The late Michel Foucault, a French philosopher and literary critic, once asserted that, “Power is not the state forbidding you to do something; it is your teacher, doctor, or psychiatrist telling you who you are.”  Foucault was making a critical point about the nature of power.  He is arguing that genuine power is not so much how the state affects our ability to engage in action, but rather how various authority figures try to shape who we are.  Actions are one thing; beingness is quite another.
     Foucault makes a good point.  In the end, as numerous commentators, including Jesus, have pointed out, we can do the right things even while our hearts are telling us we should not.  Hence, freedom is not so much liberation from external restraint as it is our ability to shape our heart, to tame and manage who we ultimately are.  Genuine freedom is the gift of being good within, not necesssarily the liberty to do the "right" thing.
     And in this, as Jesus put it so succintly, is "freedom indeed."  We cannot be fully free until we admit that we cannot be so on our own.

     "They spent their lives in misery, they died in misery."  So remarked an observer of what he called the "forgotten dead of Haiti."  By the "forgotten dead," this person was thinking about the vast numbers of Haitians who, whether it be succumbing to AIDS or other diseases; enduring aching poverty; or trying desperately and without success to put their lives back together after a series of natural disasters in the country:  people who die without a trace.  No one attends to them, no one helps them, no one remembers them.  They came into this world in obscurity, lived without notice, and died absent of any remembrance.  It is as if they had never really lived.
     Some years ago, my son spent a summer volunteering at Mother Teresa's House for the Poor in Kolkata, India.  Each day, he accompanied staff as they traveled through the streets of the teeming city, looking for people near death, people abandoned, people whose passing would not cause anyone to blink an eye.  With the staff, he brought these people to the House.  There, they tended to their wounds, bathed them, gave them clean clothes, and laid them in a bed with fresh sheets.  Then they kept vigil with them, waiting with them, holding their hand as their lives slipped away into their eternal destiny.
     These people then died, so the staff hoped, feeling loved.  I cannot explain why some of us are born into pleasant circumstances and others not.  I cannot explain why some people die being loved deeply and others not.  And I cannot explain why the world is full of such aching disparity and God seems to be doing nothing about it.
     What I can explain, however, is that because we are beings created in the image of God, we can love.  We can love ourselves, we can love each other.  And we can love the planet.
     God seems frightfully distant at times, yes, but we can make our love, his love in us, his love that is rooted in his creation of us, constantly present.
     

     May 1:  May Day.  It's a good day to think about the glory and wonder of life, in particular, spring.  Consider this line from "Here the Birds' Journey Ends," a poem written by Mahmoud Darwish:  "And we will etch on the final rocks, 'Long live life, long live life.'" 
     On the one hand, we know that, unless something extraordinary happens on earth, none of us will live indefinitely on this planet.  One day, we all will die.  As much as we may treasure life, this life we live in this present moment, we know that we will not be able to enjoy it forever.  Eventually, it will end.
     On the other hand, we know that our lives are but one manifestation of the life that grounds the lives that all of us live, that undergirding and fueling our individual lives is life, the life that animates and enlivens us all.  Without this life, none of us would be here.  That we are born, live, and die is the fruit, the outward and visible individuated expression of this "life" that pervades the planet.  We live because there is life, because life exists, exists not just as a concept but as papable and concrete reality.  Without this life, we would have no reality.
     So, yes, indeed, may life live.  May we always be part of and experience this vast bios, this teeming movement of existence that gestates and ripples across the universe and, specifically for us, sweeps and pervades planet Earth.  May life always be, may life always be here to birth us, grow us, enlighten us, even, sadly enough, end us.  May life always be here for us.
     Even more, however, may life take us into more life beyond it, a life (the life) created by an eternal God.  Long live the present, yet long live the future, a future with a meaning beyond itself, a meaning rooted in the absolute meaningfulness of an eternal and purposeful creator.
     Long live life, etched on the rocks of eternity:  God's life for us.

     "The less religious you are, the more likely you are to think that aliens exist."  So said an recent op-ed piece by Clay Routledge in the New York Times.  Is he correct?  In his article, argues that even though we are more knowledgeable and intellectually confident than ever, we cannot escape our need for greater meaning, some sort of connection with whatever it is that we sense is beyond, figuratively, metaphorically, or physically, us.  
     He's not the only one in this regard.  Countless studies confirm that although interest on conventional religion has been decreasing steadily for decades, interest in spirituality has not waned; in fact, it has increased.  Hence, sometimes a highly irreligious person will want to believe in the something which, to her, speaks to her of things of the "spirit."  On occasion, these "things" can include aliens.  Why?  Aliens bespeak of a presence utterly foreign to this world, something we cannot find in this life, something that, well, is "alien" to us.
     In their interest in aliens, the irreligious among us confirm the fact of our need to answer the most fundamental questions of our existence.  To wit, it's hard, perhaps impossible, to evade who we most deeply are:  spiritual and believing beings.

     Most of us are aware of Charles Darwin, the British biologist who devised what has become known as the theory of natural selection and evolution.  Although Darwin was acutely aware of the potential flaws in his theory of species development, nowhere did he struggle more with this than in his conclusions about morality.  People did not designate actions as moral because they believed such actions would increase their happiness in the future, he suggested, but rather because they had concluded that these actions had increased happiness in the past.  Put another way, we humans decide what is moral on the basis of what has happened rather than on the basis of what will (or might) happen.
     Setting aside the troubling question of how to define the moral sense and why it has somehow risen, over a period of millions of years, out of formerly inert matter, we should note that defining morality in this way renders it highly subjective.  If it has worked in the past, the reasoning goes, it should continue to work in the future.  Sometimes this is true, sometimes it is not.  On the one hand, this allows us to shape our morality according to the dictates of our particular moment; on the other hand, it leaves us without any solid basis for morality other than our happiness, itself a rather slippery term.
     Justice is not necessarily happy, nor is rectitude always fun.  Morality should be more than happiness, and it should be predicated on more than personal--or group--whimsy.  Better that we struggle to fit our convictions into "what is" than allow "what is" to shape our convictions.  Sure, we need to be ready to change with changing times, but not to let changing times make what has never been morally defensible, in turn, morally supreme.

     "Passion," says one of the characters in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, "we need passion."

     Precisely.  We cannot live without passion.  We also cannot live, the novel goes on to suggest, without unhappiness.  Brave New World paints a portrait of a society in which unhappiness is frowned upon, even banned.  As the story winds to a close, however, some of the inhabitants of this world come to conclude that happiness isn't enough.  We need to be, they say, unhappy. We need to see both sides of life.


     Quite true.  Oddly enough, however, we cannot do so unless we are living in a broken world.
     Ah, the dilemma of being human.

     "To be or not to be, that is the question:  whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them." 

     So wrote the Bard of Avon, otherwise known as William Shakespeare, generally acknowledged as one of the greatest playwrights who ever lived.  As we think about Shakespeare's birthday, which the world celebrated on April 23, we marvel at his ability to write such striking and memorable poetry and prose.  We are awestruck at his insight into the human condition, at his ability to create such stunning portraits of humans at the peaks of triumph or, alternatively, the depths of despair.  Shakespeare had a remarkable capacity for capturing life, for divulging the intimacies of what it means to be a human being.

     To be or not to be?  Do not we all ask ourselves this at some point?  Do not we all wonder why we are here?  What we should do?  Why will it end?
     Indeed.  We are only human, but ironically, that is all, Shakespeare constantly reminds us, we ought to be.
     And so, in this bewildering and astonishing world, is God.