Let us applaud Alexei Anatollevich Navalny.  If Navalny's name isn't familiar to you, consider him to be one of the most prominent and certainly one of the bravest Russian dissidents to appear on the scene in the past decade.  Seemingly fearless of arrest or repression, Navalny has repeatedly challenged the twenty year reign of Vladimir Putin to change its ways.  Over and over, he has stepped forth to lead the Russian people in contesting the steady erosion of democracy in Russia.  For this, Navalny has endured numerous, arrests, imprisonment and, most recently, poisoning.  Putin seems to stop at nothing to prevent Navalny from encouraging and leading protest against his ironclad rule.

    

     Now, finally, he did.  Holding, trying, and convicting Navalny of a fabricated parole violation, Russian courts have recently sentenced him to two years in a Siberian prison.  But, Navalny says, he is not afraid.  And his wife supports him fully.

     For those of us in the West, people who every day enjoy and appreciate the liberties democracy affords us, we ought to admire Navalny greatly.  We ought to pray for him every day, and support him any way we can.  Repression is not the natural state of humanity.

     The fact of God ensures that every human has inherent dignity and the right and capacity to exercise choice.  I hope and pray that Navalny and his movement continues to inspire all of us to work to realize the push for the full expression of these things in every person across the world.

     From Mozart to Schubert to Mendlessohn:  these last few weeks have been filled with numerous musician birthdays.  Their contributions to music and the enriching of the human adventure have been singular and vast.  Born into a Jewish family (although his father separated himself from Judaism before Felix was born) and later baptized as a Christian, Felix Mendelssohn composed in a wide range of genres, choral to orchestral to chamber to operatic, each work distinguished by its melody, passion, and attention to detail.  Some of his most famous, and most recognizable, works include "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing," 

"Overture to a Midsummer Night's Dream," and the "Wedding March."  He was acknowledged as a prodigy early in his life, most notably by Goethe, writer of the timeless story of Faust.  People found his music uniquely captivating.
     As I think about Mendelssohn, I realize, again, the remarkable fact of music in this adventure we call life.  To form sound, to frame melody, to write song:  there is nothing quite like these in all the cosmos.  Our ability to visualize (as Paul McCartney once said, "I see the music in my head") and compose music mirrors, mirrors as both reflection and extension of the marvel of existence, the capacity of the universe to express itself in sound.  Unbidden, unsought, the universe speaks to us every moment of every day.  It's never totally silent.
     Before composers like Mendlessohn, we can therefore only weep in amazement, astonished that we understand the fact of melody and sound, and that we can emulate, albeit in shattered form, the timeless and ageless marvel of that which empowers and expresses what is.

     Yesterday was Groundhog Day (and also the birthday of one of my oldest friends).  It's a day buried deep in ancient European belief and lore, a day of reckoning, a day that marks the approximate midway point (otherwise known as Beltane; or, from a Celtic standpoint, Imbolc) between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox.  It is, as those who live through cold and snowy winters, the point at which, maybe, just maybe, things are on the upswing, and that, going forward, the earth is closer to spring than winter.

     Today, we know much more about the weather than our ancestors.  We can predict its trends far more effectively.  Most of the time, this is good.  On the other hand, with each new statistic and predictive instrument we devise and use, we put one more layer between us and our world.  We're perhaps safer and better prepared, yes, but we are not necessarily better off.  We forget what the world is like.  We fail to remember our deepest roots, we overlook the beauty of the rhythms with which our planet breathes.
     And maybe in so doing, we forget that we live in a reality whose meaning does not cconsist in our ability to tame and conquer it, but rather in our willingness to submit to and acknowledge its mysteries.  And to learn that, finite that we be, we will never fully outwit that which we did not make.

     We learn to open our eyes.

      Today is February 1:  in the U.S., it is Black History Month.  In truth, one finds it rather odd that we must set aside a month to celebrate a history of a people whose lineage is considerably longer than that of the more dominant race in the world today, that is, white people.  In fact, as Nell Irvin Painter points out in her 2011 The History of White People, it is the white skin color that, from a genetic standpoint, is the more "aberrant" of human skin colors.  Moreover, whether we believe that humanity began in southern Iraq vis a vis the Garden of Eden, the savannah and gorges of central and southern Africa, or some combination of the two, we must admit that our earliest ancestors were anything but lily white.

