As the American presidential campaign, accentuated by the debate earlier this week, continues, the nation, and the world, waits, wondering what will happen.  At this point, it's anyone's guess.
     Everyone who plans to vote will do for different reasons.  Some will focus on economic issues, others cultural, still others religious or "values," national security, and more.  In the end, however, it seems that what will be most important is that people vote not so much according to their individual needs and vision but for the greater good of the nation, however, of course, they define this.
     And that's the challenge:  what is the common good?  Without question, it's more than a single issue.  It's more than one region.  It's more than one group's concerns.  The common good is about the present, but it's about the future, too.  It's individualized, it's corporate, comprehensive and holistic.  The momentary and immediate are only the beginning.
     The common good is bigger than all of us combined.  It's possible, but inscrutable, attainable but hazy.  That's the challenge of finitude, that's the vexation of temporality.
     It's why we need a transcendent God.
     Enjoy the campaign.

     Why do so many "young" people no longer attend church?  For those who have no interest in church, this is a moot question.  For those who study such matters, it is.  This notwithstanding, however, analyzing why many young people do not attend church says much, not just about the Christian church, but about the state of religion in general today.
     Historically, most of those who participate in a religion, regardless of what that religion might be, have sought to balance tradition and innovation in how they approach and utilize their beliefs.  Too often, however, the scale has been tipped toward tradition. Creativity and innovation are frequently shortchanged.
     God is a vastly creative God.  He is also a God of the new.  Although the "old ways" should not always be summarily dismissed as irrelevant, they can at times impede the input of the future.  They can inhibit the thoughts of new generations.
     For many centuries, the people of Israel had been told to expect a kingdom and Messiah.  Wait, they were encouraged, wait, wait through toil, pain, and disappointment for the revealing of God's bigger plan.
     And one day that plan disclosed itself, disclosed itself in a decidedly unexpected way. Jesus was born.  Here was someone quite new, someone quite radical, someone quite innovative in how he viewed and approached centuries of traditional Jewish theology. Few wanted to believe him, and even fewer wanted to follow him.  The old ways were too comfortable.
     When we wonder why not just young people but Westerners, broadly speaking, no longer associate themselves with religion, we can think about the radical nature of Jesus' message:  it was old, but it was also astonishingly new.  It announced a seminal change in how people were to view God.
     Yet it didn't abandon God.  It rather magnified his wonder and creative power. Properly interpreted, religion can, too.  It must only remember this:  never put God in a box.

     Goethe, surely one of, if not the most revered German writer of all time, perhaps most well known for his Faust, offered some fascinating observations about art.  Art, broadly speaking, that is, art in the sense of a work of the imagination, the birth of human sensibilities beyond materialistic reductionism, the fruit of minds and hearts set loose to think, ponder, and create outside the box, outside the box of conventional structure and form, so much so that in some instances we do not understand it.
     But that's the point.  Art stretches us.  Art challenges us.  Art makes us look at the world in ways we had not thought to before.  So did Goethe say, "Man can find no better retreat from the world than art, and man can find no stronger link with the world than art."
     Though Goethe veers between natural and supernatural in the many pages of Faust, taking us one way and then another, he understands that if art is to be art, it must be a pursuit that allows us to step back and look at life in new ways.  For some, it invokes the spiritual; for others, simply another layer of the material.  Either way, art, whatever we conceive it to be, offers us a window and vantage point into a new dimension of existence.
     At the same time, however, because it is implicit in the human being who lives in the world, art connects to what is.  So did Monet say, "I wish to render what is."  So did he wish to reframe and reimage the world and our perception of it.  From a theological standpoint which, as you know, I seemingly cannot help but wander into (!), art's dual role as absence and presence tells us of the potential depth of our experience of the universe. It reminds us that, as Goethe observed, although we can dance between being in the world and being apart from it, ultimately we realize that we are profoundly creative and imaginative beings who inevitably ponder what is beyond our immediate material ken.
     Hence, we ask ourselves:  why do we, thoroughly material beings, think to venture into what is not?
     Maybe, just maybe it's because whether we know and accept it or not, we live in a world woven by and with a God who, in the revelation of himself in all things, enables it. Otherwise, why would we look beyond what we can see?

     Are you a pessimist or optimist?  I ask because I'm reading a book titled, A Philosophy of Pessimism, written by Stuart Sim.  Why, he asks, given the state of the world and the many upon many challenges we face, can anyone suppose herself to be optimistic about the outcome?  Moreover, if the Calvinistic doctrines of divine sovereignty and predestination are true, how will we ever hope to change anything if God has already ordained the end of all things?  And how will those who, given sufficient circumstances, might be inclined to believe ever do so if God has not elected them to do so?
     He's asking some powerful questions.  If God is there, and if God is guiding and ordaining all things, how can we ever suppose we have any say in the matter?  How can we be hopeful if all for which we might hope has no basis?
     I don't know that anyone can fully answer these questions and, if she imagines she can, I am willing to say she is sorely mistaken.  In the end, if we wish to acknowledge, simultaneously, the fact and presence of God and the human capacity for choice, our only reason to be pessimistic is if we do not believe God is good, if we do not have evidence he is really a God of love.
     Yet we do have evidence that God is good and a God love, in the person of Jesus Christ.  Does this explain or compensate for the pessimism that inevitably accompanies this fleeting existence?  Not always.  Without this, however, given our finitude and all with which we fill it, we only face more turns in the vacuum of the unknown.

