Amid the controversy that some expressions of Islam are stirring across the world, it's instructive to think back over one thousand years to the relationship between Europe and the Middle East and Asia during the Middle Ages.  Western Europe's emergence from the "Dark" Ages into the intellectual splendor of the Renaissance was encouraged and aided in part by the extensive learning, scientific, mathematical, and philosophical, it absorbed from the Arab Muslim countries of the Middle East.  Even as today the largely white West and the largely Islamic Middle East seem locked in interminable conflict in almost every way, neither side being openly willing to admit that the other may have learning or thinking that it might find useful, we long for a repeat of world history past.  Over a millennium ago, for a few golden decades, West and East, Europe, China, and Middle East interfaced in harmony, learning from each other, embracing each other, and working with each other for a greater good.  Setting religion aside, they strove to think the best of each other and proceeded accordingly. And the world was immeasurably better off.
     The God who created this amazing world and every person in it (consider Psalm 24:1) knows very well that we will never agree on absolutely everything.  He made all of us different, sometimes radically different from each other.  And that's good:  we grow best in a dynamic world.  To do so effectively, however, we need to love and appreciate this dynamism, and to try, however difficult it may be, to live and deal, indeed revel in, with its effects.  It's a beautifully colored world, a wonderfully woven tapestry of experience.
     We just have to find the most appropriate blend.

     A few weeks ago, October 9, to be precise, a full page advertisement appeared in the New York Times.  It said simply, "Imagine all the people living in peace."  It was placed by Yoko Ono, widow of former Beatle John Lennon.  October 9 was Lennon's birthday.  He would have been 74 this year.
     As most of us know, these words are drawn from Lennon's classic recording, "Imagine." Aside from reminding me of the enduring tragedy of Lennon's abrupt passing on December 8, 1980, Yoko's ad made me think, again, about one of the central tenets of Lennon's existential vision:  peace.  It is a vision to which Lennon devoted much of the last decade of his life.  Although we may question or debate some of his methods (sleep-ins in posh hotels; shaving off most of the hair on their head, to name just a few), most of us can hardly quarrel with their ultimate objective:  global peace.  Like the rest of us, Lennon was acutely aware of the near impossibility of achieving such a thing, but he nevertheless did his best to push the planet in that direction.  He used the accouterments of his wealth and fame to give peace a "hearing" in the discussion halls of the world.  For this, we cannot fault him.
     From most standpoints, political, religious, scientific, philosophical, cultural, we can conclude that permanent and lasting global peace will likely never happen in our lifetimes, nor the lifetimes of our very distant descendants.  There is too much baggage working against it.
     Furthermore, even if everyone on the planet is able to achieve a permanency of inner and personal peace, this will not necessarily translate into world peace.  We will remain captives of ourselves and our desires.  We cannot escape who and what we are.  Nor should we.
     Many of us find personal peace without believing in God.  However, if there is no God, our universe is a vast, empty composite of space and time.  Personal beings will never tame the meaningfulness of an impersonal universe.
     Peace needs a context beyond itself.

     When encountering the unusual or unexpected, many religious people like to remark, "Well, the Lord works in mysterious ways."
     So he does.  Why would he not?  He's infinite, we're merely finite.  For us, nearly everything God does is a mystery.  Frequently, this mystery is quite confounding.
     The other day I watched, as I had several times before, the 1982 Academy Award winning movie, "Chariots of Fire."  "Chariots," which is a true story, presents the lives of two British runners, Harold Abrams, a Jewish student at Cambridge, and Eric Liddell, a Scottish missionary in China, and how their lives come together and intertwine at the 1924 Olympics in Paris.  Each of them wins his race:  Abrams, the 100 meter dash; Liddell, the 400 meter run.  Throughout the movie, we are shown how for Abrams, running is an existential quest, what he does to affirm his existence.  As he states before he runs his race, "I have ten seconds to justify my entire existence."
     For Liddell, his running is what, as he sees it, gives God pleasure.  God, he believes, has made him fast, and he wants to run his races for God.  He likes to win, but he likes for God to win more.  As the movie draws to a close, we are told that after the Olympics Abrams returned to England in triumph, married an opera star, and became the "elder statesman" of British athletics.  He died in 1978.  On the other hand, Liddell, we are told, returned to the mission field in China, where he died of a brain tumor in a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War.  All Scotland, the movie tells us, "mourned" his passing.
     Christians of most every ilk loved this movie, and many believed that its winning the Academy Award for best picture demonstrated that God was blessing it for his use. Perhaps this is true.  It later came out, however, that Ian Charleson, the actor who so capably played Eric Liddell, was in fact a gay man when he did the role. (Regrettably, he succumbed to AIDS in 1990.)  Considering the opprobrium that some Christians heap upon the gay community, this is perhaps the ultimate irony.  Despite everything we might say or think, it seems clear that God used a person with whose lifestyle many Christians vehemently disagree to definitively proclaim the fact and worth of his name to the world.
     The Lord indeed works in mysterious ways.  And may we never suppose or think that we know completely how he does so.