     Be this as it may, we do well to remember our black brethren and not just in the U.S.   Due to racist behavior perpetrated by other races and ethnicities in the course of human history, the virtues of Black culture have often been ignored, suppressed or, worse, abused and destroyed.  This has been at our peril.  We can only enjoy and appreciate humanity when we experience all of its manifestations.  And this experience should include not just literary or historical insight, but physical encounter.  How wonderful it would be if we could realize that over and above us all is a God who loves all of us equally and wishes for all of us to become everything that he has created us to be on the world he has made for all us, together.
     I'll always be white, I'll always be a part of a traditional Western "elite."  Yet I also realize that, as the apostle Paul wrote many centuries ago, that there is, "neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28):  immense diversity, enormously one.
     So did God make us:  different, yet destined to be one.  We therefore celebrate the beauty of the Black experience, this month, and every month to come:  it's all part of being one.

     Not as well known as Mozart, whose birthday we remembered a few days ago, Franz Schubert was nonetheless one of the most remarkable musicians in Western history.  Immensely productive and profoundly creative, Schubert wrote some of the most ethereal and haunting melodies of all time.  We listen to his music and feel transported, lifted above what is earthly and material, moved into transcendence.  January 31, is Schubert's birthday.

     Schubert's music gives us pause.  If music only told us what we already know, we probably wouldn't get as much out of it as we do.  We do not need to be reminded of what is obvious and normal.  We rather need to be encouraged to ponder what is beyond the apparent, what breaks down the seen, what splits the visible apart.  We want to know what we, at the moment, cannot.

     And this is what Schubert's music does.  Descending into the darkest recesses of his soul, Schubert talks to us about the deepest mysteries of existence, how we walk in a wisp, a gossamer veil stretched between us and the other side of time.  He romanced eternity.
     As do we all.  Every day we balance, balance between presence and absence, perched on a thin line dividing present reality and ultimate destiny.

     Thanks, Franz Schubert, for showing us that life is bigger that life itself.

     Yesterday, January 27, was a day of great solemnity:  International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  It is a day that should cause all of us to stop, think, and weep.  How does one begin to grasp the deliberately engineered deaths of over six million people?  How does one connect with a person who lost the sum of his lineage in a concentration camp?  How can we possibly comprehend being the object of such virulent hatred and racism?

     We can't.  And that's the point.  God aside, evil has no explanation.  It has no point, it has no plan.  It is beyond our ability to fully understand.  Yet evil is us.  We think, we make choices, we act.  And usually with little grasp of its full consequences.  Many Holocaust scholars insist, and rightly so, that the Holocaust is an event that surpasses the widest and deepest boundaries of our ken and imagination.  It's beyond intelligibility.

     For some, it ends all poetry.
     Yet it happened.  Writing to me nearly three decades ago, an American then living in Jerusalem and who had made clear to me that he did not believe in God, allowed that the Holocaust caused even him to acknowledge the reality of the metaphysical.  Why, he reasoned, would anyone with a hatred other than one rooted in the tenebrosity of a twisted notion of the metaphysical engage in such horror?  And why, he suggested, would a God other than one committed to the sanctity of human choice be present as such a thing happened?  Finally, he asked, why, unless Jesus really is humanity's savior, would God ever run away from such pain?
     Weep for our Jewish brothers and sisters, and pray for those who persecute them. And believe:  at all costs, believe in the ultimacy of God.

     It's a big day:  the birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (it's also International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which we will consider tomorrow).  Around the world, people continue to be astonished by the immense creativity and wonder of this Austrian's music.  Fluent in all genres of classical music, Mozart, though he died, sadly, at the tender age of 34, produced an array of musical expression that most musicologists agree is unmatched.  As a contemporary said of him, "He was like an angel sent to us for a season, only to return to heaven again."  Most of us can only stand mute and marvel at Mozart's immense ability.  How could one person write works of such extraordinary beauty?

    

    Rightly do we therefore weep and swoon at the beauty of Mozart's compositions; they are works of unsurpassed wonder.  Yet rightly do we marvel equally at God, the personal infinite God who made and fashioned this artist, with his prodigious talents, and enabled him to be and become who and what he is.

     Similarly, rightly do we marvel at ourselves, who are gifted in a nearly infinite number of ways, we who are similarly made to create in unabashed wonder.
    Thanks, God, for giving us Mozart, as well as every other human being:  these astonishing displays of consciousness and sentience that move across this amazing planet.