Is faith simply an ethnic expression?  We have some good friends who are Muslims.  They came to the States from Pakistan in 1975 and never left.  They love America and would never return to Pakistan, except to visit.  And they love and revere Allah.  They pray to him at least five times a day.  Growing up as Muslims, they have never known anything else.  For them, being Muslim is being who they are.  If they had been born in the U.S., would they be Muslims?  While it is impossible to say with certainty, my point is that for them faith has been filtered through the lens of their cultural heritage, just as mine has been filtered through the lens of my American experience.  We express our faith amid our cultural baggage, for sure, and walk in it in the compass of our life experience.  We cannot do otherwise.

     So whose is the greater confrontation with the limits of the present?  We both walk in an aura of a coming thing, we both tread about in this life in light of the life we believe it will one day be, however we conceive and define it, we both understand existence through the skein of another one from which it came.  We cannot see life as existing independently, as life being accidental, as life being no more than the coalescing of subjective chemical experiences, as life being what has been made from what has been there.  We both hold to the fact of another presence.  Faith knows no boundaries.
     Ethnicity may drive the experience of faith, but it doesn't define the fact of it.  People have faith in God because they are human beings.  People have faith in God because they realize that all the scientific knowledge on the planet, valuable though it be, will not answer a most basic question:  why are we here?
     People have faith in God because they understand that humility is essential to humanness.

     Although she has been gone for nearly five years, I cannot help but think of my mother on this day, year after year after year:  it's her birthday.  I found fresh poignancy in the day this year when a few days ago I heard John Lennon's "Mother."  For those who have not heard the song, Lennon sings of the mother and father whom he always wanted but, as he puts it in the song, were never there for him.  They didn't "have" him.
     Would we all wish for parents who are there for us, who "have" us, who love us as we wish them to love us.  In contrast to Lennon, I experienced this love in full, and more, in the love of my parents, my mother and father.  I really needed nothing more from them, for in their love they gave me everything I could possibly want and need.  I left home believing that the world was a good place, that people were decent beings, that love reigned in the universe.  Thanks indeed, Mom and Dad, thanks always and forevermore. I'll never be able to repay everything you did for me
     I hope that all of us find this kind of love, too.  Whether it's from our parents or others, I hope that we all come to see the fullness and presence of love in the cosmos, and enjoy and appreciate its every expression on our behalf.  I hope that we all know love as something that always wants us.
     Like the love of God.  Thank goodness for a loving God.

     The other day, I watched a video produced by a prominent atheist blogger named Matt Dillahunty.  He talks about what he considers to be the futility of faith.  Using the famous "faith" passage in Hebrews 11:1, which reads, "Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen," he proceeds to dismantle the entire edifice of Christian belief.  In the end, he observes that faith is just "pretending you know something when you really don't."  In point of truth, he says, the verse in Hebrews indicates that faith itself is the evidence for itself, a conclusion that, for him, is not a tenable intellectual position.
     He's right:  it's not.  Faith needs more than itself to be credible.  Faith needs reasons, and faith needs evidence to be cogent.  However, when believers raise this issue with Dillahunty, he replies that their evidence is "not good."  By whose standards?  Clearly, his own.  If the evidence for the Christian faith can be tested, that is, if it is falsifiable, why should it not be considered credible?
     Although we cannot readily test an experience, we can certainly test historical event. There is ample archaeological and linguistic evidence that many of the events presented in both testaments of the Bible really did happen, and there is ample historical evidence that the people of whom the Bible talks were born, lived, and died just like you and me. We can test this evidence, not in the court of public opinion, but through dispassionate research and study.
     If Christianity has no historical basis, then, yes, we have no good reason to believe it. If it does, however, we have every good reason to at least test and examine it, even if we later decide we cannot live with it.  We owe it to ourselves to follow the evidence where it leads.  We all possess minds, we all possess reason, and we all possess the capacity for rational thought.  And we ought to employ it.
     Who knows what we will find?!

