Although I enjoy watching some movies, I never watch the Oscars.  While I acknowledge the thespian skills of many Hollywood actors, I remain rather amused by it all.  We see a group of wealthy and extremely wealthy (and rather homogeneous) people celebrating each other for their successes and, as the world watches, subtly reminding everyone else how much they are missing by not being one of them.
     Yes, this is a rather cynical view of a night that does honor some very talented people, and yes, it's analyzing an event with parallels in almost every other occupation.  Around the world, regardless of how ephemeral their work may be, people enjoy, generally, celebrating those who do it best.  They set aside any envy they may hold toward the honorees, and come together to laud the achievements of their brethren.
     So what's wrong with the Oscars?  Broadly speaking, nothing, really.  We may loathe the morality of the film industry, we may cringe at the movies it generates, and we may despise the foibles of various actors, but most of us appreciate the creativity of spirit it reflects.  Sure, we understand that ultimately making movies is about making money, yet we can still marvel at the artistry that this quest occasionally presents to us.  It's a very big world.
     And we have a very big God.  Though we humans are capable of creating immensely dark or perfidious art, we stand alone among all other creatures in our ability to create. We speculate, we imagine; we suppose, we render.  We give ourselves new worlds, worlds of thought, word, and aesthetic wonder every day.  I do not think God would have it any other way:  it's who we are made to be.
     In the end, it's really a matter of perspective.  We can look at the Oscars as the effluent of an immoral industry or we can view them as reflections of human creativity and joy.
     Or we can take them as yet another picture of the enormous mystery of God.  Only he knows why we create.  Only he knows what it means.  And only God understands the ultimate picture.
     We can only marvel at what we know.
     

     As February draws to a close, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that, at least in the U.S., February is Black History Month.  In truth, one finds it rather odd that we must set aside a month to celebrate a history of a people whose lineage is considerably longer than that of the more dominant race in the world today, that is, white people.  In fact, as Nell Irvin Painter points out in her 2011 The History of White People, it is the white skin color that, from a genetic standpoint, is the more "aberrant" of human skin colors.  Moreover, whether we believe that humanity began in southern Iraq vis a vis the Garden of Eden, the savannah and gorges of central and southern Africa, or some combination of the two, we must admit that our earliest ancestors were anything but lily white.
     Be this as it may, we do well to remember our black brethren and not just in the U.S.   Due to hegemonic behavior on the part of other races and ethnicities in the course of human history, the virtues of black culture have often been ignored, suppressed or,worse, abused and destroyed.  This has been at our peril.  We can only enjoy and appreciate humanity when we experience all of its manifestations.  And this experience should include not just literary or historical insight, but in physical encounter.  How wonderful it would be if we could realize that over and above us all is a God who loves all of us equally and wishes for all of us, again, equally, to become everything that he has created us to be on the world he has made for all us, and to, equally and together, experience.
     As I reflect on the lengthy journey I have made with the African Americans among us, from my days of civil rights activism in California to working in anti-poverty programs in East Texas to participating in political and religious events in Chicago, Washington, and beyond, I realize that I have far to go.  I'll always be white, I'll always be a part of a traditionally Western "elite."  Yet I also realize that, as the apostle Paul wrote many centuries ago, that there is, "neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28).  Immense diversity yet enormously one.
     So did God make us:  differently, yet destined to be one.  We therefore celebrate the beauty of the black experience, this month, and every month to come:  it's all part of being one.

