I recently finished reading a novel by the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow.  Spring Snow is the story of a young man born into a fairly low social station who craves the affection of a beautiful woman of a much higher level in society.  By a twist of fate and circumstance, the young man has frequent opportunity to interact with this lovely young woman, heightening his expectation and fervor.  He finds himself falling in love with her--but he is highly hesitant to tell her.  What will she say?
     As the story draws to a conclusion, the young man does tell her.  With this, the spell is broken.  She rejects and shuns him, and he retreats to a place deeply within himself, never to return.  His life is over, his time spent.  He has nothing more to do, nothing more to think about.  Love has proved a fraud, romance a myth.  It's a tragic tale of obsession on the scale of The French Lieutenant's Woman or Lolita, a tale that can never turn out well. Once made vulnerable and dismissed, love often never returns.  Obsessions only rarely result in personal peace:  life is a race for nothing.
     Compounding the angst of this story is the story of Mishima himself.  A fervent advocate of extreme right wing politics in Japan, when Mishima was not writing he was busy involved in various radical nationalist activities against the government.  He seemed obsessed.  Unfortunately, as the characters in Spring Snow crater into emotional or social holes, so does Mishima fall into the pit of his own obsession.  In 1970, he committed sepuka suicide, slashing open his stomach and dying, seemingly twice, as he passed from the planet.
     So we wonder how this happens, how people come to this, how the world breeds this type of response to it.  Humanity is so unpredictable.  We all long for things, be they emotional or physical or material, and most of us desire, in some form, existence.  Only when desire and longing prove futile do we reject them. Tragically, however, in rejecting them we reject purpose as well.  Yet purpose is the only reason we exist.  And purpose is only purpose because we say that it is.  But absent an explanation for existence, how do we really know? 

     The other day I heard a song I had not heard in some time, the Stone Ponies'
"Different Drummer," featuring lead singer Linda Ronstadt.  As you may know, the Stone Ponies split soon after they recorded this song, some of them going on to form the Eagles; others, including Linda Ronstadt, moving into highly successful solo careers.  As the Seventies looped their way across the West, the Eagles sold millions of albums, and Linda Ronstadt achieved international fame with her music as well as her highly alluring figure and persona that made her, in the view of many people, the "sexiest woman" in rock and roll.
     That was over forty years ago.  Today, things are very different.  Although the Eagles continue to make music and tour, reaping ever larger financial rewards, Linda Ronstadt sits in her house in Los Angeles, no longer shapely, and largely alone, unable to make much money at all.  A number of years ago, she was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. For her Parkinson's has been particularly cruel:  it robbed her of the ability to sing.  As she put it in a recent interview, "I'll never sing again."  No longer will her powerful voice rock the airwaves, no longer will she fill vast arenas with her remarkable musical talent.  It's tragic.
     As I reflected on the song and where Linda is today, I thought, once more, of life's unpredictability and caprice.  Who could have imagined, at the height of her fame, that forty years later Linda would be an operatic cripple, forever robbed of the very thing that made her such a presence on the musical scene?  As Ecclesiastes observes, "Who can know what will come after her?"  Who can know what will happen next?
     No one, absolutely no one.  We weep over life's seeming randomness, and well we should:  we live in the nexus of forces we only rarely fathom or measure.  We struggle with circumstance, we wrestle with mortality.  We strive against things we will never defeat or overcome.  We live as human beings, and we die as human beings.
     So is God really there?  That's up to you.  Everyone must decide this:  are we here because we are here or are we here because we are in a "here"?

     "I look at all the lonely people," the Beatles once sang in their Eleanor Rigby, "where do they all come from?"  I thought about these lyrics as I was moving through the security lines at the Denver Airport a couple of weeks ago.  Because TSA personnel had us lined up in aisles formed in the shape of a snake, I had ample opportunity to observe my fellow passengers who were, as was I, slowly parading around and around as we moved toward the check-in people who sat in front of the scanners.  I was struck by the incredible diversity of humanity before me, the different skin colors, heights, weights, facial expressions, hair colors, and more flowing through the terminal.
     All these people, I thought, are going somewhere, be it to a place where they are loved, a place where they would be challenged, a place in which they struggle, a place out of which they might find something new, and more.  But they're all going somewhere. Every one of them is living a little life, a little bundle of hopes, joys, pains, and dreams, a sliver of existence in a world that seems at once big and small, a trek of days and weeks of concomitant drivenness and surcease.  It seemed simultaneously totally and absolutely true as well as entirely depressing and opaque.  Where would we all end up? Where would it all end?  Whereof the human race?
     Without any larger point, and without any larger plan, humanity is of course destined to live out its time and subsequently vanish, forever gone and absent from the cosmos. While each of its lives were vastly important in their time, when the last human takes her dying breath, none will really matter.  It will be as though nothing had ever been there, nothing at all.
     In the final scenes of the original Planet of the Apes, as the human and his "wife" leave the apes to start a new life, they come upon a most discouraging sight.  Rising out of an immense pile of sand, a battered Statue of Liberty stands before them.  The once mighty human civilization from which this monument came is now gone, buried in its own waste and debris.  Did it matter for anything?
     It does, yet it doesn't:  absent a creator, there is no absolutely no reason why it should have happened.  Though it indeed happened, we have no way to prove its worth, for all we have to do so is our accidental selves.
     Ah, look at all the lonely people.

