"For the people who walk in darkness," wrote the prophet Isaiah, "will see a great light (Isaiah 9:1)."  Isaiah speaks of Messiah, the one who would come to illuminate an Israel darkened by disappointment, abandonment, and sin.  He speaks of the one who would open the eyes of all those who longed for a bigger picture of reality, who sought to see a greater light.  Those who believed in more.

     

    On the third Sunday of Advent, we remember this fact of light.  We remember how, like the sun exploding over a frigid mountain ridge, transcendent light, the light of enlightenment, the light of hope and meaning that shines through the cold of an often disparate existence.  It is a light that, if we embrace its rising, embrace it fervently and without reservation, will change our lives forever.
     

    Though we may struggle with the idea of eternality, though we may question the presence of God, we all long for light. We all long for hope and meaning.  We all long for a window into a richer existence.
    

    In an accidental universe, however, richness is impossible, for value and morality cannot be measured or even be.  Only in a personal cosmos, a cosmos in which an enlightening transcendence is possible, can hope and purpose be, infused with meaningful light.
    

    The light of the world.

      Is God incomprehensible?  It's an age old question, one that has occupied many, many books.  The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, long known for his deeply measured thoughts about God, asked this question constantly.  Buried at the heart of his inquiring was his notion that life itself was incomprehensible.  If we can't comprehend God, how can we expect to understand the life he has bequeathed us?  So, he asked, how do we live?

     Rilke's answer was to embrace, in living our lives, all that is beyond our control, particularly death.  To fully understand life, he suggested, we must wrap it in the specter of death.  To ignore death is to ignore the fullness of life.
     

    Though Rilke's position may sound rather morbid, it is, on the other hand, decidedly cognizant of the framework of our mortal existence.  We all will die.  If we believe there is no afterlife, however, then we may conclude that death, though it be inevitable, may not so much affirm the fullness of life as to underscore its assumed (but not provable) meaningfulness, as well as, for some, its futility.  What has it been for?  But for Rilke, as one who has placed a degree of credibility in the supernatural, to embrace death is to embrace the incomprehensible, that is, God.  In this is the fullness of life, to know that from which it has ultimately come.  Life has meaning beyond itself.

     We may agree that God is incomprehensible, but if we believe that life is incomprehensible, too, we have missed the point.  If we reject the idea of God, we are still faced with the grim reality that life is incomprehensible.  And what will we then do?

    I heard the other day the poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”  It reminded me of Canadian (and now American) singer Neil Young’s song, “When God Made Me.”  In it, Young questions God, asking him why he made people a certain way, why he made people when he knew they wouldn’t believe, and more.  Both pieces ask a very good question:  how can I believe in a God if I do not understand him?  Why must I wander in the darkness when I’m standing in the light?

    Yesterday, many across the planet remembered the fortieth anniversary of the death of John lennon.  In one of Lennon's most famous songs, "God," he says, "I just believe in me; Yoko and me.  That’s reality.”

 

    Granted, transcendence and religion do not lend themselves well to our rational perceptions.  And that’s the problem.  Ironically, it’s also the solution.  If we could explain everything with chemicals, if we never developed questions like Cohen and Young pose, if we subsumed all experience into a plastic (or computerized) box, then, yes, we would need nothing else.  But we can’t.  So we wonder.

    

    And we mourn those whom we've lost.

    

    As we therefore remember John Lennon, we also ponder the ultimate challenge:  how do we know who we are if all we know is ourselves?

       "It is a day that will live in infamy," said Franklin Roosevelt after the attack on Pearl Harbor.  For those who were alive when it happened, the attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor, whose 82nd anniversary is today, changed their world forever.  Never before had America been attacked, never before had such devastation been visited upon its shores.  Life was turned upside down.

     But isn't that the nature of existence?  It's capricious, random, and unpredictable, a series of unexpected waves in an unfathomable sea, an illusory skein on an abyss whose bottom we will never see.
     
     Yet we go on.  We grieve for those who lost their lives in this attack.  And we grieve for the thousand and thousands of additional lives that were lost redressing what happened.  The pain and carnage defy all form and sensibility. 
     
     And we continue to believe in meaning.  As we should.  No one should die unremembered, no one should die alone. No one should leave this life lost and abandoned, a forgotten and abandoned image of God, an entity without a point.

     Advent's light, however, reminds us that the horrors of existence are never the end.

  

     Since the days of Auguste Rodin, sculpture has often occupied a special place in the artistic imagination:  what is it really trying to say?  Consider the works of American sculptor Charles Ray and his unique ability to speak through his creations.  Even though it is clear that, in his "Archangel," this sculpture has little to do with communications from the divine, it nonetheless seems to reflect, or so the critics say, transformation.  Or what theologians call an apotheosis:  a transformation into God.

    Yet on the other hand, most of us wish, in some way, to be different than we are today.  We may wish for better people skills, increased insight into what life means, greater compassion for our fellow humans, deeper love for our spouses or significant other, and so forth.  Bottom line, we want to find our greater point.  Even if it is a point that only we define.

    And we will do so whether we believe in God or not.  When I consider Ray's "Archangel," I therefore ponder how much it expresses who we are.  Be it people in passage, people in stasis, or some blending of the two, we long to see who and what else we can be.

    After all, we're purposeful creatures in an intentionally purposeful universe.  Otherwise, we would have no claim to aspire to anything.

    "For the grace of God has appeared," writes the apostle Paul in the third chapter of his letter to Titus, "bringing salvation to all people" (Titus 2:11).  As we remember the second Sunday of Advent, we can think afresh about the idea that in the historical person named Jesus, we see, in flesh and blood, concrete and visible expression of God's grace, physical manifestation and display of his truest posture toward humanity.  Jesus' appearance tells us that, above all, God is love:  the grace of God.
    

    We grant each other grace every day, as we should.  Yet it is God's grace that elevates us above the too frequent senseless and confusing vagaries of the world in which we live.  It is this grace that tells us that there is hope, a hope that reality is more than what we see, a reality that frames and orders all we do.  It is a grace that tells us that whatever else we may think about God, what we ought to think most about him is this:  God is loving, God is gracious, and God is for us, for us today, for us tomorrow, for us forever. 
   

    This may leave you nonplussed.  Fair enough.  However, do we really want to believe that this world, this magnificent and bounteous and amazing world, cannot speak beyond itself?

     If you enjoy rock and roll music, particularly that of the Seventies, you may have heard the news:  Christian McVie, a longstanding member of the British band Fleetwood Mac and one of its most prolific songwriters, passed away yesterday.  She was 79.

    But her music will live on.  One of her most famous songs, enshrined in the excitement of Bill Clinton's 1992 election to the presidency of the United States, is "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow."  It's a song of optimism, a song of hope:  never cease imagining that there will be another day.

    And there will be.  Yet therein is the glory, and tragedy, of humanness.  Highly gifted, made in God's image, yet a captive of her finitude, Ms. McVie demonstrates to us that, in the big picture, though we are wonderfully designed and created, we are enormously fragile.

    Ironically, we are also made to dream of another day.  Futile though finitude may be, it can't be completely contained in a meaningful and intentionally created world.

    Rest well, Christian McVie.