Creator of the novel Frankenstein (when she was but in her early twenties), Mary Shelley led a highly fascinating and somewhat tragic life.  Her father was the anarchist author William Godwin, her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women (and who died shortly after giving birth to Mary).  She was also married to the outspokenly atheistic poet Percy Shelley until he tragically died in the Bay of Spiza in Italy in 1822.

    Although most people believe Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein to critique the Industrial Revolution's focus on the life of the mind while overlooking the supremely important place of the heart, and she did, there might be more to the story.  More precisely, Frankenstein is a parable about the limits of humanness.  In the person of the "monster" (who turns out to be far more intelligent than the 1931 Hollywood movie makes him out to be), Shelley provides an incisive narration of the ultimate emptiness of the human condition.  She powerfully demonstrates that for all of its magnificence, humanity is finally as confused and shallow as the world over which it purports to rule.

    Dr. Frankenstein's words, in the movie, upon seeing the "monster" move its hands, exclaims, "Now I know what it feels to be God!" speaks volumes about Shelley's vision.  What would we do, really, if we were God?  Would we create the world as it is, or would we do something entirely different?  And how would we know either way?

      Can any of us bear the burden?.

     Recently, my wife and I saw an amazing performance of piano virtuosity.  The piece was Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto #2, the pianist was Nobuyuki Tsujii.  The amazing thing was that Nobuyuki was born blind.  But this didn't stop him.  Recognizing his incredible gift for music early on, his parents and mentors ensured that he got all the training he could.  Today he performs all over the world.

    As I watched and listened to Nobuyuki play, I marveled at the remarkable display of human ability before me.  I also marveled at the way in which, despite being born handicapped into a broken and bent world, Nobuyuki found redemption in his musical talent.  Though the world sometimes undermines us, the intentionality with which it has been created grants that what breaks us can also redeems us.

    Redeems us not just for us, but for the entire planet.  We just need to wait for it.

     A few weeks ago, I was hiking in the Sierra Nevada of California.  I try to go there every year.  This year, I met my youngest sister and we camped at the same campground at which we had camped as small children, many, many years ago, with our two other siblings and mother and father.  It was a stroll down memory lane.  A good one.

    Although we visited the same swimming holes and had some of the same ice cream at the same camp store, we took some hikes we had not done as children.  In one of them, we drove twelve miles down an unpaved road just to get to the trailhead.  From that point, we set out into some remarkably spectacular country.  We saw no one.  As we passed by a set of lakes many miles from the trailhead, we caught glimpses of the Sierra of yore, the bucolic stretches of rock, tundra, and sky that characterize its higher elevations.  It was good to be "home."

    Which is the point.  Nearly thirty years ago I heard a message about starting points and home.  We all have a starting point.  Sometimes it is one we remember, sometimes not.  Sometimes we have positive feelings about this point, other times, not nearly as much.  Divining the meaning of our beginnings is therefore difficult: we will never know why we began where and when we did.

    But isn't that the point?  We're born in a mystery, a mystery which we cannot begin, in this life, to unravel.  And that's fine.  How shallow would our lives be if we could reduce them to complete rationality!

    Thank goodness for the wonderment and imagination of an unfettered and personal universe.

      Ah, August.  As this most glorious month winds to its conclusion, I think occasionally of some words of writer Patricia Hampl.  In talking about her younger years, she asked, "Is this a happy childhood--the unfettered experience of the strangeness of existence, the pleasure of being caught up in the arms of creation?"

     In many ways, August evinces the "strangeness" of existence.  Its effusiveness of life belies its silent and underlying prelude to and anticipation of the coming autumnal "death."  But existence cannot be any other way.  Even Eden had days and nights.  We love the shimmering glow of August even as we may cower before what follows it.

     Yet August's demise is hardly cause for alarm.  It is rather a call to rejoice.  To rejoice in the incredible rhythms of a simultaneously strange and wondrous creation.  To rejoice in a creation which could only have been set into motion by an equally befuddling and wondrous God.

     That's the glory, that's the mystery.  And that's the vexation.  But would we really want it any other way?

  

     

    Hieronymus Bosch, the late Renaissance Dutch painter, left us a curious legacy.  On the one hand, his art seems to reflect a wish for the traditional, the staid and religiously structured medieval past that the Renaissance left behind.  On the other hand, it evinces a desire for a breakage from tradition, a severing of ties to what had long been considered to be morally valid.  His "The Garden of Earthly Delights" is a prime example.

     In a way, we're all like Bosch.  Most of us appreciate tradition, most of us value the tried and true, and few of us entertain a wish to overthrow the existing order completely.  Conversely, however, not too many of us wish to maintain things exactly as they have always been.  We wouldn't be fully human if we did.

     Consider religion.  Repeatedly, the many religions which have emerged in the course of human history have advocated a new way, a fresh way of looking at the world.  That's their appeal:  a richer perspective on existence.  We may agree or disagree with any or all of the world's religions, but we cannot deny how they have opened new and, usually positive, avenues of thinking for billions and billions of people.

    It's tricky, this humanness of ours.  We constantly balance a compelling desire for stability with an equally compelling desire to undo it, to undo it for a greater day.  As we should.  God didn't make us to stand still.

       "Do not rejoice at your enemy's misfortunes," a Hebrew proverb says, "but want the best for him."  Or God will bless him anyway.

    In this era of highly polarized political dialogue and disputation, avoiding what we might call Schadenfreude (taking pleasure in the misfortunes of those with whom we may disagree) is difficult.  However, it seems to be the only way forward.  We demean ourselves if we suppose our integrity to be ours, and ours alone.  There is always a bigger picture. 

    And we do not paint it.  Although it may be easy enough to say that, well, one day God will judge all things and hold everyone accountable for his or her deeds, I'm not sure this resolves the issue.  We do not live in the "later;" we live in the here and now.

    Yet unless there is a bigger picture--and a larger vision of newness--we have no business judging anyway.

  

Ernest Hemingway

      Isn't truth a funny word?  Most of us appreciate it, most of us desire it. Very few of us, however, can define it.  Philosophers tell us there are essentially two ways of looking at truth.  The correspondence theory suggests that truth is simply that which corresponds to reality.  While this seems logical enough, it raises other questions:  how do we know what is real and how do we therefore know what corresponds to it? 

    Taking a different tack, the coherence theory holds that truth is the sum total of what seems apparent, logical, and right.  Truth is not fixed but is rather what appears to be most correct based on the prevailing evidence.  Yet how do we decide what is most correct and right?

     Though I see virtue in both perspectives, I won't try to reconcile them now.  I merely wish to make an observation about the necessity of truth.  When we insist that truth is relative or a creation of the moment, we are essentially saying that truth does not exist.  If so, we have no good reason to hold that even we exist.  If nothing holds, if nothing is sure, then neither are we.

     We need truth to be truth.  Otherwise, we became like the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, who, in the final scene of the novel, when he has just watched his wife die giving birth to his child, and then stood by as the child died, too, "put on his hat and walked into the rain."

    The end.