After I had an interesting conversation with a Buddhist monk last week, I came upon a vignette about Buddhism in a recent issue of Christian Century.  A Zen Buddhist master was asked if he had ever read the Bible.  When the master indicated that he had not, the questioner began to read it to him.  As the reader got into the Sermon the Mount (Matthew 6), Jesus' words about possessions caught his attention.  These words, toward the end of the chapter, go, "And why do you worry about clothing?  Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these . . . so do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself.  Each day has enough troubles of its own" (Matthew 6:28-34).
     So the Century's account goes that after the master heard these words, he said, "I would say that the man who spoke these words is enlightened."  The master's remarks affirms and underscores the necessity of privation--giving up--for a meaningful religious experience.  Although Buddhism and Christianity are very far apart on basic questions of existence and God, they both realize that unless we let go of the things in this life and hold them, as I said earlier this week, loosely, we will never be happy.  If religion is a matter of faith, we will not necessarily find its core by living as we always have done.
     In Luke 12, Jesus tells a story of a certain rich man who, having produced a great deal of grain, resolved to store it in massive bins to fund what he believed would be a very long retirement.  Well, the parable continues, that very night the man died.  He would never enjoy the fruits of his labor.  So does Jesus conclude that, "What if a man gains the whole world and loses his soul?"
     In the end, it will not matter how much we have accumulated, for possessions will never liberate us from the angst and fleetingness of existence.  What will matter is how much we have given up, in trust, to find that which the world will never produce:  peace of soul.  It's a journey of faith.
    

     Is God incomprehensible?  It's an age old question, one that has occupied many, many books.  The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, long known for his deeply measured thoughts about God, asked this question constantly.  Buried at the heart of his questions was his notion that life itself was incomprehensible.  If we can't comprehend God, how can we expect to understand the life he has bequeathed us?  So,  asked, how do we live?
     Rilke's answer was to embrace, in living our lives, all that is beyond our control, particularly death.  To fully understand life, he suggested, we must wrap it in the specter of death.  To ignore death is to ignore the fullness of life.
     Though Rilke's position may sound rather morbid, it is, on the other hand, decidedly cognizant of the framework of our mortal existence.  We all will die.  If we believe there is no afterlife, however, then we may conclude that death, though it be necessary and inevitable, may not so much affirm the fullness of life as underscore its assumed (but not provable) meaningfulness, as well as, for some, its futility.  What has it been for?  But for Rilke, as one who has placed a degree of credibility in the supernatural, to embrace death is to embrace the incomprehensible, that is, God.  In this is the fullness of life, to know that from which it has ultimately come.  Life has meaning beyond itself.
     We may agree that God is incomprehensible, but if we believe that life is incomprehensible, too, we have missed the point.  If we reject the idea of God, we are still faced with the grim reality that life is incomprehensible.  And what will we then do?

     Have you ever seen or heard someone pray?  Have you ever seen or heard someone singing songs to what she believed was God?  If you have, have you asked yourself why she is doing it?
     More often than not, this person is doing such things because she believes someone out there is hearing her songs and prayers.  As the psalmist pointed out many centuries ago, "I believe, therefore I spoke" (Psalm 116).  Faith is asking, faith is speaking, faith is acknowledging and trusting in the presence of the divine.  People who believe in a divine speak to it.  They believe someone is listening.  People who do not believe in a divine do not.  To what, from their standpoint, would they be speaking?
     Speaking affirms and expresses the fact and experience of faith.  If you believe, if you really believe, you will speak.  Why otherwise would you bother with faith?
     Faith is only faith if it uses the visible to acknowledge and invest in the invisible.  It is an act of defiance, and it is an act of rebellion.  Faith takes what is rational and normal (speaking) and transforms it into something equally normal, in a world pervaded with the spiritual, but which validates it.  Faith makes what is real into something that makes the real become even more so.

    What is contentment?  The writer Peter Matthiessen, who passed away recently at the age of 85, devoted much of his life to finding contentment.  Famous for a number of novels and nonfiction books that dealt with a wide range of human and ecological issues, Matthiessen, early in his life, found Buddhism to be his path to peace and contentment. 
     One of Buddhism's virtues, one which I suspect all of us can appreciate, is that we are unhappy because we crave or long for things that are impermanent.  Because we lust after the material artifacts of this world, things that, while perhaps grand and wonderful for what they are, eventually cease to provide us any happiness, we spend our days, as the Buddha put it, suffering.  We long for what will never fulfill us.
     The Buddha's observation turns up, of course, in almost every other religion of the world, usually framed against the backdrop of a God who, these religions insist, is the only source of permanent and lasting happiness.  God or not, we can certainly agree that it is the wise person who learns to hold all things in this life loosely, that what we have today could just as easily be gone tomorrow, and that that for which we crave can quickly become that which we abhor. 
     As Matthiessen remarked toward the end of his life, " . . . I've had a pretty good run of it [life], and I don't want to cling too hard.  I have no complaints."  Matthiessen realized that in the end it was more important to look at what he had experienced rather than  what he had not, and that in our final hours we are better served to accept the end rather than struggle or moan about the inevitability of our destiny.
     On the other hand, we can perhaps learn a different lesson from another of Matthiessen's remarks, these in his The Tree Where Man Was Born.  " . . . I have found what I was searching for without ever having discovered what it was."
     Precisely.  God has spoken; the universe speaks, too.  Always.