     "What has been is exceedingly remote and mysterious."  So says Ecclesiastes 7:24. Whatever else you think about the Hebrew Bible (otherwise known as the Old Testament), you may need to admit that, in this case, it is correct.  Sure, with the help of modern historical research and inquiry, we can learn a great deal about the past.  We can learn what people thought, what people did, and what people wanted to do--even if they lived thousands of years ago.
     What we cannot--and may never--understand, however, is what, in the big picture, the past means.  We cannot know why things have gone the way they have.  For some, this isn't a problem.  For the nineteenth century German historian and author of Force and Freedom, Jakob Burckhardt, history is nothing more than a continuing and meaningless series of events. Some things happen, other things do not. Either way, it doesn't matter. There is no greater meaning.
     For others, like Augustine, author of City of God, history is a highly meaningful enterprise, one which God infuses with purpose and point.  Everything means something, everything matters, and everybody is necessary.
     Of course it goes without saying that everything that happens is dependent on what happened before it.  In a way, it is inevitable.  Though Karl Marx, author, with Frederick Engels, of the Communist Manifesto, was an atheist, he believed strongly that history was leading toward something, that there was a greater purpose at hand.  For Marx and Engels, this was the classless society of Marxism.  For Augustine, it was the consummated kingdom of God.  In both cases, purpose remains, but for very different reasons and in very distinctive expressions.
     So who was right:  Burckhardt, Augustine, or Marx?  Is history really without any point, any point at all?  Or is it infused with purpose?  Although I think I've made my loyalties clear in this blog many times before, I'll leave you to decide.  Either way, Ecclesiastes' dictum holds true:  we cannot, from our present vantage point, know. Either way, we cannot know it all.
     What we can know, however, is that if we insist that we have purpose, we must also  insist that history does, too.  And if we say that this purpose does not come from a higher power, i.e., God, we are left to answer the same question as before:  how do we, if we hold that we are meaningful beings in an accidental universe, know?
     

     Unless you live in a part of the world in which the ambient temperature rarely varies, you have learned to be patient with the seasons.  You have learned that regardless of how you may dislike a particular time of year, it will go on as it must.  You'll not stop it.  You simply must live with it.
     As the northern climes of the planet move ever closer to spring and their southern counterparts to winter, I realize again, how critical patience is.  In a sound bite age driven by ever more rapid information dissemination and processing, we need to think about patience.  We need to look outside ourselves, we need to look beyond our immediate needs.  We need to take in the planet.  We must accede to bigger issues.
     When I contemplate the extraordinary order with which the earth's systems are endowed, and how much some of us struggle to change it, I think:  why?  If these systems were not in place, we would not be here.  If the world was entirely chaotic (and if this happened, it would not be a world as we like to think of one, anyway), we would be as absent as the passenger pigeon.  We need the order, we need the seasons.
     All we lack is patience.  Whether we believe in God or not, if we believe the universe required fourteen billion years to birth the world on which we live today, we understand that things do not happen quickly.  We understand that they will only happen as quickly as their patterns and constituents allow.  That's all they can do.
     That's all we can do, too.  We therefore humble ourselves before purposes of which we know not; we bow our minds and hearts to inevitabilities of which we do not know.  And in the end, we have a choice:  we can be patient with an unfathomable universe, or we can be patient with a knowable God.

     Who are the Funhogs?  The Funhogs are a group of men, now in their sixties and beyond who, many decades ago, spent their days roaming across the planet in search of adventure.  Some of their names may be familiar to you.  They include people like Yvon Chouinard, founder of the outdoor clothing manufacturer Patagonia; Doug Thompkins, founder of the outdoor equipment company The North Face (both Chouinard and Thompkins have also devoted much time and resources to preserving the wildlands of South America's Patagonia); and others who are not as well known:  Dick Dorworth, once a prominent skier, Chris Jones, and Lito Tejada-Flores.
     The Funhogs are perhaps most famous for their epic 1968 driving journey from California to the tip of the Americas, where they successfully summited the formidable Fitz Roy in, of course, Patagonia.  They reached the top on Christmas Day.
     1968 is a long time ago, yet the Funhogs still look back on that year as one of the highlights of their lives.  As Thompkins later wrote, "So I give thanks, as I look back, that fate played its mysterious hand guiding me along a wonderful path, in a life with never a single moment of regret.  If I could play it over, I would let it go just as it has, with all the minor bumps that came with it.  Just like those bumps along the last 900 miles from Bariloche to the Fitz Roy valley--sometimes a bit uncomfortable, but still very enjoyable all the way."
     Thompkins's words surely underscore the joy and marvel of life, whose twists and turns he attributes to fate and its mysterious hand.  Don't we all wonder why life goes the way it does?  Do not we all occasionally sit back and ask ourselves how it is that we ended up where we are today?
     Or maybe we do what the Funhogs did:  as long as we are here, we ought to go ahead and embrace everything we can.  After all, when it's over, it's over.  If death is a blank wall, well, the Funhogs have done great.  They've lived to the max.  If death is otherwise, however, we wonder, too, yet in a different way:  what are we then to do?
     The abyss between these positions is profoundly deep.  It is in fact unbridgeable.  It all comes to what we know and, significantly, what we believe about what we know.  So we therefore ask, if Jesus rose from the dead, and every evidence indicates he did, will we, too?  Everything, absolutely everything about us, our life, and our world, hinges on how we answer this question.
     By the way, sadly, Doug Thompkins recently died from hypothermia after a kayaking accident in his beloved Patagonia.  He was 72 years old.

