As I sat down to read and pray earlier this week, I realized that on this day, sixty-eight years ago, my parents got married.  Wow.  I have posted on a wall of my study a photo of Mom and Dad on the day of their wedding, smiling at each other at the reception in my grandparents' backyard of apricot and peach trees in the Los Angeles of long ago.  I marvel at how out of that day, a day that for most other people was just another day in many, many days, an entire family, two boys and two girls, came.  And how out of these two boys and two girls came more children in turn and, we hope, one day more children from them.
     It's a remarkable statement to the wonder of human existence.  We live and we die, yes, but while we live, we testify, each and every day, to the fact of the universe's progenitive and creative impulses without which nothing could be.
     And, I hope, we will always wonder why.  What did we do to deserve such meaning, such transcendent and enduring meaning?
     And love.  Without a creator's love, without a personal originating presence, what could possibly be?

     Before September 11, 2001, before international terrorism made itself known with such striking effect in the U.S., America felt, in some ways, like it felt prior to the attack of Pearl Harbor:  apart.  Set astride a vast continent, separated from the world by two wide oceans, the nation sat, comforted by its industry and wealth, soothed by its ability to remain aloof from the troubles of the rest of the world.
     No more.  In a few chilling moments, the world exploded in America's face.  There were no more barriers, no more obstacles:  Americans had met the world.

     And could no longer escape it.  On the other hand, perhaps America was, in a peculiar way, at that point redeemed.  Perhaps America was set free (the essential meaning of the word) from the complacency it had nurtured over the decades, its blindness to the way that it is perceived in other parts of the world.  Perhaps 9/11 set America free to realize that it, and the watching world, could be more than the sum of its parts.  Maybe like biblical redemption, a redemption rooted in an unspeakable darkness that set humanity's hearts free, so did the darkness of that summer morning liberate Americans, and the world, to see that, yes, there really is something more to life and existence than simply conquering them.
     Perhaps those black moments will help the planet to grasp anew what it is really here for.

     Think about our Jewish brothers and sisters today.  At sundown last night, Jews around the world entered into the most sacred time of their year:  the high holy days, the Days of Awe.  Beginning with Rosh Hashanah (the New Year) and culminating in Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), these days give every Jew opportunity to reflect on the past and prepare for the future.  They're marked by repentance and reflection, singing and gathering, and reading and mediation.  These are days of intense inwardness--always in community--regarding one's relationship with his/her fellow human beings and God.


     All of us can learn from the Days of Awe.  All of us can profit from taking time to think, to really think about what and how we are doing with our life, about where we have been, spiritually, vocationally, and personally, and where we want to go, come tomorrow.  In this fractured, media driven age, we all can benefit from setting ourselves apart to ponder deeper things, to contemplating the greater meaning and realities in which we move.

     In doing this, we affirm that we are born for transcendence, that we are made to look beyond the immediate and present.  In these Days of Awe, our Jewish brethren remind us that we are more than material concoctions, more than nexuses of chemical exchange.  They tell us that we are creatures of this earth, yes, but simultaneously, creatures of something far greater than we can imagine.
     Enjoy your pondering.

     Who will remember you?  All of us, I think, like to suppose that after we are gone from the planet, someone will remember us.  Particularly if we are, to use a loaded term, famous.  If that is the case, we may well be remembered as long as humanity walks the earth.  For good or ill.
     "I am Taushiro.  I have something that no one else in the world has.  One day when I am gone from the world, I hope the world remembers."  So said the last member of this forgotten tribe living in the jungles of South America.'
     It's a poignant observation.  And frightfully accurate.  If not for the article from which this quote is taken, this person is absolutely right:  when he is gone, no one will know that the tribe had even existed.

