This is our world," David Petersen writes in his On the Wild Edge:  In Search of  Natural Life, and "it is all that ever will be."  This is a classic statement of naturalism, the idea that this world represents the sum of all that we can know, all to which we can go to discover purpose and meaning.  We do not need anything outside of or beyond this world to decide what is real, valuable, and true; we only need this world, this  remarkable sphere of materiality and undeserved grace on which we live, to know what life is all about.
     On the surface, this assertion seems to make sense.  Why, if we live in this world, do we need to look anywhere else for what this world means?  Why, given that this world is the foundation of all that we think and do, must we suppose that we should look in other places to decide what it really means?  We're here and, as the writer Joan Didion put it in a university commencement address a few years ago, "should get on with it."
     
     However attractive this perspective may seem, it overlooks one very important fact:  we cannot know, with absolute certainty, whether this world is indeed "all that is"  Finite creatures that we are, we simply cannot honestly conclude that, without any doubt, what we see and experience every day is all that we will ever experience, or that it is all from which we may draw any ideas for determining truth and meaning.  It is beyond our capacity to fully discern and see.


     Moreover, if we indeed insist that this world is all that we need to explain this world, then we are forced to ask another troublesome question:  how we can use a world whose precise meaning we do not know, a world we ourselves did not make, in order to decide what it means?  We're proving meaning on the basis of what is we already think--without any proof--is meaningful.  It is circular through and through.
     
     What can we do?  As the writer of Proverbs (Proverbs 29:18) suggested many millennia ago, we must look to a source of information and content beyond the world to find what the world--and us in it--means.  We look to revelation, truth that we did not manufacture or make, truth that we did not previously know to make sense of this bewildering existence.  Without revelation, without input from that which necessarily frames the world, we will never know what is really true.  How could we?  Truth is only genuine if it is absolute, and a mercurial and shifting and ebbing world will never be absolute.  It will always be contingent.
     We need revelation to really see.

     Last week, my wife and I took time to visit the Holocaust Museum in Skokie, Illinois.  Although we hope to one day take in its counterpart in Washington, D.C., the institution in Skokie is, surely, the next best thing.

     We are not sorry we went.  While we are quite familiar with the historical underpinnings and existential circumstances of the Holocaust (and given that I've taught about it for decades), we were nonetheless moved.  There is something about experiencing the raw physicality of the concentration camps, the railroad car used for transport, the guns of the guards, the mountains of skeletons, the direct testimony of survivors, the uniforms the prisoners were forced to wear, and more, that enables one to step more fully into the horror of what that unspeakably dark period of human atrocity really means.

    
 I will not here attempt to explicate the many, many layers of the Holocaust's meaning for humanity.  I will leave that for you to discern.  However, I will observe that although it seems that a dictatorial governments initiate more acts of genocide, never suppose that genocide cannot happen in a democracy.  Portents abound throughout the West.  We humans tread a very narrow ledge between fighting for good and promoting evil.  And we rarely know, precisely, when we are definitively walking on either side.

     "If we can measure the metaphysical," Paul suggested to me, "then maybe it's not the metaphysical."  An atheist for most of his life, Paul holds to atheism for two principal reasons:  the "suffering of innocents" and "why can't everyone have a road to Damascus [how the apostle Paul came to believe in Jesus] experience?"  A third one, I learned as we talked over coffee and tea one afternoon, is our inability to measure the metaphysical.

     Paul has a good point.  How indeed can we measure something we cannot see?  It seems to be a non-starter.  Let me suggest that maybe the problem lies in how we look at measurement.  When we measure something, we are assuming that the instruments with which we do the measurement are accurate and reliable.  We also assume that how we are measuring is reliable and true.  Put another way, we measure according to how we have chosen to trust, frame, and understand the world.  While this usually works, it is not as effective when we must measure something we do not necessarily understand.  Or something we cannot see.  Consider dark matter.  We only know of its existence by measuring its effects, that is, the spaces between stars and galaxies, the gravitational pull that seems to hold the universe together, the expanding universe.  We cannot see it. But we assume it's there:  what else could be "there"?
     It seems that we might detect and measure the metaphysical in the same way:  understanding what we cannot see by looking at what we can.

     Most people, I suspect, are at least peripherally familiar with the great British scientist and mathematician Isaac Newton.  Moreover, most of us, I suspect as well, know that he is remembered for his "discovery" of gravity, a discovery that led humanity to realign nearly everything it had previously believed about the structure and workings of the universe.
     A good deal of this realignment had to do with religion.  During the Middle Ages, the era in Western Europe that preceded the period (generally called the Scientific Revolution) in which Newton made his discovery, the Church (at that time solely Catholic) determined what was right and true.  Few dared challenge it.
     As modern science (which, by the way, most historians believe, found its genesis in the then prevailing belief that because God had made it, the universe was one of rationality and order and therefore amenable to thoughtful investigation), bolstered by the development of instruments such as the microscope and telescope, began to learn more about how the universe worked, however, most intellectuals came to view the Church's authority on such matters as decidedly less credible.  As they saw it, it was the scientific method, developed by Francis Bacon, that now constituted the means by which responsible people should ascertain the inner structure of the cosmos.  Nonetheless, nearly all of these scientists continued to believe in God, and to place him as the center and impetus of creation.
     Newton was no exception.  Writing on page 440 of his famous Principia (translated from its original Latin), the mathematician observed the following:

     "And lest the systems of the fixed stars should, by their gravity, fall on each other mutually, he hath placed those systems at immense distances one from another."

