At the monthly meeting of my atheist discussion group this week, we watched a video that presented interviews with various atheists about how they found meaning without believing in God.  Young and old, female and male, Western and not, these interviewees shared how even if God is not there, life is nonetheless meaningful.

     Although I do not doubt their words, am highly reluctant to define another person's sense of meaning, and strongly affirm the human capacity for choice, I do wonder about the idea of meaning and the human being.  In order for us to decide life has meaning, we must understand what meaning is.  And in order to understand what meaning is, we must be able to say, unequivocably and unreservedly, that we are meaningful.  We end up doing nothing more than agreeing with ourselves.
     And we still do not know what meaning is.

     For many years, I have had a bird feeder in my backyard.  My wife and I love watching how, summer, winter, autumn, and spring, birds come to the feeder to catch a snack.  Although most are sparrows, we have seen cardinals, wrens, goldfinches, chickadees, and blackbirds.  All are welcome sights.
     This year, however, for reasons we do not know, the birds aren't coming.  Although we've cleaned the feeder, put in fresh food, and hung it further from our house, no bird has yet to land on it.  It's rather puzzling.  And disappointing.
     Granted, birds have ample food sources during the summer; they may not necessarily need a birdfeeder.  Life is good.  Yet I find myself calling, in the manner that St. Francis (Francis of Assisi) is said to have summoned birds to himself, to the birds, whoever and wherever they are, to come to our feeder.
     It makes me think about the Prodigal Son.  He had everything.  But he didn't hear his truest call.  He only heard what he wanted to hear.  Until he couldn't even hear that.
     It was only then that God could speak to him.
     Come winter, I hope the birds return.

     As Ramadan draws to a close (its last day is Thursday, June 15), those who are celebrating it will be taking time to remember its greatest night, Laylat Al Qadr.  On this night, centuries ago, the prophet Mohammad is said to have received the first of the divine revelations which would eventually become the Qur'an.  Laylat Al Qadr is a night in which God (Allah) visited and manifested himself to his human creation in a way, as Muslims, see it, he had not done so before.  It is a night of revelation, a night of divine unfolding, a night in which the distant and unknowable God expressed himself in ways his human creation could understand.
     In this understanding is Laylat Al Qadr's greatest contribution to humanness.  By affirming the possibility of revelation, Laylat Al Qadr reminds us that whether we believe it or not, God speaks.  God speaks through nature, God speaks through image, and God speaks through word.  Life is the speech of God.
     How much remarkable do I therefore find the apostle John's understanding of word, which he articulated several centuries before Mohammad walked upon the earth.  Not only does God communicate himself through the written word (which Jew, Muslim, and Christian alike confirm), John observed, but he communicates himself by showing us, directly and visibly in the person of Jesus, who he most deeply is.
     John showed us that although, as does Laylat al Qadr, we do well to treasure the words of God, we come to know God most fully face to face.

     Ah, the Romantics.  Rebels to the Industrial Revolution, advocates of the senses and imagination, creators of a new picture of God.  Sliding in and out of the nineteenth century, the Romantics strove to push Western Europe past its obsession with technology and open its eyes to new possibilities of what humanity can be.  We are not mere robots of mind and materiality, they said, but creatures of the heart.

     Today, we remember the birthday of one of the most famous Romantic composers:  Robert Schumann.  Like so many of his contemporaries, Schumann died young, passing out of this world at the age of 45.  In his relatively short life, however, he composed some of the most lovely and ethereal melodies of the era.  His music was full of fantasy and images of other worlds, challenging us to dig ever more deeply into who we really are.

     Schumann tells us that, regardless of what we believe about the world, eternity, or God, we are, in our essence, beings of emotion, passion, and pathos.  We develop technologies, yes, and we appreciate what our minds can do.  Ultimately, however, we are destined to look past our mental machinations, and to contemplate why we even have such things, to ponder, wonder, and celebrate our ability to be creatures who, made in the image of God, can birth a dream.

     "Numbers," said the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, "are the essence of all things."  Maybe you like mathematics, maybe you don't.  Maybe you do not see the presence of numbers in the structures of the universe, maybe you do not sense the ubiquity of numbers in all that we do.  Or perhaps you see numbers as the work of God in the make up of the cosmos, that the fact of numbers indicates that God has made an orderly universe.
     Without question, the universe has a sense of balance and order, a presence of symmetry, number, and function that seems to defy imagination.  And we all wonder:  how did such a perfectly tuned structure come to be?  Why did numbers, the foundation of order, the harbinger of space and time, come to be so deeply woven into the fabric of the cosmos?
     Perhaps it's too easy to say that God created it this way, and that, given all things, this was the only world he could have made.  Perhaps.  On the other hand, as any number of unbelievers have remarked, the universe could not be anything other than what it is if it is to exist.  Obviously.  Regardless, it seems that a cosmos grounded in number and, necessarily, order, is essential to our wellbeing and sentient existence.
    Hence, the bigger question is this:  without trapping ourselves in logical circularity, how do we explain the fact of this numbered and orderly existence?
     Have a great day.

     "The mountains are calling me," said the American naturalist John Muir, "and I must go."  As we little human beings wander about this planet, living out our lives, responding to circumstances, making choices, devising goals, and constructing visions, we all wonder:  where, really, are we going?  To what are we really being called?


     In the big picture, we may never know.  We live with what is before us.  We may feel called, we may feel compelled.  Or we may feel as if we have never had a choice in what happens in our lives.  To an extent, none of us really does:  as Martin Heidegger was fond of saying, we are "thrown" into this world:  not a single one of us could make ourselves be here.
     So yes, listen to your call.  In an empty world, it's all you have.  Or better, listen to the rhythms out of which this call, if it is to hold any meaning, any meaning at all, must inevitably come:  the presence of God.

     Asylum?  Across the world, nations are wrestling with the question of asylum.  How do we decide, if we even must decide, to whom we will grant asylum into our country?  It's a very complicated issue.  On the one hand, most asylum seekers have patently legitimate grounds for requesting protection.  For instance, what would you say to your child if she came home one day and told you that the local gang informed her that unless she joined tomorrow, she would be killed?  Or if you were a girl who faced genital cutting?  What if you were caught in the middle of a war, your home completely and utterly destroyed, and no end in sight?
     On the other hand come rejoinders like, "We can't help everyone," "That is their lot and we cannot change it," "They're really trying to slip in and hurt us," and a host of other, dare I say, less than fully adequate excuses.  Most Western nations are far wealthier than the rest of the world.  Surely, we can bend our arcs of justice (to borrow a phrase from Martin Luther King, Jr.) to accommodate these situations.  It does not do to say that the law is just, that the law restricts us, and that therefore to deny asylum is to be just.  That's simply spinning our wheels.
     Maybe this is why the Hebrew prophets said repeatedly that God is more concerned that we make the core of justice mercy, not ritual, that we use our minds and our hearts to effect justice and not our minds only.
     Of what use is a law if it does not take into account the humanity of the heart?