As we consider the fact of All Souls Day, the day after Halloween, we remember.  We remember our loved ones who are gone, we remember what has gone well, we remember what has not.  We remember existence, we remember life itself.  We ponder the import of memory.

    We also ask, how do we explain what has happened, what has been?  How do we measure the span of our existence?  How do we measure the value of our days?

    In ourselves, though we may take pride in reflecting on a life we believe to be well lived, a life that has made its mark, how do we really know?  We have only ourselves and our fellow human beings by which to assess.  We measure the unknown by what we know.  And what we know is frightfully little.  Rarely do we ever see the big picture.  Rarely do we grasp the full meaning of our years.  We're finite creatures living in a finite world, a world that, one day, according to all cosmological predictions, will be burned up by an expanding sun, gone forever, never to be seen again.

    Even if we are but dust, we affirm that dust only has value if it has a reason to be.  Absent this, though dust could well be, we have, absent everything in us, no reason to believe it should.  It all just happened.  But why?

    As we remember, as we look back, and as we also look forward, we can think, as poet Robert Browning once wrote, whatever is to come, we come face to face with the fact of existence.  Why must it be?

    Revel in the memories of a personal creation.

     Once in a blue mooon?  Historically, the phrase "once in a blue moon" has been used to describe something that would likely never happen.  A blue moon occurs when two full moons appear in a single month.  October 31, Halloween, which she of us remembered last week, marked a blue moon.

     Did weird things happen on the blue moon?  Maybe.  Did we feel odd?  Maybe.  Either way, when we celebrate the blue moon, we celebrate rarity.  We laud the ability of our universe to startle and surprise, to offer us something we do not expect to see:  two full moons in one month.
     Some of us might say that God planned these things for our enjoyment.  While I do not discount the activity of God in the cosmos, I would rather say that in creating the universe, God ensured the ubiquity of regularity and the inevitability of the unexpected.  He gave us a universe of surprise and wonder.  We experience this everyday:  there is always something new to find.
     Enjoy the idea of a blue moon.  Enjoy that we live in a universe of abiding purpose.

 

      As Halloween, the Celtic Samhain, the night that, in ancient tradition, the spirits and goblins of the inner earth escape, for one bone chilling evening, their chthonic imprisonment and roam about the planet, weaving magic, confusion, and mystery into the lives of those still living, approaches, we wonder.   Why do we think about such things?  Why do we speculate on what might lay on the "other side"?  
     For many of us, Halloween is a night in which a new reality emerges, sometimes subtly, sometimes violently, always irruptive, always transforming, telling us, reminding us that our assumptions are not what we imagine them to be.  There is other, there is more.  There is a beyond, a somethingness which we might not otherwise see.
     Perhaps deceased spirits are wandering, wailing about their ignominy.  Perhaps.  Yet how could spirit be without spiritual presence?

     A light that always overcomes the darkness.

      A few nights ago, my wife and I watched the new Netflix movie, "Chicago Seven."  It presents the story of the trial of that name which took place in Chicago in the fall of 1970.  On trial were seven of the leading protagonists of the various protest movements that dominated the American Sixties.  They had been charged with, supposedly, conspiring to cross state lines to cause a riot.

     That these gentlemen crossed state lines to come to the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago was not in question.  What the Seven's defense team found problematic was that none of the players in question ever intended to start a riot.  They simply decided, but separately and without consulting each other, to show up in Chicago.

     No matter.  The Nixon administration was looking for a scapegoat (other than the excessively heavy handed Chicago police response to the protestors) for the disturbances at the convention.  The ensuing riots had made international headlines.  As the leaders of the demonstrations had predicted, the whole world was indeed watching.

     Having lived through this time, I found the reenactment of the events fascinating.  I also found it sobering.  Many of these leaders are now dead, some at the proverbial ripe old age, others way too young.  How passionate they were for the cause, how dedicated they were to end the war in Vietnam and restore accountability to American democracy.  In many ways, they succeeded.  In other ways, they did not:  American democracy is less accountable today than it has ever been.