     Like almost everyone in the West, I weep over the predations of ISIS.  I weep over the people being kidnapped, the people being executed, the people being terrorized, all in the name of establishing a utopia designed for only a very few.  The tragedies the group is spawning are almost beyond imagining.  
     Yet I also hope that the West learns from these difficulties.  I hope that the West learns that a great deal of ISIS's appeal stems from the West's quest, a quest that has now spanned over a hundred years, and counting, to control the world for its benefit.  I hope that the West realizes that its obsession with corralling access to oil and other natural resources has produced enormous resentment in many corners of the world, and I hope that one particular country in the West comes to see that setting itself forth as exceptional belies what the word means.  How does it really know?  It's no secret that part of the ongoing anger towards the West is due to the West's historical willingness to support numerous dictatorial regimes in various regions of the world.  In the end, everyone, the most exceptional nation included, wants its turf, usually regardless of how this desire may affect others.
     ISIS is a creature of its moment and time, a moment and time created yes, by the culture out of which it came.  It's a creature whose actions almost everyone agrees are horrific, but a creature in part sparked by other cultures seeking hegemony over all others. It's a delicate balance, really:  how do we look out for ourselves while looking out for others, too?
     Be it in interpersonal relations or international affairs, Paul's observations in 1 Corinthians 13 holds true:  "Love seeks not its own."

     For those of us (a group which includes, I hate to say it, me) who read AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) Magazine, we know that this month's issue featured a lengthy interview with one of the elder statesmen of rock and roll, Bob Dylan.  At 73, Dylan finally decided to sit down with AARP and talk.
     We all have varying opinions about Bob Dylan, and I won't spend time talking about those (except to say that one member of my family is very passionate about his admiration of him!).  I do want to highlight one thing Dylan mentions in the interview, which is that, "Passion is a young man's game.  Young people can be passionate.  Older people gotta be more wise."
     Of course, Dylan doesn't mean eschewing any kind of passion.  He'd be denying who we all are.  He's referring to the wild passions (and perhaps debauchery) that seem to accompany rock bands that tour in their twenties, thirties, and forties.  Such things have become rock and roll legend, and have filled countless books.
     Dylan has a good point. Those of us who have lived past the midpoint of their life understand that as we grow older, things change.  We look at life and time differently. How can we not?  We all hope we are growing in wisdom; we all hope we are becoming more balanced people.
     As Ecclesiastes advises the young person (chapter eleven), follow the impulses of your heart and pursue the desires of your eyes.  Yet remember this:  when all all else is said and done, reverence God.  Remember your creator.
     Passion may assume different forms, yes, but it remains essentially the same: reminders and reflections of our journey before, I trust, God.  We all see existence differently, but we all exist the same.  We may not do everything we once did, but we do what we do now.  And that's enough.  Life is a cacophony of possibility.  It's always new.
     So did Jesus say, don't put new wine in old wine skins.  Put new wine in new wine skins and, whether you're young or old, see your life unfold in the eternality of God.

     Most of us have no doubt been thinking about Leonard Nimoy lately.  The famous and enduring "Mr. Spock," Nimoy captured the imaginations of millions of people all over the world.  His character's commitment to rationality and logic, his Vulcan hand sign, his mysterious ways of overpowering those opposed to him, and his endless quest for certainty have touched us all.  They've made all of us think anew about who we are.
     Out of costume, Nimoy was of course as human as the rest of us, emotive, passionate, and creative.  In character, however, it was a different story.  "Trekkies" reveled in his ability to cut through the superfluous and focus on the most important issues at hand.  For him, logic was king.
     Interestingly, this raises a larger point:  are we mind or heart?  Are we more mind than heart or more heart than mind?  Or does it depend on the situation?
     Some people will tell me that they make all their decisions on the basis of reason alone.  Really?  Then we may as well be a brain on a table, a Cartesian talking head. However we want to take the Genesis story of the creation of man and woman, we can at least say it indicates that, in the beginning and, judging by human history since that point, people are as much mind as they are heart.  And we make decisions based on both. We cannot help it.  It is who we are.
     So I say to Mr. Spock, thanks for reminding us of the necessity of rationality and logic. And yet, as one episode of Star Trek showed us, thanks as well for demonstrating that even those have their limits.  It's hard to suppress, much less overcome the heart.  And who would want to?
     God didn't make us robots.  He made us creatures of the heart.

     Here we are, the day after the second Sunday of Lent.  By now, the faithful are well into their Lenten pursuits, steadily and patiently striving to relinquish control over various areas of their lives and to set their days into a larger compass of understanding.  As they should:  giving up is the essence of being human.  If we try to control everything, we will inevitably end up creating a world of us and us alone, a world without any real point except poor little us.
     Granted, we ought to control some things.  When we strive to control everything, however, we will eventually realize that we have not succeeded in controlling anything. We reduce ourselves to a collection of atoms spinning in a nexus of space and time, avoiding everything but ourselves.  And who are we?  We will never be any more than our limits and possibilities.  Lent is God's way of telling us that though we are remarkable creatures, we err in supposing that we are so remarkable that we can decide what it means.  How could we?  We are only us.
     We're just visiting the planet that God made and, one day, we will see things as they are really meant to be.