     Have you ever read, and really pondered, Romans 1:19-20?  It's an intriguing set of verses.  It reads,
     "Because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them.  For since the creation of the world his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse."
     Whatever does this mean?  In short, it tells us that although we do not see, visibly, God in this world, we in fact "see" him when we examine and consider the many appearances of the natural world.  In effect, we "see" God in what he has made. The caveat, however, is that unless we already know about the idea of God or believe in the fact of his presence, however we conceive these to be, we may not necessarily affirm his existence in the creation.
     So I now share a quote from a Canadian artist named Lawren Harris.  He observed that there is an "evolution from the love of the outward aspect of Nature and a more or less realistic rendering of her to the sense of the indwelling spirit and a more austere spiritual expression."  In other words, in experiencing the beauty of nature, we come to consider more fully the possibility of spirit, spirituality and, dare I say, God.
     Most of us, including some in my atheist discussion group, will admit to the fact of spirituality, however we picture it to be.  Far more daunting, though, is when we move from spirituality to its source.
     It is then we must ask ourselves this:  can we experience spirituality without experiencing a spiritual presence?
     To wit, apart from the latter, we cannot even define it.

     "Now is the wind-time, the scattering clattering song-on-the-lawn time early eves and 
     gray days clouds shrouding the traveled ways trees spare and cracked bare slim       
     fingers in the air dry grass in the wind-lash waving waving as the birds pass the sky 
     turns, the wind gusts winter sweeps in it must it must."  (Debra Reinstra, "Autumn")

     Today, in the northern hemisphere, is the first day of autumn:  the autumnal equinox. It's a good day, a fun time.  Turning leaves and brilliant colors; cool, crisp nights and rich blue skies; the rising of Orion, his three star belt shining in the night; and light and dark woven with liminality and change:  life displays itself once more.
     In the ancient near east, the land of Egypt, Assyria, Sumer, and Babylon, autumn was a significant moment.  It marked the time of harvest and thanksgiving, a season of expectation--the life giving autumn rains were imminent--and days of ingathering and contemplation.
     So it can be for us.  Amidst our technology and worldly disenchantment, we can learn from our long ago brethren, our many ancestors who placed such tremendous faith in the certainty of the seasons, ordained, as they saw it, by the gods.  It's good to reach ends, it's good to meditate on beginnings, and it's good to remember the ubiquity of the rhythms that ripple through the cosmos.  It's good to ponder the security of an orderly world.
     And it's good to note that even though this security can at times be unnerving, even frightening, it is at the same time beautiful, a living picture of the endless grace of our creator God.  We change, the world changes, but God does not.  In autumn's changes, we see even more the necessity of his presence.

     We've all heard, I suspect, the adage that, "You can't take it with you."  Quite true. Despite the efforts of people, from the ancient Indo-Europeans and Egyptians to the "inhabitants" of modern masoleums to preserve--and continue--what they have as they leave this life, the sad truth remains:  nothing, materially speaking, will accompany us in our earthly passing.
     Wealth, and the kingdoms, be they cultural, political, or economic, that attend them, will not last indefinitely.  I recently read book titled The Final Voyage.  An account of the rise and fall of the New England whaling industry in the nineteenth century, The Final Voyage aptly presents how once enormously wealthy whaling merchants, their coffers swollen with the fruits of years of international whaling expeditions, expeditions taken in quest of whale oil, at that time the preferred oil for all appliances, eventually lost everything.  They failed to recognize how rapidly the oil produced by the burgeoning petroleum industry would supplant that of whales, how in just a few short decades oil from the ground would become the primary substance upon which the Industrial Revolution would move forward. 
     And most of them lost literally everything.  Their once mighty kingdoms crumbled and fell, collapsing under the weight of an economic tsunami to which they proved helpless to respond.  Their world was gone.
     On the other hand, although petroleum oil continues to dominate the energy industry, one day it may not. And what then will its proponents do?
     I trust they will adjust with circumspection.  We live so fleetingly, so very much captives of a finitude and time we will never overcome.
     And why?  Deuteronomy 29:29 observes that "the secret things belong to God"  True enough.  However--and happily--Ecclesiastes 9 advises us to "do whatever we do [that is good] with all our might."  Wealth's evanescence merely serves to underscore a more fundamental truth: we live, and die, in the loving and purposeful vision of God.