Are you married?  Over the weekend, my wife and I celebrated our 34th wedding anniversary.  When we reflect on the years behind us, we are amazed:  who would have thought that out of an event held on an otherwise ordinary Saturday in Dallas, Texas, so many years ago, we have traveled, metaphorically speaking, so widely, trekking together through mile after mile of adventures as one.
     In a world that has reduced much of communication to digital expression and, as I see it, in so doing has undermined some of the humanness of the global community, marriage still stands as one way that people can connect with each other on a deeply personal basis.  It affords people a way to express their humanness in actual physical exchange. While barriers and hesitations of course exist in every marriage, the intimately personal shape of marriage allows those who participate in it to explore and deal with these things in a way that respects who we, human beings, most fully are.  It recognizes and affirms our inherently human capacities.  Marriage lets us see that whatever else we may say about the human species, we see that the human's deepest point of meaning is his or her ability to love.  We are made to love.  Be it love in marriage, friendship, or any other relationship, we mark ourselves by our capacity to love.
    And why not?  As the Italian writer Dante noted, in his Divine Comedy, when he reached the end of his journey through Paradise, it is love--God's love--in which all things form and come together.
     So it is:  we do not love unless we are loved first.
     

     Now that the solstice has come and the full "summer" moon not far behind it, those of us in the Northern Hemisphere can once more rejoice in the warmth and bounty that accompanies, indeed, seems to burst out of this timeless pattern of rotation, orbit, and diachronic splendor.  Of course, for those of us who live in the tropical areas of the world, or even those who live in the sunnier climes of Europe or North America, summer barely comes:  the air is temperate, if not warm all year around.  Nonetheless, as our ancient ancestors always did, we still tend to mark our lives by the movements of the sun, noting and engaging each passing phase of the seasons with various and different activities and remembrances.
     Curiously enough, however, if we look at the word solstice carefully, we see that it literally means, "the sun stands still" or "the sun doesn't move."  People who live in the Arctic know this firsthand:  for a couple of months during the summer, the sun never slips below the horizon.  For people who live further south, although the sun rises and sets every day and night, on some days, time does seem to stand still.  Everything seems to shine, grass, trees, flowers, lakes, streams; the sky seems endless, not a cloud in it; and the air seems as though it could not get any better, any better at all.  The world almost seems, at this moment, and no other, perfect.  It is as if heaven, in the broadest sense, has come upon earth, as if a spell, a wondrous and glorious spell has been cast:  peace and harmony and bliss flood the land.
     However we experience summer, we can be sure of this:  somehow, some way, it always comes.  Despite its troubles, our planet remains remarkably predictable and resilient, expressing the work of a God of love and grace whose fact of presence is beyond our imagination.  In this God is order, and in this order is us:  moral and free beings, free to move, free to seek, free to love.  Summer has come.

     Pope Francis!  If you've read any of the Pope's recent encyclical on the environment and you have any inclination, any inclination at all to support human attempts to reduce environmental degradation, you likely cheered (I did).  In particular, I cheered that Francis made clear that one's religion should affect everything we do.  It does not do, he argued, to let our religious belief into only certain areas of our life, or to pursue our religious beliefs for our good and no one else's.  We do not do them justice (nor, I might add, do we do justice to the God who inspired them).  The metaphysical encompasses everything.
     Speaking to a crowd of people a couple of days before Francis released his encyclical, U.S. presidential candidate Jeb Bush remarked that, "I hope I'm not going to get castigated for saying this by my priest back home, but I don't get economic policy from my bishops or my cardinals or my pope."  "Religion," he added, "ought to be about making us better as people, less about things that end up getting into the political realm."
     We need to wonder, really, what Bush thinks religion is.  We can't turn the metaphysical on and off.  It's either everywhere or nowhere.  Besides, do not "better" people make for a "better" political realm?
     Thanks, Pope Francis, for demonstrating that our religion should shape everything we think, say, and do, including how we treat our earth.
     As the opening lines of Psalm 24 say, "The earth is the Lord's, and all that is therein."