     It's easy to say that this is simply the way of sentient existence.  It's easy to say that it doesn't matter.  It's easy to say that once we are gone, we will not care that no one remembers us.
     Then why do we long so much for it to not be true?  We may say that we have come from nothingness and that we will eventually return to nothingness, but can we really square this with our fundamental longing to be loved and remembered?
    It seems that there is something we are missing here, something that, however we define it, brings this together.
     Dare I say God?

     Another day, another movie, I guess.  Not only did I see "Revenant" recently, but a movie called "Operation Finale" as well.  "Finale" presents the account of how a group of Israeli secret agents captured Nazi Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Final Solution, then living quietly in Argentina, and returned him to Israel for trial and justice.

     Philosopher Hannah Arendt covered Eichmann's trial and later wrote a book about it her observations (Eichmann in Jerusalem).  In it, she coins a phrase which was to make her internationally famous.  What Eichmann has done, she said, was to establish the "banality of evil."  So blithely did Eichmann talk about his actions, so casually did he view what he was doing to an entire race of people, and so easily did he compartmentalize his doings at work from his life as loving father at home that, to Arendt, he had made evil irretrievably unimportant and trivial:  totally banal.  Eichmann had banished evil.
    While we can disagree on what constitutes the truly evil, most of us acknowledges that it exists.  Once we eliminate even the idea of evil, however, morality becomes a moot point.
     And the world crumbles completely.

     Perhaps you've seen "Revenant," the 2017 movie, starring Leonard DiCaprio?  Loosely based on the life of Hugh Glass, a Western "mountain man" of the early nineteenth century, "Revenant" is a study in earthly and transcendent morality.

     Briefly, the plot is how, after he is badly mauled in a grizzly bear attack, Glass is left for dead by his companions who, after reaching the safety of an American fort, lie about how they left Glass in order to obtain a larger share of the money due them.  In the months following his abandonment, Glass, through sheer perseverance of will, along with a fortunate encounter with a friendly Indian, manages to "resurrect" himself and make his way to the fort.
     When once he as at the fort and learns that the one who left him for dead has recently fled the justice due him, Glass sets in pursuit.  As the movie draws to a close, Glass and the unscrupulous trader are locked in a fight to the death.  However, when Glass finally gains the upper hand and prepares to end the trader's life, he remembers something his Indian benefactor told him.  "It is for the Creator to seek revenge."
     So he lets his opponent go.  However, as his antagonist drifts into the stream by which they were fighting, he lands in the hands of a group of Indians traveling on the opposite bank.  He is summarily scalped and killed.  Glass, because one of the women in the group recognizes him as the man who earlier rescued her from a rape attack, is spared.
     If we were to frame this scenario in earthly terms, most of us would respond that, yes, Glass should kill his enemy.  If we were to set it in a transcendent framework, one invested in the presence of a Creator, however, we could not.  Satisfying though revenge may be, it will never satisfy the variegated moral contusions of our human heart.  We exact justice only imperfectly.
     When Martin Luther King, Jr., a person deeply committed to God, observed that, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," he expressed this same thought:  we cannot do morality without a just God.

     Yesterday, America (and Canada) celebrated Labor Day.  It's a good day.  It's a day to take time to think about and honor those who, like many of us, work, those who, day after day after day, engage in some type of vocational occupation.
     Most of us accept work as an inevitable fact of existence.  In many respects, it is. Most of us must work. Not all of us of course necessarily like what we do.  Not all of us enjoy getting up for work each day.
     Nonetheless, rightly understood, working can give us a more complete grasp of who we are in our world.
     When we work, however enthusiastically, imperfectly, or apathetically we do so, we echo the fact of a personal creator.  We express our meaningfulness, we manifest that we have a point.  And we contribute to the greater good of existence:  we testify that we are not, as Sartre put it, "useless passions."  In addition, we are underscoring that life has a meaning greater than merely living day to day, that we are made with purpose and reason.  Indeed, whether you know it or not, if you work, you're testifying, testifying every day, to the necessity of an intelligent and personal creator.

     For in a world shorn of such presence, why would we do anything?