     Have you seen "Tracks?"  Based on the true story of a woman who in the middle of the Seventies trekked 1700 miles alone through the inhospitable country that stretches across central Australia, "Tracks" is a portrait of determination, heartbreak, and profound passion for the unknown.  Bent on probing the riches of solitude, this woman, Robyn Davidson, now 64 years old, spent two years acquiring and training three adult camels, along with a baby camel, then set out into the incredibly vast Australian Outback.  She passed by Ayer Rock, the largest "rock" in the world, met and walked with, for a while, many native elders, shot down some charging wild bull camels, encountered a number of people who treated her with immense kindness and, sadly, lost her beloved dog one night along the way.  It was a remarkable journey.
     Anyone who has spent weeks and months in wilderness alone (as I have) can, I think, relate.  We love the allure of setting off alone into the wild, we delight in waking up to a sky that seems made only for us, we revel in our ability to shut ourselves off from the emptiness and vagary of the civilized world.  We like being alone.
     As those of us who, whether we are spiritually inclined or not, have experienced such moments can attest, solitude opens windows into the soul.  It lets us see things we would not see in the company of others, discloses to us insights we would not have seen had we remained in the thick of human community.  We see life in a new and richer light. Moreover, even a cursory look at the lives of the great spiritual masters, Buddha, Mohammad, Zoroaster, Confucius, Jesus, and countless others tells us that they grounded their lives in times of solitude and contemplation.  It was out of these hours and days of prayer and reflection that they emerged to bring the world their often life changing observations.
     Whether you use it to call more deeply to yourself, the "Great Spirit" (as singer Neil Young says), Brahman, or God, step into solitude.  Step into being alone.  Step into the fact of a universe that speaks, even if we are not, a cosmos that has been made to teach us when we do not know, a world that is powered by a truth that we are all made to find. Step into the inexhaustibility of a creation grounded in an infinite personal God.

     At one point in the atheist discussion group that I attend once a month, someone distributed a list of various verses from the Qur'an which this person had collected so as to set its observations about women, unbelief, and life in, he readily acknowledged, a decidedly disparagingly light.
     Granted, this person is not a fan of religion; he rejects the Qur'an, along with the Bible, as Bronze Age mythology.  Unfortunately, he ignores that the bulk of both documents were written many centuries into the Iron Age.  Moreover, the Qur'an, in particular, appeared on the cusp of the remarkable Arab Renaissance, whose scholarship influenced and, in some cases, impelled the rise of the Scientific Revolution in Western Europe.  While we may disagree with the Qur'an's contents, we should not dismiss it as the product of a primitive culture.
     Ironically, I therefore found myself in the rather unusual position of being a Christian who was defending Islam at a meeting of atheists!  While I do not agree with everything the Qur'an says, I do believe it is supremely vital to understand what it says in the fairest light possible.  This person relied entirely on English translations to convey his views of the Qur'an, when any scholar of religion knows that the Qur'an can only be properly understood by examining the Arabic in which it was originally written--and as any devout Muslim knows--is still used today.  Moreover, he read the Qur'an solely to criticize it, hardly the most impartial way to approach a document which over 1.6 billion people around the world consider to be sacred.
     We may not agree with everything religion--any religion--says, but we should at least make our best effort to understand it.  Religious people are as human as the rest of us. They deserve a fair hearing.  So does, for that matter, God.

      A few weeks ago, someone posed this question to me.  If we are in heaven and one of our loved ones is not, and if heaven is supposed to be a place of endless joy and bliss, won't our remembering this loved one be less than blissful if he or she is not in heaven with us?
     It's a difficult question.  The prophet Isaiah quotes God as saying that one day, a day on the other side of the divide between temporality and eternity, the "former things" will not be remembered, that what we had previously known we will know no longer.  This assertion begs more questions.  Does this mean that we will not remember everything that we had loved about this earthly existence?  Doesn't memory make us who we are? Who we are today, we are because of who we were yesterday, and who we were the day before that, and who we were the day before that, and so on.  Given this, what will we be like on the other side if everything, good or bad, that had made or brought us to this point is vanished and gone?  And what does God mean when he says that, "I am making all things new"?
     Though it is hard to say with certainty, I will note that God's newness is different from newness as we think about newness.  God's newness is something that is so radically new (and this is the thrust of the Hebrew and Greek words for "new") that it is totally unlike and not dependent upon anything that came before it.  It is the new in the truest sense of the word.  It is not the paradigm shift of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, not Europe's discovery of the Americas, not a birthday we have not had before.  All of these build upon what had preceded them.  God's newness does not.  While it recognizes the past, it is a future totally apart from it.
     This applies to memory, too.  What and how we will remember on the other side will be new, new in a way we cannot imagine, new as we cannot conceive newness in this broken yet purposeful existence.  It will be blissful, it will be wonderful, and it will be new.  God loves us, and God loves our loved ones.  But how he brings all this together we cannot now fully fathom.
     That's why like Job, we can only say, "I know that you [God] can do all things and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted.  Speak, and I will listen."
     Sometimes, that's all we can do.

     Yesterday, as my siblings and I reminded each other, marks another year, another year since the passing of our father over thirty years ago.  Despite the span of those decades, we still miss him, and our mother as well.  Time may heal some, yes, but time will never fully overcome the scars its events imprint on our lives.  There are  losses that, try as we might, we cannot completely assuage.  Although we learn to live with them, though we may even come to develop a measure of acceptance about them, we will never totally erase them from our hearts.  For always and forevermore, they are embedded in the innermost patterns of our soul.
     But as one of my uncles said to me as my siblings and I prepared to leave our mother to return to our lives after saying our final good-byes to Dad, "Everyone is going back to their things." Yes, we were.  But we'd never look at them in the same way again.  Nor should we.  We're personal beings who respond to our lives in personal ways.  And our lives continue.
     Yet the universe remains, an inscrutable mystery, heading to its final denouement, its ultimate destiny.  As are we.  And what then?  Almost inevitably, death makes us wonder: what lies on the other side?
     Thanks, God, that there is more.