Ah, to live long, to be one hundred years old, to even be 120 years old.  So said a person with whom my wife and I had dinner last night.  In her seventies, she does everything she believes she can possibly do to maintain her health and, she hopes, longevity.  She aims to live well into the second decade of her centennial birthday. "There will be so much to experience," she says.
     True enough.  Given the rapid pace of technological advancement we experience today, we have every reason to think that the next forty or fifty years of human existence on planet earth will be full of incredible scientific, medical, and cultural developments. We have much to which to look forward.  Most importantly to our friend, perhaps even life itself will be extended.
     However, no one who is studying such things has posited that, even in the face of all these changes, life itself will not, eventually, end.  One day, the life that all of us live, appreciate, and love will come to a close.  One day, we will stop experiencing our earthly existence.  Whatever else we make ourselves, we will not likely to be able to make ourselves imperishable.
     So what's next?  Maybe nothing, but on the other hand, maybe everything.  As I read this morning through Luke's account of Jesus' resurrection, I was struck anew by the enormous challenge it presents to human thought:  could someone really rise from the dead?  Everything we know about the human body says otherwise.  Yet everything we know about the rest of the universe, physical as well as metaphysical, says that, yes, it could indeed happen.  We therefore face a most challenging choice:  do we accept what we see perceptually, or do we accept what we see perceptually and spiritually?  On this planet, we cannot have one without the other.
     There is so much that, this side of death, we will never understand about its aftermath.  There is so much that, from our earthly vantage point, we do not grasp about what follows it.  But that's not the point.  It is rather that we look at the larger picture of what truth ought to be:  something that we, finite beings, cannot, ultimately, fully define.  We're not absolute.
     By the way, I'll be traveling for a few weeks, exploring and hiking through several sets of mountains in the American West, so will not be posting for a while.  I look forward to reconnecting when I return.  Thanks for reading!

     Having talked about Amy Winehouse and her soulful music and torturous life yesterday, I write today about the artist Nick Cage.  I'm thinking about Cage's vision of participatory art, art as something we put on or do.  Cage creates clothes, shelters, and other life appurtenances to encourage people to not only admire art visually but to step into and experience it.  If, as the saying goes, life imitates art and vice versa, then Cage understands us very well.  And, whether he knows it or not, he understands God.
     

           
                     (one of Cave's "Soundsuits")

     If we picture God as the ultimate artist, the one who, be through his word or natural agency, shaped and fashioned the entirety of the cosmos, then we can look at this world (and the universe as well) as a work of art into which we are constantly stepping and continuously exploring, every moment of every day.  We can also see our life as a work of art, a work which we are given as well as a work which we create.  We bask in the artistry of our creator.
     And the creator basks in ours.  God didn't make us robots; he made us to explore and create, to search out the most complex intricacies of the universe.  Though he knows that, as do we, we will never know about everything we see, God has granted us the capacity to roam, with insight and understanding, through the world he made.  We revel in what we can discover and know.
     Yet God also wishes for us to explore and come to grasp what is in truth the most fundamental (and, from his standpoint, the most evident) thing about us and our world: at one point, a long ago point in time, he became, in the person of Jesus, like one of us. He enlightens us, he guides us, he saves us.
     God became the artist he made.

     Poor Amy Winehouse.  Though I have not seen the newly released documentary about her, and though I am aware that her family is unhappy with how it was done, as I reflect on her too short life, I think about someone who, many decades ago, met a premature end, too, for many of the same reasons:  Janis Joplin.  Both of these women defied the norm, challenged convention, and rode horses, metaphorically speaking, which most people may not have thought they should.  But ride them they did, with often dazzling effect.  Those of us who saw Janis Joplin in concert could not help but walk away amazed at her aura and power:  she gave it her all, her absolute all.  The little footage I've seen of Amy Winehouse in concert presents her similarly:  she threw herself into her music.
     And her life.  We weep for these two women.  We weep for their early demise, we weep for the talent lost, and we weep for a world, a world which too many of us see in terms of black and white, but a world which, our artist friends tell us, is decidedly gray. Our lives are incredibly multifaceted, confusing, and diverse.  We shun its depths at our peril.
     So we ask:  why do so many of us miss life's greater point?  Or is there one?
     Not only do I hope, for the sake of these broken and seemingly unredeemable lives, there is, but so I also believe that, precisely because of these shattered existences, there must be.  There is value, there is a point:  God is bigger than the most broken of broken dreams.

