Memorial Day, 2013.  Alone with her two year old son, Jessica Mitford moves quietly through the cemetery.  Arlington Cemetery, which at 624 acres is one of America’s largest, is a study in valor and pain, a portrait of bravery, solace, and privation, the nation’s most revered place for the final earthly repose of those who have served in the five branches of America’s military.  For many, it is sacred ground, a hallowed site, one on which those who visit it tread with enormous respect and care.

     On this Memorial Day of 2013, Ms. Mitford had come to visit the grave of her husband, killed in Afghanistan in 2012.  She held up her son, a two year old boy named Evan, and talked to him about his father, the father he will, heartbreakingly, never know.  She wanted Evan to know about his father.  She wanted him to be aware of who his father was and what his father did.  She wanted to tell him that although his father was no longer with them, he would have given anything to be here and watch Evan grow up.

     Ms. Mitford wanted Evan to remember his father.  She wanted Evan to remember that were it not for his father he would not be here, that who he was today, and who he would become tomorrow are inseparably linked to this man at whose grave they now sit.  She wanted Evan to internalize the memory of a person who, though he would never meet him, is the person who would be one of the foundational determinants in creating the man he will one day be.  She wanted Evan to know that his memory of his father would be—should be—central to his future existence.  Don’t forget your father, she told him.* 

     We need to remember.  We need to remember our lost loved ones; we need to remember those we lose in wars; we need to remember those billions of people we will likely never meet.

     And though this may seem facile and silly to some, and patently obvious to others, we need most of all to remember God.  Why?  Without God, without an intentional cosmos, everything, absolutely everything means, in the big picture, absolutely nothing at all. Think about it.  We remember because we believe we and life have a point.  Yet if we have no real reason to suppose this universe should be here, what point is there to make?

     Memory is wonderful, yes, but memory only has significance in a remembered universe.

*  This account is based on an article about Ms. Mitford in The New York Times.

     Not long ago, a friend mentioned to me Herman Hesse's decades old novel, Siddhartha. Loosely based on the life of Siddhartha Gautama, the Indian prince and wandering mystic who became known as the Buddha, founder (although he didn't necessarily intend to) of Buddhism, Siddartha tells the story of how its character finds enlightenment.  It describes his journey through the landscapes of his native land until one day he happens upon a river.  As he stood on the banks of the river, watching it flow and flow and flow, noticing that although it was always changing it always stayed the same, and pondering how such a thing could be, he decided that, in this tiny prism of the natural order, he was seeing the essence of existence.  He must move, but he must remain; change, but not.  He must meld into the oneness of being, the dynamic stasis of the dichotomy of presence and absence.
     Though this seems a contradiction in terms, on the other hand, it helps us understand more of what life really is.  Always here (at least for next several billions of years!), life is immutable.  Yet it is ever unwinding, its various manifestations, its plants and animals, appearing, then disappearing, only to appear, through decay and rebirth, again, in new forms.  Life is always here, but it is never expressed in the same way.
     Our challenge is therefore to manage the joy of presence with the emptiness of absence.  While we are here, we rejoice; when we see ourselves fading, we become sad (even if in the end, we accept it).  We can do this by embracing presence and absence simultaneously; by accepting each one in their place and turn; or by assenting to the possibility--and this is a powerful possibility--that beyond presence and absence, there is yet another presence to live:  the resurrection and afterlife.
     We stand before the rivers of our lives, wondering what they mean, wondering what their mix of change, sameness, presence, and absence tell us about existence.  And we always stumble before the unknown.
     And in the end, it is a question of which unknown we wish to believe:  what is there and not, or what is there and not--and, in resurrection (the universal human longing and the heart of the Christian faith) there again?

     "From word to deed is like earth to the sky," goes an old Romanian proverb.  How true! Regardless of what claims we make about truth or our metaphysical convictions, unless we demonstrate the impact of these claims in the way we live, we may as well not proclaim them.  As the apostle John said long ago, "Little children, let us not love with word or with tongue, but in word and deed" (1 John 3:18).  Fittingly enough, those who promulgate their viewpoints the loudest are the ones who share the greatest onus for backing them up in action.  And more often than not, those who are the loudest are people of faith.
     This tells us several things.  One, it reminds us of the ferocity with which people, those of faith or not, trumpet their convictions.  Two, it encourages us to realize that of the many things that drive people apart, one of the most divisive is hypocrisy.  We tend to reject, quickly, people, particularly those of faith, whose actions do not match their words.  Three, it urges us to admit that however strongly we believe in something, unless we can display it in how we live, we are spinning our wheels.
     After all, as Jesus and many other sages have pointed out, it is not so much what goes into us that matters, but what comes out.
     When many years ago I climbed mountain after mountain across North America, I knew that with each new climb I had always had to begin at the ground floor, the earth, the base of the peak.  And I realized, acutely, that between me, the peak, and the sky beyond it lay many, many hours of work.  I was also aware that even with the planning I had done, I would likely encounter surprises and delays.  So the proverb observes:  the distance between earth--faith--and sky--truth--is always further than we think.