   When, a few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to spend a day hiking in the mountains of Colorado, I leaped into it.  I had not been to Colorado's mountains in some time.  I started early, leaving Denver before 8:00 A.M., headed to Rocky Mountain National Park.  Once there, I caught the trailhead to the crest of the Continental Divide.  I had not been to the top in eight years.  It was a relatively short hike, four and a half miles, with an elevation gain of nearly 3,000 feet.  It was great to be back, great to be in the heights, wonderful to breathe in the crisp alpine air, the oxygen thin wind that, on this day, powered over the divide at over sixty miles an hour.  As I ascended, I watched the boreal forest fade into the stunted spruce trees of the sub-alpine zone, then the treeless expanse of the high altitude tundra that sprawled across the lower edges of the peaks that thrust themselves into the nothing but blue sky.  Magnificence unleashed.
     Thinking about the years that had passed since I last stood on top, I marveled that the land had not really changed, that the features I had seen eight years before remained today, that the vistas I had seen in years past still lay before me, that the sun was still illuminating the same shadows on the same mountains.  On the other hand, everything had changed.  I had changed, the animals had changed, the world had changed.  Many years ago, as he lay dying on the battlefield, an Native American warrior remarked, "Nothing lives long but the sun and the mountains."  So true, so very true.  However, as any geologist or astronomer knows, one day even the mountains will no longer be, and one day even the sun will no longer shine.
     So will anything last?  Not really:  as the cosmos came out of nothing, so it will fade into nothing.  But the question remains:  where will "nothing" be?

     In a world that begs to be experienced, those of us who like to explore it engage frequently in what the Canadian author Robert Service terms wanderlust.  We set our sights on parts unknown, be they physical, mental, or emotional, and set forth, entirely open to what we find.  We're ready for anything.  Or as Service puts it, we respond to the call of the wild.
     For Service, this call entails nights of frigid cold and little fire, tangles with wild animals and encounters with the unexpected, people gyrating between one wild place to another, caught up in the horizons of the harsh magnificence before them.  For the rest of us, though our call could include these things, it could include countless other things as well:  we all explore limits differently.
     Whatever it be, It is in this call of the wild that we confront ourselves and our world most fully.  We bump against the dichotomy that governs all of existence, the grand balance between beginning, being, and ending.  We step into what we cannot master or tame, the surreal and sightless edge of this enigmatic experience we call life.
     As we should.  We cannot find ourselves, and we certainly cannot find the world if we don't take them apart.  It is the call of the wild, whatever we understand it to be, that fractures what we know so as to show us what we do not.  It's like God:  a wildness that undoes everything else.

     How much will a person do to survive?  It's an age old question.  I thought of it anew when I read Stephen Crane's Maggie, A Girl of the Streets recently.  Most of us know Stephen Crane as the author of the Civil War drama, Red Badge of Courage.  In Maggie, however, Crane presents us with a very different dimension of human experience.
     Maggie chronicles the sordid life of a girl named Maggie who, with her mother, father, and brother, try to survive in New York City's underside during the Industrial Revolution. It describes an extremely difficult world, one of poverty, pain, and despair, a world that, like the world of Emile Zola's Germinal, leaves one wondering why anyone in it even bothers to live.  It is a world without hope, a lonely and arduous world into which one is born with absolutely no way out.
     When Maggie comes into puberty and realizes that her father will never be able or willing to take care of her, and that her alcoholic mother will soon drink herself to death, she, like too many other young women of the time, leaves home to make her way on the streets.  Though the novel doesn't state this explicitly, we are given to understand that she eventually resorts to prostitution to survive.  It's ugly and demeaning, but it is the only way that Maggie, whom the novel repeatedly indicates is an extraordinarily pretty young woman, seems to think she can get by.
     As the novel draws to a close, the reader is asked to weigh all the factors in Maggie's situation--the unrelenting poverty, her emotional darkness, her parental abandonment--and ask himself whether she has done the right thing.  Some will insist that Maggie is being pragmatic; others will say that everyone has a choice and Maggie could have done something else; still others will point to the novel's lack of mention of God and say that perhaps God would have provided a way out.  Unless we stand in Maggie's shoes, so to speak, however, we may not really know.  Ethics become highly opaque when we face seemingly closed situations; precise knowledge of certainty is difficult.
     So should we always ask ourselves:  what would we do?  How would we integrate our sense of ethics and morality with situations that seem beyond hope or change?  We will not change without hope, yet we will not hope unless we believe in change.  Yet even though I believe in a hope in God, I would say so to Maggie with tremendous caution.  It's hard to see outside the belly of the whale.
     Sometimes we have to deal with the whale first.

     Ah, work!  Given a choice, many of us would not work, at least not at the job in which we are engaged currently.  Moreover, even if we genuinely enjoyed our job, we would not mind terribly if we woke up one day and learned that we no longer had to do it.  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 would probably not.  Ask anyone who has retired!
     On the other hand, because when God set Adam into the Garden, he instructed him to work, to till and cultivate the land before him, we, too, work.  To work is to be human, and to be human is to work.  Working enables us to discover ourselves.  It challenges, engages 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 a 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.
     On the other hand, because God is there, whatever we do in the marketplace has a point.  God created it, God endowed it with meaning.  However we may feel about our job, by doing it, we, believe it or not, become more human.  We come closer to becoming whom we are created to be:  beings who are finding themselves, beings who are contributing to the common history of humanity, beings who are eloquently and passionately using and communicating what they have been given to further the greater good of us all.  Because God is there, work has purpose.  And we all benefit.
     Thanks for working.