     Have you seen a snow leopard?  Very few people have.  I ask because this morning I chanced upon a series of photographs of the elusive cats, taken by Inger Vandyke, an Australian photographer.  After seventeen days of looking and waiting, Vandyke managed to photograph and film one of the cats chasing and capturing a bharal (blue) sheep. According to her account, posted on the internet, she found this experience "almost spiritual."
     Many decades ago, the now deceased writer Peter Matthiessen wrote eloquently about his quest to see a bharal sheep and snow leopard in a compelling book titled The Snow Leopard.  In it, he recounts his journey through some of the most remote sections of the Himalayas to find these fascinating animals.  As he traveled, he also visited numerous monasteries and, when he could, contemplated the recent passing of his wife Deborah. Like Vandyke, Matthiessen found his trek and the glimpses of life it presented to him a deeply spiritual experience.
     Unless we totally reject that a human being can entertain even a semblance of spiritual sensibility, we cannot help but identify.  When we come face to face with the raw and unvarnished mien of nature, we almost instinctively turn our thoughts to awe and the metaphysical.  How, we wonder, can such a thing produce such profound feelings of "otherworldly" marvel in us?
     The French mystic Simone Weil once wrote that one way we see the love of God is by witnessing the beauty of nature.  Indeed.  Whatever our etiology regarding the existence of the universe may be, we must still reckon with the ability of its many wonders to provoke our awe and metaphysical imagination.  Does this beauty really not have a name?

     Freedom and order:  the grand challenge that all of us face.  How do we balance our individual freedom with our desire for corporate order?  Tilt the balance too far toward freedom, and we descend into anarchy and lawlessness.  Push it too far toward order, and we welcome dictatorship and authoritarianism.  Freedom and order is not a black and white issue.  It's highly complex, replete with many, many shades and hues of gray.
     God understands this well.  From the first page of scripture to its last, we see God wrestling with the balance between the effects of the choice making capacities he granted to human beings and his innate omnipotence and sovereignty.  Though we cannot pretend to know exactly how God manages this, we can at least come to appreciate, in ourselves, the difficulty of balancing two things that are both true but when put together create an essentially unresolvable tension.  We live in a world of gray.
     This is not to say that certain things will not always be true.  It is to say that saying that one thing is true means that its opposite is not.  Really?  If freedom is true, is order false? No.  It simply means that, as finite beings, we must resign ourselves to never knowing, in full and with exact precision, almost anything.  For instance, if we believe in God, we understand that we do so by faith.  We will never understand our belief completely.  Conversely, if we do not believe in God, we should know that we do so with incomplete understanding, too.
     Isn't being finite fun?  We're free, but we're not; ordered, but not.  But really, would we want it any other way?  Being human is immensely challenging.  Perhaps the apostle John can help us here.  In the fourth chapter of his first letter, he remarks that, "God is love."  No more, no less.  If this is indeed true (which I believe it is), then everything else, even if we cannot see it do so, falls into place.

     "We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year, running over the same old ground.  What have we found?  The same old fears.  Wish you were here."
     So goes the chorus to Pink Floyd's song "Wish You Were Here."  Does this sound depressing?  Perhaps it is.  If we stretch our purview to the limits of this universe, however, we see that it is, in truth, what life is.  As Martin Heidegger puts it, we're just "thrown" into this world, without a choice as to where we are born and what we are born with and, as Paul Sartre adds, for this reason, we are lonely, very lonely beings in a vast and uncaring cosmos.
     If this universe is all that is, Pink Floyd, Heidegger, and Sartre are all indeed more than correct:  though every one of us is born uniquely, every one of us will live with the same hopes and fears, running over the same old ground, the material of planet Earth. And we wish all of us were here; social animals that we are, we want to be with each other.  We like community.  We are in this together.
     True enough.  But then why, if we are no more than errant cosmic dust, do we want so desperately to make existence meaningful?
    Are we really all that is "here"?

     Many people have wondered why, if Adam and Eve sinned, every one of their descendants (including you and me) are still paying for it:  why are we born with the damage they have done?
     Some suggest that this simply reflects the idea, an idea very prevalent in the time the Bible was composed, of corporate sin:  what the mother and father do affects the children, their children's children, and so on.  Sin never occurs in isolation.  We see hints of this in some of the Greek tragedies.  Here, a male or female head of a household commits an act of egregious injustice, and although he or she may continue to live, relatively unscathed, as time passes, the effects of his or her deeds eventually bring his or her entire house down.  Their families are never the same.  They're warped for eternity.
     There is much in this that is true.  Obviously, what an individual does may well affect those who around her and, if this person is a political leader, perhaps her nation as well. It's the nature of cause and effect.  In the writings of Ezekiel (chapters eighteen and thirty-three), however, we see a different perspective on this.  While these chapters do not reject the idea of corporate sin altogether, they do let us see God's ways in a different light.  Whereas before, God says to the prophet, you believed that what the father does, the children will also inevitably do, too, I'm telling you today that, nonetheless, I look at each person individually.  Each person's sin and transgression is unique to and contained in her.  I look at a person's individual deeds, God says, not what her father or mother did.
     If we apply this idea to modern Western jurisprudence, we see that it makes sense. We cannot hold a parent totally accountable for her child's wrongdoing, and we certainly cannot hold a child totally accountable for her parent's error and sin.  Although blame, in part, remains, in the end, our actions are our own.
     Adam and Eve made a colossal mistake, yes, and we all are still paying for it, yes, but we are each paying for it in our own way.  We're individuals before God.  It's the beauty of human uniqueness.
     Would we really want it any other way?