"Look what the universe did for me!"  Have you ever heard someone say this?  Though I'm not always sure what a person means when she puts things this way, I find it curious that, more often than not, I hear it from a person who does not believe in God.  A person who doesn't want God to interfere with her life, a person who feels no need to trust anything bigger than herself.

    Sure, I am well aware of the numerous difficulties that attend a belief in destiny, foreknowledge, or predestination.  No argument there.  Yet it seems that to invoke the universe as an agent is doing no more than substituting an impersonal presence for a personal one as an explanation of agency in our lives.  It really doesn't solve the problem of a world in which physical laws juxtapose with human choice.
     
     We can accept that life is entirely random, yes, but then we must also accept that we are, too.  And I wonder whether, when push comes to shove, anyone really can.

     Innocence, hope, and redemption.  That were the words comprising the title of a symphonic piece I heard this morning.  The announcer played it because he thought that, on the anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001, such words would be appropriate.
     I agree.  Before that September 11, before international terrorism made itself known in the nation with such striking effect, America was, to an extent, akin to how it felt prior to the attack of Pearl Harbor:  innocent.  Set astride a vast continent, separated from the world by two wide oceans, the nation sat, comforted by its wealth, soothed by its ability to remain aloof from the troubles of the rest of the world.

    No more.  Sometimes, however, darkness harbors the deepest hope. Sometimes the coldest and bleakest night creates the brightest of dawns.  Life renews.

     And redemption.  To redeem is to set free.  Perhaps America was, in a peculiar way, redeemed by the events of that fateful September day.  Perhaps America was set free from the complacency it had nurtured over the decades, its blindness to the way that some of its foreign policies had contributed to the attack, its penchant to focus only on itself.  Perhaps 9/11 set America free to realize that it, and the watching world, could be more than the sum of its parts.  Perhaps the terror of the day planted the seeds of a better world.  Like biblical redemption, a redemption of unspeakable darkness that
set humanity's hearts free, so did the darkness of that summer morning liberate us to see that yes, there really is something more to life and existence than simply living them.
     Pain endures, but hope conquers still.

     Although our children are well beyond college, I enjoy seeing other families in our neighborhood sending their children off to school.  For most of us, it's an essential rite of passage.  As I observed one of my bicycling buddies take his son for his freshman year at the University of Wisconsin yesterday, I thought about how he and his wife feel, letting go of their oldest child and only son, setting him off on a new journey, a journey from which he will likely emerge definitively separated from them as he begins a new life of his own. It's hard to let go.  Yet it's also hard to hold on.
     It's an apt parable for our lives.  We try so hard to cling to what we know because in that we find security and, for most of us, control.  Conversely, we ought to try equally hard to let go:  security is welcoming, but it only perpetuates what is already there.  The greater challenge is to embrace the unknown.
     So often have I seen my students, most of them believers in God, balance these polar opposites.  It's never easy.  Yet why believe in God if we cannot trust him?

     Whenever I go away, for whatever reason I do, our cat, aptly named Summer, remains at home and, in her funny little way, greets me upon my return.  Summer has a cute little life, really, a life of routine, yet a life at the same time that is always new and changing.  Like ours.  Year round, her daily patterns remain about the same, exploring the backyard in the morning, having a bit of "breakfast" when she returns, then "retiring" to a comfortable chair for a nap.  In the afternoon, after she is "rested," she does the same thing.  Likewise for the evening (although we do not let her outside after dark).  But one day she might see a butterfly she has never seen before; another day she might find a puddle of water left by the rain from which she can drink; yet another day she comes upon a new flower in the yard.  There's always something "new" to see.

     If she looks for it.  And she does.  Summer is a very curious cat.  Are you a curious human being?  You likely do not sleep as many hours as does a cat (well over eighteen hours a day), and you probably do not thrill over a new puddle of water in your yard.  Nonetheless, we build our lives around the new.  That's how we are made.
   
  Again, only if we look for it.  The world is indeed a remarkable place.  But like Summer, we will never know this if we do not look for its wonders and, more importantly, we realize that, all laws of physics aside, a world without "newness" is a world without transcendent truth.  Newness is only as amazing as the framework in which it occurs.

     Only last week, I was wrapping up my final backpack of the summer, this one a trek with my youngest sister in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California.  We had a lovely time, really, a lovely time hiking through the mountains together:  a wonderful gift!  Though we have both been going to the Sierra since we were children, finding the time, as we "age," to step away from the campers who come to Yosemite and moving ourselves into the high country, is always a treat.  In the high country, the land of flower dappled tundra and quiescent lake, of sculpted peaks towering over dense river valleys, of entirely  cloudless and ever blue sky, we find another world, a world which, as my sister remarked on our first night out, that is "real."
     Not that the world we inhabit outside the mountains is unreal; it is quite real.  Yet in the world of the mountains, a world in which what is important is gazing across a glistening lake or taking in the alpen glow of a sunset, we find life distilled into its essential purity:  sheer beauty.  It's the beauty of nature, it's the beauty of our companions, it's the beauty of God.
     As the famous Scottish mountaineer John Muir observed upon hiking through the Sierra for the first time, "These mountains are the finest temples to God."
     You may believe, you may not.  But I suspect you'd be hard pressed to deny the fact of a beauty you cannot fully understand.

     As we in the West leave the traditional summer behind, we might find ourselves remembering some of its joys.  Perhaps we remember a trip we took, or maybe a family reunion.  Perhaps a baseball game.  Maybe a wedding, maybe a birth.  Whatever our memory may be, we remember it in the enduring warmth and expansiveness of the summer, the season when many of us try to make time to do something for which we do not have time at other parts of the year, a season when we can go outside without bundling ourselves up, a time when we just hang out with family and friends.  Either way, we remember those summer days as wonderful gifts in our lives.

     Not to say that summer is over:  almost a month remains until the autumnal equinox.  It is to say, however, that as, in some fashion, the weather changes and our lives resume their "normal" rhythms, we remain grateful for the opportunity, for a season, to let go, to loose ourselves, even for a little while, of our responsibilities.  To lose ourselves in the wonder of just "being" in the world
     Although with climate change, summer is beginning to look very different in many parts of the world, its inevitability remains constant:  it will always happen.
     Thank goodness--and God--for the rainbow.

     Earlier this week, 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 most 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. However, not all of us enjoy getting up for work each day. Nonetheless, to work is to be human, and to be human is to work.  Working enables us to discover our humanness most fully.  Ideally, work challenges us, involves us, equips us, fills us.  Working gives us a more complete grasp of who we are in our world.

     More broadly speaking, 

work has a point.  When we work, however enthusiastically, imperfectly, or apathetically we do so, we affirm our meaningfulness.  Whether we know it or not, when we work, we are contributing and communicating.  We are contributing to the greater good of the planet, we are communicating the presence of a meaningful world.  We are underscoring that life has a meaning greater than merely living day to day.  We are stating that although, yes, we must in most instances work to survive, we nevertheless see hope and meaning beyond it.  We affirm that we are made with purpose.

      Absent an intentional beginning, shorn of a God, the cosmos has no reason to be.  And we have no reason to work.  Beyond the authenticating boost it might give us, a boost which never lasts, why would it matter?  We live, work, and die.
     Oddly enough, work, whatever it may be, testifies to the fact of a meaningful universe, a therefore personal universe, a universe which, therefore in turn, is made, somehow, some way, by a personal God.