Hiking the Transcendent Trail

    While hiking after a northern Michigan snowstorm, I was reminded why Christian theologians (as well as philosophers such as Plato) have developed an argument for the existence of God that builds from the presence of beauty in the world.  The formal argument reads something like this:

"There are compelling reasons for considering beauty to exist in a way that transcends its material manifestations. According to materialism, nothing exists in a way that transcends its material manifestations. Although one can make plausible evolutionary explanations for finding beauty in potential sexual partners and in healthy animals that might be food or predators, the experience of beauty is much wider than these categories and includes visions of things for which there can be no direct evolutionary advantage (like clouds seen from aeroplanes, or images from telescopes). According to classical theism, beauty is a quality of God and therefore exists in a way that transcends its material manifestations. Therefore, to the extent that premise (1) is accepted, theism is more plausible than materialism."

   Saturday, I found the visuals to go with this argument while hiking with my boys along the Boardman River in Traverse City, MI.  For a couple hours, I was immersed in the stunningly unnecessary beauty of creation.    
     The idea that all of reality can be reduced to nothing but atoms in motion may pass some kind of muster in a philosophy classroom, but not in midst of the raw beauty of nature.  Yes, there is ugliness too.  I get that. In fact, in a materialist universe of blind forces and chance, I understand gratuitous evil and decay.  
     But what do we do with gratuitous beauty?  What do we do when sticks, frozen water, dead chlorophyll sacks, dirt and a distant star take our breath away?  We enjoy it, and remember that our existence is greater than the sum of the details. Thank God.

In Memory Of My Father

  My Dad died of cancer nine years ago today. He sickened in the fall and died in the winter, as if nature itself understood.  Not long after he died, and with those images in my head, I looked out a window in Traverse City one October and penned the following: 

Fall

 

Yellow leaves fall hesitantly,

smothering the once vibrant grass

as the black squirrels gossip their way from

cooling earth to darkening sky.

They grow cold together.

And as the leaves fall to their death

the squirrels fall asleep,

not knowing that others have fallen,

and that I'm not feeling the best myself.

   I am much improved since those dark days.  His death was a storm, and his ghost has cast a long shadow, but the sunlight breaks through.  Since his death I have written to him, knowing that he can’t read it but taking comfort in an imaginary world where I am Odd Thomas and he is looking over my shoulder as I type.

   Here is my letter today:

Dear Dad,

    You knew who I was, so you will understand why this story is important now.

    In high school I lived for basketball.  It was my identity.  Each day's quality depended on how pick-up basketball went at lunch, and whether the girl I liked at that moment noticed the poetry-in-motion that was my game. I probably liked basketball  a little too much, and myself too little.

        I still remember when you sat me down and said you would not be attending many of my games my senior year.  You wanted me to know that you loved me because I was me, not because I could put a round ball through round metal opening. 

    We would sit by the wood stove in the winter, playing Stratego and Risk,  but never basketball.  Never the idol.

     Thank you.

    I wish you were here today to tell me you loved me, not because I have “accomplished “ something, and not because I’m perfect, and not because of the fleeting self-esteem builders I do,  but because of who I am.

   I am a son whose father loved him. 

   I will always miss you, and never forget you.

And God said:

 “Go down, Death, go down, go down to Columbus, Ohio, down in Broad Street, and find Brother Leon. He's borne the burden and heat of the day, he's labored long in my vineyard, And he's tired-- he's weary-- Go down, Death, and bring him to me….” And Jesus took his own hand and wiped away his tears, and he filled the gauntness in his face, and the angels sang a little song, and Jesus rocked him in his arms, and kept a-saying: “Take your rest; take your rest....”

My  personal touch added to “Go Down, Death,” by James Weldon Johnson

The Joy of Trouble

 
  The book of James was written about 15-20  years after Jesus’ death.  As the first letter to circulate among the early followers of Christ, it was addressed to a large group scattered all over the world, not just those living in a specific locale (i.e., Corinth). 
     Two key cultural events that had a “scattering” effect:  Persecutions had begun around AD 45, and a major famine had hit a large portion of the world.  The persecution had scattered the Jewish Christians, and the famine had hit what has recently been referred to as the “99%”  pretty hard.
    In this context, James writes the following (this is my paraphrase from multiple translations and commentaries):

                                 From James 1  and James 5

    In spite of what you might think, there is joy in facing the tests, trials, and dangerous temptations of life.  When your faith is tested, your endurance has the opportunity to grow.  Endure so that you can experience the full effect of  these experiences; you will become mature and complete, not lacking anything.     When tempted to sin, you have to stop saying, “God is tempting me.”  God cannot be tempted by evil, and he doesn’t tempt anyone to do evil.  People are tempted when they are lured and then carried  away by their own desires and lusts.  If they nourish the lust conceived in them, they will eventually give birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, will bring death to them.    Blessed is the one who patiently endures both temptations to sin and trials of hardship because, having passed the tests, that person will receive the victor’s crown of life that the Lord has promised in this life and in the life to come to those who keep on loving him.     As you know, we count as blessed those who have persevered. As an example of patience in the face of suffering, look at the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. Or think of Job’s perseverance, and what the Lord finally brought about for him.     There are people teaching you falsely about the character of God as it relates to trials, temptations, and suffering. Don’t be misled and deceived.  The Lord is full of compassion and mercy.  Every  good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights who shines His light on you.  He does not change like shifting shadows.  God gave us life through His word of truth, that we might be the beginning of a new kind of creature – his most important and prized possessions.    Be patient as you wait for the Lord’s return. See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop, patiently waiting for the autumn and spring rains?  You too should be patient as you wait for the Lord’s return, when you will finally be delivered from all of these hardships.  Stand firm, and don’t give up hope; His coming – and your deliverance and reward - is near.

