We daily tangle with the weight, and hope, of existence.
     As we should.  That we are here is its weight, that we will one day be beyond it, real and true, is its hope.  The rhythm of God's universe, from fading tree to dying star, is this:  life, and death, are the beginning of life again.