     Many of us remember former U.S. Vice President Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth, Gore's presentation of the global ecological challenges with which he believed human beings must deal if they hope to continue existing on the planet.  Many people liked the movie, probably just as many did not.  Ours is not to pass judgment on it here, but rather to consider how we deal with fact or, even more challenging, truth.  There are facts which most of us have no difficulty accepting, such as the conclusion that the moon moves the ocean's tides or that gravity is what holds the cosmos together.  But there are other facts which many people have more difficulty accepting, more often than not because they do not regard them as facts in the same way as those who propound them do.  One example might be the existence of God; another might be the historicity of the Qur'an.
     We might also say that there are some facts which some of us we might consider inconvenient.  These might include the possibility of a ticket if we run a stop sign; the change of losing money on an investment; the realization that if we have no money, we may not be able to buy what we need to live.  We find them inconvenient because they tell us about things we would rather not acknowledge or think about.
     From a religious standpoint, one such inconvenient fact might be the existence of God.  Why is this an inconvenient fact?  If God in fact exists, we must look at the world in a profoundly different way.  Another inconvenient fact might be the historicity of Jesus.  If Jesus really lived, died, and rose again, we must view ourselves and our lives from a very different standpoint.  Moreover, even if one does not believe these facts to be facts, one must recognize that many people do, and, to be absolutely honest with oneself and one's fellow beings, endeavor to learn why.  We owe it to ourselves not to blink at what might be facts, but, worse, the truth.

     One of the last lines in "Here the Birds' Journey Ends," a poem written by Mahmoud Darwish, reads, "And we will etch on the final rocks, 'Long live life, long live life.'" That's quite a wish.  On the one hand, we know that unless something extraordinary happens on earth, none of us will live indefinitely on this planet.  One day, we all will die.  As much as we may treasure life, this life we live in this present moment, we know that we will not be able to enjoy it forever.  Eventually, it will end.
     On the other hand, we know that our lives are but one manifestation of the life that grounds the lives that all of us live, that undergirding and fueling our individual lives is life, the life that animates and enlivens us all.  Without this life, none of us would be here.  That we are born, live, and die is the fruit, the outward and visible individuated expression of this "life" that pervades the planet.  We live because there is life, not just as a concept but as palpable and concrete reality.  Without this life, we would have no reality.
     So, yes, indeed, may life live.  May we always be part of and experience this vast bios, this teeming movement of existence that gestates and ripples across the universe and, specifically for us, sweeps and pervades planet Earth.  May life always be here for us.
      Now if this "life" came about through evolution and circumstance, then, yes, we would expect it, like all other things, to end.  That's just the way things are.  We are born, we live, we die, then other people are born, live, and die, and so on until the bios in which we all find existence dies, too.  Tragic, perhaps, but it's reality.
     But it also leads us to ask:  what, really, was the point of anything?
      Yet if life is not the product of random variation and circumstance, but the work of God, everything changes.  The universe has purpose.  It has a point.  Moreover, if God created life, then it follows that God can create it again.  And again.  And again.  God brings life to be.  Hence, even if we lose this present life, as we one day will, we will live again.  An eternal God who creates a finite existence can also create an eternal one.  Life will continue to live, but it will be lived forever.
     Long live life:  God's life for us.

     Beauty is a slippery term, really, covering everything from a good looking human being to a work of fine art to a piece of symphonic music to a sunset over the ocean, and more.  It's definable, but it's not, apprehensible, but not.  We all see it differently.  The French memoirist Marcel Proust, famous for his lengthy, insightful, and voluminous In Search of Lost Time, once observed that beauty occurs when our perceptions of present reality remind us of some long ago and now lost experience.
     Proust had a good point.  We build our present on our past, and we live on the basis of what we remember going forward.  Sometimes beauty surprises us, sometimes we expect to see it.  What we find genuinely beautiful, however, we find to be so largely because it speaks to us in a way that other things do not.  It seems to encompass and enlarge our ideas, like tentacles of an octopus, remembered from recently or long ago, about what is most pleasing or remarkable about the world.  Whoever we are, we find beauty to be singularly special and unique.
     Long did the Greek philosophers debate over the meaning of the beautiful, trying hard to discern exactly what it is.  They only succeeded when they agreed that it is rooted in some sort of ultimate point, some sort of final definition.  But what would this be?  We're still looking.
     The greatest beauty, however, is that which is new, radically new, and in no way dependent on the old.  Although it builds on and connects to the old, it has not been produced by the old.  It's never been before.  The prophet Isaiah once recorded God saying, "Behold, I create something new; even now it will spring forth."
     The greatest beauty is that there is beauty at all--and that we can know that it is so--the beauty of the absolutely new, the inexhaustible newness of God.
     It's a wide open universe.