     If you do not spend much time reading annals of Arctic and Antarctic exploration, you probably have not have heard about Henry Worsley.  One of the most well known cold weather explorers today, Worsley died while attempting to be the first person to make the first unaided crossing of the vast and desolate mass of ice that we call Antarctica.  A life long admirer of the storied Antarctic explorer Ernst Shackelton (whose adventures are chronicled in the book Endurance), Worsley was trying to do what Shackelton, for all his strength and courage, did not.  (Shackleton died at fifty, victim of a heart attack.)
     Perhaps the most tragic dimension of Worsley's death was that he was forced to halt his quest barely thirty miles from its end.  Citing extreme exhaustion, he made one of the most difficult decisions of his life:  he called for help.  Unfortunately, when doctors began examining him in a hospital to which he was airlifted in Chile, they discovered that he had developed bacterial peritonitis.  So advanced was the infection that at the point they could do nothing for him.  He died of advanced organ failure.  He was fifty-five.
     Yet Worsley died doing what he loved doing most:  exploring one of the least explored regions of the planet.  As one who has explored many parts of the Arctic (not the Antarctic), I can readily testify to the remarkable wonder and beauty of the polar regions. Stark and austere, yet marvelously and enticingly alive, they speak of the joy of mystery, solitude, and desolation, the sublimity of travel that takes us well out of our comfort zone. They show us another side, the side of existence that, as Ecclesiastes puts it, is about "mourning" and not "feasting."
     Not that we should not "feast" on life.  God wants us to enjoy his creation.  Yet by journeying into realms which demand challenge and deprivation, we come to know more fully what life's "feast" means.  We understand why we need mourning as much as we need feasting.  We reduce our existence to its most fundamental truth.  In the end, whether we feast or mourn, we walk, as Paul put it, "in a riddle," sojourners and inquirers in the vast cosmos of God.
     It's about life, our most precious gift.  Use it circumspectly, use it wisely.  It is, to use a very old adage, the only one we have.
     Consider your life as the fruit of God.

   
     “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

     So said American author and transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau in 1845. Thoreau was poised to commence living, alone and apart, on Walden Pond in eastern Massachusetts.  Out of his solitary ruminations came one of the classics of American literature, On Walden Pond.  

     

     As we continue our journey through Lent, I think occasionally about Thoreau. Although he did not have much interest in conventional religion, he captured, in his writings, much of its essential posture towards earthly existence, particularly during Lent.  Lent reminds us to reduce life to its most fundamental parameters, its most seminal components.  It tells us to set aside worldly distraction and focus on the deeper meanings of life, the most profound sensibilities that inhabit our present existence.  As did Thoreau over one hundred years ago, Lent urges us to live in the world, yes, but live so as to ponder what the world really means, to grasp that from which we and it come.  For Thoreau, this was to immerse oneself in nature (which he often spelled with an upper case "N");  for those of us on our Lenten journey, it is to immerse oneself more fully in the God who made it.  As Thoreau strove to shear himself of the extraneous, so do we strive to separate ourselves from the temporary and, theologically speaking, profane.  We aim to view life through a larger lens.  We look to the greater possibility.

     For the greater possibility is what, for us as well as Thoreau, makes life worth living.  It is what gives existence its point.  Although Thoreau identified this possibility as Nature, I'll go him one step higher and call it that which created nature: God.

     Lent lets us know that we cannot conclude we are alone in the universe.  We who would frame our lives ascetically for Lent understand that we do so because we know that it opens our hearts to what is really and most there, the center of all being.

     By the way, if you can, read On Walden Pond.  It's a classic.