How the West was Broke

      I have posted before about the societal implications of couples willingly choosing not to have children.  A lot of the feedback I received can be summarized succinctly: "You're an idiot."  That may well be true, but it won't be because I am wrong about this issue.  Pointing out the the cultural erosion that happens when one generation does not create another generation is not a matter of opinion.  It's just a fact of life.  
    I understand that couples can have legitimate reasons for not having kids, sometimes through choice and sometimes because biology has not been favorable.  I have friends who desperately want to have children but can't, and others who have foregone parenthood not because they don't want to be parents, but because they believe they have a higher calling on their life that precludes them from having children. You are not the subject of this post.  
     I am posting about this because, if statistics are correct,  more and more people have decided that they want the pleasure and privileges of sex (and ideally marriage) without the responsibility that naturally follows.  It makes sense, really.  Western culture increasingly presents freedom and choice as the Holy Grail of life, and what could possible keep us from these two demanding masters more than children? (Or so the thinking goes).     
     Unfortunately, this unfettered self-interest is not without consequence.  From Mark Steyn, in National Review Online: 

     "The developed world... is barren. Collectively barren, I hasten to add. Individually, it’s made up of millions of fertile women, who voluntarily opt for no children at all or one designer kid at 39. In Italy, the home of the Church, the birthrate’s somewhere around 1.2, 1.3 children per couple — or about half “replacement rate.” Japan, Germany, and Russia are already in net population decline. Fifty percent of Japanese women born in the Seventies are childless. Between 1990 and 2000, the percentage of Spanish women childless at the age of 30 almost doubled, from just over 30 percent to just shy of 60 percent. In Sweden, Finland, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, 20 percent of 40-year-old women are childless. In a recent poll, invited to state the “ideal” number of children, 16.6 percent of Germans answered “None.”      The notion of life as a self-growth experience is more radical than it sounds. For most of human history, functioning societies have honored the long run: It’s why millions of people have children, build houses, plant trees, start businesses, make wills, put up beautiful churches in ordinary villages, fight and if necessary die for your country . . . A nation, a society, a community is a compact between past, present, and future, in which the citizens, in Tom Wolfe’s words at the dawn of the “Me Decade,” “conceive of themselves, however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream.”     Much of the developed world climbed out of the stream. You don’t need to make material sacrifices: The state takes care of all that. You don’t need to have children. And you certainly don’t need to die for king and country. But a society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for: It’s no longer a stream, but a stagnant pool."

    Politicians talk a lot about all the sacrifices we have to make for "the future generations of our children."   That's if we have them, I suppose.  One way to avoid living a life that considers the long term is to simply not contribute to the long term.  If nothing will matter then, I suppose nothing matters too much now. 
    This is street-level nihilism.  Neitzsche thought we were killing God; he did not realize we were dying too.
  

Always Go To The Funeral

    I have been reminded recently that the most meaningful moments in life are found far more often in the walks through the dark valleys, not the meadows ( I place a lot of the blame at the feet of Odd Thomas).  The lifeless stones and hard despair of the valleys - sickness, death, poverty, loneliness -  are meant to make us all look up to the source of light and life; meadows are so flooded with both that we eventually begin to notice the flowers more than the sun. 
     That's not the flower's fault, or course, or the meadow's.  Beauty and peace are two of God's best gifts to the world. The importance of the tangible blessings of friends, family, health, comfort, and love cannot be overstated. We minimize the importance of these "glimpses of heaven" at our peril.  
      But there is a part of human nature that cannot stay in the meadows for too long, or we forget to look up.  Even worse, we begin to resent those who need us to follow them into the valleys and walk with them out of the darkness.  
     From the December 2011 issue of First Things:

"You can't come in without going out, kids. Always go to the funeral."  So Deirdre Sullivan's father taught her.... Going to funerals was partly a duty and partly a matter of learning to do things for others when doing them wasn't convenient, like going to 'the painfully under- attended birthday party' and visiting someone in the hospital during happy hour.
    It bears fruit, this discipline. When she was sixteen, she went to the funeral home by herself, unwillingly, for her fifth-grade math teacher. 'It was worse than I thought it would be; I was the only kid there.  When the condolence line deposited me in front of Miss Emerson's shell-shocked parents, I stammered out, "Sorry about all this," and walked away.  But, for the deeply weird expression of sympathy delivered twenty years ago, Miss Emerson's mother still remembers my name and always says hello with tearing eyes."

     If, by God's grace, I can lay claim to similar legacy - that people say hello with tearing eyes because I was willing to enter the valleys of their lives and walk with them -  I will consider my life to have been lived well.