     What is the "Great Beyond"?  About a year ago, I blogged about this phrase, prompted by my hearing REM's song of the same name.  After hearing the song again recently, I noticed some phrases that had not grabbed my attention before.  Although I know little about the songwriter's spiritual convictions, was struck by how he seemed to posit the quest for the "Great Beyond" as one born of immense effort and struggle, of pushing, as he put it, "an elephant up a hill."
     I think REM is onto something here, and it dovetails with my ruminations about faith that I posted yesterday:  embracing the real meaning of the metaphysical is exceedingly difficult.  We can't see it, we can't touch it, we can't hear it (though some insist they do). And it's hard to believe something that "presents" itself in these terms.
     Yet as British theologian John Milbank once observed, we live before a basic "presentability," what he calls our need to "say how things are in general before we can say anything at all."  Even if we deny the metaphysical, we stumble without it.  If we say that this universe is all that is, we are still left with explaining what "is" really means. Physicality cannot happen in a vacuum.
     Nonetheless, the challenge remains:  why should we believe?  To this, I say, why should we not believe?  As I blogged last year, we all seek purpose, we all seek point.  We cannot help but do so.  And it is a purpose greater than mere survival. We all strive to do more than simply exist.
     So it is not so much a question of the "Great Beyond" than a question about who we are, and why we are this way.  Although I do not deny that evolutionary processes, guided by a divine intelligence, may well have brought the world to its present state, I do wonder why, if the goal of evolution is to ensure survival and nothing more, people still seek meaning. Every other animal does not require meaning to survive.  But we do.
     Why?  

     How much should we trust God?  One Hebrew story that asks this question in a highly acute way is the story of Abraham and his son Isaac.  One day, the account goes, God directed Abraham to take his son Isaac to a mountain and sacrifice him.  What, we might ask at this point, is God thinking?  From our understanding of the cultures of this time, we know that many peoples engaged in child sacrifice; for this reason, perhaps Abraham did not think that God's request was overly unusual.
     To our twentieth-first century eyes, however, it seems preposterous and outlandish. What kind of a God would ask one of his followers to kill his own son?
     Christians of course will say that in asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, God was foretelling the way in which he would see his son--Jesus--sacrificed on the cross for the redemption of humanity.  As God would one day sacrifice his son, so he asked Abraham to sacrifice his.
     Although I cannot quarrel with this interpretation, it still leaves me wondering:  why did God think it necessary to demand Abraham do such a thing and, subsequently, immediately before Abraham plunged a knife into Isaac, tell him to stop?  And what was Isaac thinking?
     I'm reluctant to answer this questions by saying that they are simply part of the mystery of faith, and that by its very nature faith is a walk in the darkness.  While faith is indeed often a walk in the darkness, it doesn't answer every question.
     So we're back to square one:  how much should we trust God?  If I may draw a page from the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, I note that for Kierkegaard, we either trust God with everything or we trust him with nothing at all.  It's really that simple.
     Oh, how simple, but oh, how complex!

     Many of us know the story.  It's the story of Jonah, the prophet who was swallowed by a "great fish" and, after spending three nights in its belly, was released.  So you may ask, how did Jonah end up in the belly of the "great fish"?  Earlier, God had told ("the word of the Lord came to Jonah") Jonah to journey east to Nineveh, the capital of the mighty and much feared Assyrian Empire and call them to repentance.  With a well deserved reputation for rapacity and cruelty, the Assyrian Empire was, in its heyday, the most powerful nation in the ancient Near East (what we call the Middle East today).  Every spring, its king and his armies ventured forth, moving across the deserts of Mesopotamia in pursuit of conquest, ever seeking to overwhelm and destroy all who stood in their way. And until the Babylonians toppled Nineveh in 612 B.C., no one could stop them.
     Hence, we cannot be surprised that Jonah was reluctant to go to Nineveh.  The Assyrians had no soft feelings for Israelites, and Jonah did not see how calling them to repentance would change that.  So he ran away.  He ran to the port city of Tarshish, got on a ship, and set west across the Mediterranean Sea.
     But God's eyes, as many a Jewish rabbi says, are everywhere.  Very soon, a storm swept across the sea, threatening to capsize the ship.  Knowing very well why the storm had come, Jonah told the ship's crew to throw him overboard.  They did.  And the storm stopped.
     Here we come to the heart of my thought.  As he languished in the fish's belly, Jonah prayed.  He told God that God heard his voice and that he would not abandon him.  He told God that he knew God would journey to the deepest depths of the earth to follow and redeem him.  It is likewise for us.  The ubiquity of God ensures that no matter what we do, no matter where we go, and no matter what we think, God is everywhere, watching and listening. And it's not an Orwellian 1984 type of watching and listening.  It's a watching and listening of love and concern, a focus of entirely good intention.
     We all will wander in our lives, looking for meaning in futile places.  Given God's omnipresence, however, and given his steady watchful care, though life is full of vanity and dead ends (as well as immense joy and delight), we can know that purpose continues to roam through it.  The world can be very capricious, and we can be exceedingly foolish, yes, but God is neither.  In an intentional world, God's intended world, we can mine everything for point and meaning.  While we may not see these right away, we can believe, as did Jonah, that because God is there, they are, too.

     "Mr. Fantasy."  It's an enticing name, an intriguing thought:  a person who can fulfill our richest fantasies and wildest dreams.  Traffic, a British rock band of the Sixties, wrote and performed a song of this name throughout the world.  "Dear Mr. Fantasy," the words go, "you are the one who made us all laugh, but doing that you break out in tears; please don't be sad if it was a straight mind you had, we wouldn't have known you all these years."
     Though I do not know whether Traffic intended to weave spiritual overtones into this song, listening to the lyrics afresh made me think:  how this is like God.  As creator and redeemer of the world, God wishes for his creation to enjoy life, to revel in its beauties, to marvel at its wonders.  God is a God of joy.
     In order to ensure this joy, however, God had to cry.  He had to cry horribly.  In the person of Jesus, God had to weep and howl with pain as he hung on a Roman cross two thousand years ago.  He had to die the worst of all deaths.  But God knew that joy would not come without those tears. He knew that redemption would not happen apart from immense suffering on his part. He knew he had to shed his tears.
     And yes, if God was nothing more than a "straight mind," a black and white line, we would never know him.  God had to rejoice, he had to weep; he had to revel, he had to cry.  Otherwise, creatures of emotion that we are, we would never be able to connect with our creator.