     Forgiveness?  As Americans the world over continue to weep over the recent shootings in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, we might also ponder what about various subcultures of American society produced a person like Dylann Roof.  How did he come to nurture such a deep hatred for African-Americans?  What was it in his life, what was it about his life's patterns, what was it about the cultures in which he moved or to which he was exposed that led him to draw such perverse and horrific conclusions?  We rightly weep for the survivors, and are in profound awe over their ability to forgive Roof for his deed, yet we also wonder about Roof.  Though we cannot in any way excuse his action and the enormous pain it has sent rippling through too many families, we must also realize that he, too, is a person wrestling with enormous pain, pain so biting that it led him to kill nine people in cold blood.  His darkness is almost beyond fathoming.
     And roughly a week ago it came upon us, cutting through our lives like a knife, once more wrenching us out of whatever assumptions we may have made about the state of humanity and the societies they create, tearing apart mercilessly our picture of our fellow human beings.  It makes us close our eyes even as it makes us open them.
     What can we do?  It seems facile to say, trust God, although that is what the survivors are trying to do.  On the other hand, this is really the only response we can make when the cold underside of the metaphysical pushes into our lives.  It's also facile to simply chalk Roof's actions off to sin, although sin has been done.  When we look at ourselves, we see magnificent creatures who have been created by a magnificent God.  Yet we also see creatures who too often wander from this magnificent God, trying, over and over, to make the metaphysical do what we want it to be rather than letting it make us who we should be. 

     As many of us know, yesterday was Father's Day.  It is a day worth thinking about and celebrating.  It's a time to think about and, we hope, celebrate our fathers and, if we are fathers ourselves, to think about what that means and, we hope, to celebrate being one.  All of us are aware, of course, that not everyone has had a positive experience with his or her father, and for this I am very, very sorry.  Moreover, all of us fathers out there have regrets, some a few, some many, about the manner in which we raised (or are still raising) our children.  None of us is perfect.
     I lost my father, very unexpectedly, many decades ago, to a heart attack.  It was shocking then, and it still is today.  Why did Dad have to go so soon?  Happily, however, I have many, many wonderful memories of my father.  I owe so much to him, not just for taking care of me materially, which he did in abundance, but even more for being such a splendid picture of what life could be.  Dad embodied for me life's astonishing potential, always encouraging me to consider the nearly endless possibilities of existence.  With Dad behind me, I felt as if I could do anything.  His simple words, "Do your best," still resonate with me today.  He was a father, yes, but he was also a friend, a friend whom I miss every single day.
     I am so thankful to God for Dad, so grateful for the workings of God's loving vision through which he came into the world.  Having Dad in my life testifies amply to the enduring goodness of God.  Confused sinners that we are, God still looks after us.  His love, expressed so clearly in Jesus Christ, seeks everyone.
     Thanks, God, for Dad, and thanks, Dad, for being my Dad.

     A few weeks ago I talked about the passing of acclaimed rock climber Dean Potter.  If you recall, he died while attempting a BASE (building, antenna, span, earth) jump from Taft Point in Yosemite National Park in California.  In every way, it's tragic.  He had done the jump before, but for reasons we may never know, this time it didn't work for him. One of his friends who was doing the same jump died, too.  They both left girlfriends and many other friends and admirers.
      The other day I read a detailed article about the events leading to the jump and its immediate aftermath.  Toward the end of the piece, Potter's girlfriend shared a time in which she returned to Taft Point to remember him.  As she sat on the rock, she saw a raven who, as many ravens who frequent national parks will do, approached her and ate food out of her hand.  And she thought, "Yeah, it was Dean."
     Roughly four years ago in October of 2011, a time I wrote about a couple of times in this blog, my three siblings and I scattered our mother's ashes on a mountain in the San Gabriel Mountains of Southern California.  As I tossed my last handful into what seemed to be a very empty and lonely space, I saw a crow soaring up to the edge of the cliff, looking intently at me.  Though I'm not fully convinced that animals speak to us from the other side of death, I do believe that God speaks through everything that is.  He's always calling us, always reaching out to us, in life as well as death.
     God wants to love us.

     Have you ever gone to a medium?  A clairvoyant?  At a dinner party I attended the other night, a couple of people indicated they had.  I do not doubt that mediums and clairvoyants possess a special ability to, for the medium, look into the past, and for the clairvoyant, look into the future.  I've seen too many like phenomena to think otherwise. What always intrigues me about Westerners who invest in these experiences is that if I were to ask them whether they believe in God or the existence of a cognitive supernatural being, most of them would say no.  OK.  But if one believes in a medium or clairvoyant's ability to summon news from the past or disclose intimations of the future, does not this mean that one must also believe in the existence of fate and cognitive spirits?  Does not this also mean that the world is but a captive of a much larger "spirit" one?
     We can't have it both ways.  We must either believe in a cognitive supernatural realm and accept or reject what it has to offer, or we must categorically deny everything metaphysical and content ourselves with not knowing a thing about our past or future.
     Many of us enjoy imagining there is a spirit world.  Yet just as many of us like to think that we can make this world whatever we want it to be.  Again, to borrow a phrase from Renaissance England, we can't have our cake and eat it, too.  Can physical beings create spirit?