     I admire these people deeply.  I admire their courage, I applaud their convictions.  I'm sorry that some of them are no longer with us.  Very sorry.  I only hope that we all can learn from their lives, that we realize that our lives are as much a measure of the years we have them as the degree to which we invest in the transcendent meaningfulness that pervades them.

     Thanks, God, for humanness.

    

 

If you are at all familiar with the history of art, you are aware of Pablo Picasso, the famous Spanish painter who is perhaps best known for introducing the world to cubism.  Much has been written about Picasso, and countless museums have mounted exhibitions of his art over the years.  He has achieved a notoriety, good and bad, and fame which few artists have surpassed.  Next week, we remember his birthday.
     It is in the thinking behind cubism, however, that Picasso perhaps made his most significant mark.  Prior to Picasso, art, despite its numerous divergences into Impressionism and Postimpressionism and the like, continued to present its images reasonably proximate to the object it was portraying.  But cubism broke up its images, fracturing them, twisting them up and down and around, bending them in ways that they would never be in real life.

     Picasso dared to break boundaries, dared to dream in ways that others either could or would not.  Although some religious people found his forays threatening and felt as if his art was making their world less secure, others welcomed Picasso's perspective.  It was simply another way of looking at the human condition.  It underscored that a world wrestling with the ennui of modernity was looking for a way out.  Though Picasso's cubism didn't necessarily solve the problem, it more than made it plain:  we are significant people in, apart from loyalty to a divine being, an insignificant universe.
     When boundaries fade, we find new boundaries still.

      Most of us like music.  Many of us enjoy piano music.  Recently, I came across a book titled The Lost Pianos of Siberia.  It's an account of how, in the midst of the prisons and gulags that have filled Siberia over the centuries, pianos and the music a skilled pianist can produce on them, have endured.  It's a tale of the power of melody to move the human heart.

     And move the heart it does.  Regardless of how rational, unimaginative, or tone deaf we might suppose ourselves to be, most of us cannot help but be captivated by a richly composed and played piece of music.  Music seems to penetrate us in ways nothing else can.  It grabs us in the innermost workings of our hearts, stirring, evoking, and probing, tangling past, present, and future together in the contours and folds of our minds.  It speaks to us profoundly.

     We may wonder why we have ears, we may wonder why we are soulful and tune happy beings.  We may wonder why music is.  As we should.  Fragile beings we be, we grasp at the metaphysical implications of our existence as in a riddle, as in a mirror darkly:  we cannot easily discern the patterns of our deeper selves.

     Maybe that's why, in the face of music that opens our souls, we need a bigger explanation for ourselves than, well, ourselves.  Absent transcendence, why, really, are we here?

      Do you watch television?  Almost all of us, at some points in our lives, do.  Some watch it every night, hour after hour, while others watch it primarily on weekends, catching football games, and still others tune into it for special shows and programs.  Or all three.  Either way, the television has become rather ubiquitous in most lives, be it in the affluence of the West, where we see people walking out of Best Buy and Costco with 72 inch screen monstrosities, to the most rural hinterlands of Romania, where the barely brick and wood homes of a gypsy village in which I taught a number of years ago sprouted any number of satellite dishes rising into the sky, looking for a signal.

     For better or worse, television is everywhere.  I thought about this a bit as I recently read the obituary of Bob Shanks, a former television executive who pioneered the idea of the early morning talk shows to which countless millions of people now tune every day.  His timing proved highly prescient:  today, talk shows dominate the airwaves, coming on at all times of the day or night.

     In The Cool Fire, one of the books he wrote, Mr. Shanks said this about television, "Television is used mostly as a stroking distraction from the truth of an indifferent, silent universe, and the harsh realities just out of sight and sound."  It's quite an indictment, really, of television, the human psyche, indeed, the entire cosmos.  If television is in fact just a distraction from an absolutely insouciant universe--and the random and unpredictable existence that this implies--we may well wonder why we're even alive.

     If life is to live and die and be no more, is it really life at all?