      The way Newton put this is highly instructive.  He allows gravity to be the sovereign force that governs the movements of the stars (the "heavens"), yet notes that it is only able to do so effectively because the Creator (God) had set the stars in a certain way. Although we can argue about how God did so--whether he simply "spoke" it or used natural forces to execute his vision--we come away with an intriguing juxtaposition of divine presence and natural capacities.  It is a juxtaposition in which we see a perfectly balanced picture of supernatural and natural in which to frame our understanding of the universe.  God is there, yet gravity is, too, natural as well as supernatural, both present, both necessary, both contributing, both upholding, both ensuring the existence of the cosmos.

     Many years ago, when the church we were attending was preparing to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary, I was asked to write the script for the video presentation a committee was developing to commemorate the occasion.  After some thought and prayer, I settled on the initial verses of Psalm 90 as my opening.  They read, "Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations.  Before the mountains were born or You gave birth to the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God."

     Big picture, we little humans have no clue as to how things appear when they do or why things happen as they do.  Usually, all we see are the effects and results.  In like manner, when my church began those fifty years ago, no one knew what would happen.  All they knew was that they believed that their efforts were in the hands of God.

     One Sunday when we were in Nova Scotia last month, we decided to attend church.  It was a little white building on a lonely road in the Cape Breton highlands.  Like many Canadian churches, it was in the United Church tradition.  It had been established in 1832.  I have no doubt that its founders believed precisely what the founders of my church did:  their efforts were in the hands of God.

     And still are.  The threads of belief are lengthy; we cannot measure their full effects.  But their longevity should tell us something about the nature of belief:  if it is rooted in truth, it will endure.

     As I write, the British band the Who are doing yet another world tour.  Its two surviving members, Roger Daltrey and Peter Townshend, well into their seventies, continue to enjoy doing music.  And we are grateful they are.
     Some of us recall how, in the Who's early days, upon completing a performance, the band members, particularly Pete Townshend, would proceed to smash their instruments on stage.  It was part of their act, part of how they saw their music as an expression of an almost anarchaic protest of the stilted manner in which so many of us lived.


     While we can agree or disagree on the merits of such actions, I write about them because I recently came across the obituary of one Alan Rogan.  His job?  Rogan's job was to repair Pete Townshend's guitars in the aftermath of his carnage.  It is an odd thing for which to be remembered, but that's how I noticed his obit in the newspaper.  On the other hand, someone, I guess, had to do it:  Pete had some very expensive guitars.  He couldn't readily afford to buy a new one every week.

     We do not have the capacity to measure the worth of a life.  We cannot see beyond it.  We can't always see it in a bigger picture.  We're only finite human beings.  How Rogan's work fit into this picture I'm not fully sure, but when I was writing my first book and needed permission from Pete Townshend to excerpt a line from his "I'm Free" in my manuscript, one of his representatives called me and told me that Pete had granted me permission, gratis.  I was so grateful:  permissions are often very expensive.
     As Ecclesiastes observes, "we do not know the activity of God who makes all things."  Thanks, Alan, for repairing Pete's guitars.

     Maybe you've heard of Pyotr Pavlensky.  He is a Russian street artist whose art has made quite a splash in Europe lately.  Why?  Pavlensky's art is rooted in him mutilating himself.
     Some of us may be asking whether this is art.  If art is expression, then it is.  Pavlensky does art with a purpose, to make a point.  We may not like it, we may find it repulsive, but we should at least examine its point.  In the same way that Pussy Riot used the interior of a Russian Orthodox cathedral to play music as a protest to what they considered to be Vladimir Putin's repressive policies, Pavlensky uses his own body to lodge his dissent of the same.  At times, his actions make us cringe:  wrapping himself in barbed wire or nailing his scrotum to the pavement of the Red Square.  But like most street theatre, it is art that attracts attention.  And that is the point:  expression as protest.
     More broadly speaking, however, all art is protest.  It is protest against accepting what is and an openness to what could be.  It takes what is there and makes something new, something that has never been seen before.  Art makes us think.  It makes us think about what else, in this broken world, is possible.  We need it desperately.
     Even from a person who mutilates himself.  Even Pavlensky, a person made in the image of God, has reason to be.