What is the art of rock and dirt?  This is the question we ask when we consider "City," a sculpture/amalgamation/creation of artist Michael Heizer in the hinterlands of Nevada. Heizer began working on "City" in 1972, and is still not finished.  It is a massive formulation of rock, sand, and concrete, best viewed from the air.  At present, it is over a mile and a half long.
     To our initial question, well, the more poetically minded of us will reply that, to name one example, mountains represent artwork, artwork of rock (of all kinds, though often granite) and dirt.  Or we might cite a formless beach, its nearly infinite particles of sand, worn and polished over many, many years, shimmering in the sun, waiting for the rising tide morning after morning.
     Heizer's "sculpture" asks us to look at rock and dirt differently.  It asks us to consider its beauty when it is shaped not by natural forces but by the human imagination. Moreover, it invites us to ponder the meaning of transformation:  Heizer took what many people might dismiss as ancillary to their lives and elevated it to an object of scrutiny and meditation.  He makes us look harder at what we think we already know.
     And perhaps that's one point.  We often do not see what things can fully be until we are willing to see them as we had not imagined them to be.
     So did Augustine observe many centuries ago about faith in God that, "I understand that I might believe."

     He was moving "more toward trying to figure what death is, and what my place in the world is."  So remarked a doctor who treated poet Max Ritvo in the final days of his life. A highly acclaimed young poet, Ritvo passed away last week at the tender age of, like British poet John Keats, 25.  It was a bitter end to a promising career.  A book of his poetry will appear in the fall of this year.
     As I have pondered this quote, I constantly return to the enigma of death.  Whether or not we believe in an afterlife, death remains an intractable mystery.  Sure, we can explain, through science and/or religion, why people die, but we still struggle with its immensity.  How can we grasp the notion of an earthly end, a point at which we no longer exist on this planet?  It's insuperably difficult.  And what about Ritvo's other quest, to understand his place in the world?  Do not we all wonder about this, too?  Whether we are famous and, in the eyes of many, accomplished, or relatively obscure, mere specks amidst the lengthy annals of time and history, we wonder:  what are we to do, given the inevitability of death, with this life in which we find ourselves?
     Though I (and undoubtedly many others) can offer some theological frameworks and possible answers to these questions, in the end what you decide about them will be what you believe to be, in your heart of hearts, potential, possible, and true.  No one can decide for another.
     Yet when all is said and done, we can only do what the parameters, those here, there, and everywhere, of our experience allow us to do.  For how can we really know?
     What is more probable in a universe in which matter and energy interchange constantly:  an end that is open--or an end that is closed?
     Rest well, Max Ritvo.
     

     What's history?  One of Christianity's greatest prelates, Augustine lived toward the very beginning of the medieval era.  Even today, his thought shapes countless theological inquiry around the globe.  One dimension of existence about which Augustine thought extensively was history.  History, he said, is the story of two cities, the city of man, and the city of God (for details, see Augustine's voluminous City of God).  History is a struggle between human striving and divine purpose, a purpose which, in the end, prevails.
     Yet it does so through the agency of human adventure and exploration.  God's ideas last, but human activity does, too.  None means anything without the other.
     On the other hand, Karl Marx saw history as the story of class struggle, the conflict between the workers and the owners.  It had nothing to do with God.  Spirituality is a myth.
     In many ways, both Augustine and Marx have much to offer.  We understand the necessity of God, and we understand the fact of human presence.  What we will never see, however, is what they mean when we fit them together.  In the end, who in history can ever know, fully, what this history means?  We may live history, but only God understands it.
     Otherwise, its meaning would be solely our own.  And apart from transcendent moral structure, what do we mean, anyway?  We're only here.
     And as French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre once remarked, if there is no God, then we are simply "useless passions," bundles of subjectivity with nowhere to go.

     "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, the present moment 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 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?

     Many of us have probably seen the poignant photograph of the five year old Syrian boy, bruised, bloodied, and discombobulated after a mortar attack.  It's almost as heart rending as last year's photograph of the even younger Syrian boy found drowned on a beach, victim of a botched crossing attempt.  For some of us, these photos are too close to home; we may witness, in our country, similar episodes regularly.  For others, though we are far away from such carnage, we may have children of similar ages whom we would not want to experience such horror.  For still others, we simply weep at the idea of such unmitigated pain and suffering.
     Unfortunately, it appears that Syria's civil war will not end anytime soon, and as is the case in most wars, it is the civilians who are taking the brunt of the fight.  It is anything but fair, and it is enormously tragic.  So we wonder:  why must this happen?  Why must innocents endure such awful lives?
     To these questions, we have no ready answers.  We lament before an opacity beyond our grasp.  Even if we aver that God is in this darkness, we are still left to wonder what, if anything, he is doing.  But we'll never know completely why.
     Setting these questions aside, however, we see that we remain singularly responsible to do whatever we can to halt the conflict.  We can question, we can wonder, but we can also act.  It's God's world, yes, but it is ours to own.
     "No greater love than this," Jesus said, "that a person lay down his life for his friend."

     Are you familiar with the Neolithic?  Based on two Greek words, "neo" (new:  remember the protagonist in the first Matrix movie?), and "lithic" (stone), it means, basically New Stone Age  The Neolithic refers to the period of human history when humanity ceased its hunting and gathering existence and began to form fixed settlements.
     For some of us, this supposition of course creates enormous difficulties.  If, as the biblical account holds, Adam and Eve were the first humans and did not live in a "settlement," why did subsequent humans decide to do so (for instance, Cain founding the city of Nod)?  And from where did the woman whom Cain married when he left his parents?
     If we can get past these theological questions, however, we see a more fundamental truth.  It is that humanity was created not to wander in tribal isolation but to interact with each other in larger community.  Sure, many people groups continue to live in relative isolation or sustain a nomadic existence today, but they are the exception.  And even they enjoy community with each other.  While we can lament many aspects of "civilized" urban life, we can also see it as the distant descendant of the ways of the Neolithic. Many thousands of years ago, people realized that it was better to come together in community than to migrate and wander apart from the bulk of their fellow human beings.
     Hence, we can celebrate the Neolithic not only for its impressive demonstrations of human creativity and prowess, but for its enduring statement of the necessity of commonality and unity and respect among human beings.
     After all, isn't this what, broadly speaking, God, the creator of us all, wants?

     If you have been to college, you probably took a course called "Western Civilization," or some variant of it, loosely labeled as the history of the world.  Unless the course tracks the history of the world outside of the West, however, the name is a misnomer.  It assumes that anything that occurred outside the West is of minor or, worse, of no importance to the state of the world today.
     Although I suspect that few historians feel this way, simply retaining the name of such a course almost seems offensive to many parts of the world.  And perhaps it is.  If we for instance assume that history is nothing more than a mix of force and freedom, a continual and senseless striving for power, we have every reason to study the world from the standpoint of other parts of the globe.  It is these areas that have felt most acutely the tension of force and freedom in their lives, and it is these regions that have sensed, more than the West, the delicate balance between force and freedom.  It is a balance for which, ideally, all peoples should strive.
     What is my point?  If all of us are made in the image of one God, no one of us is more valuable than the other, and no nation has any call to subjugate the other.  Further, no nation has the right (and, yes, I realize that "right" is an overused and misunderstood term) to decide the destiny of another country.  Even if we insist that God has a master vision for human history, we of the West err in supposing that we have a unique window into it or that we are specially called to orchestrate it.  (When God called Abraham, he made clear that the initiative and impetus was God's alone).
     Enjoy learning about the world--your world--and everyone, of whom you are one, in it.