Grief is a strange thing in that its memory is more characterized by what the relationship was or was not than by what characterized the death.(1) You look forward and ache over what has now been lost for the future. You look backward and grieve what never truly was and can now never be.

The award-winning author Paulo Coelho is a beautiful writer, and his lines of pure poetry are disguised as novels. His book The Witch of Portobello, a mystical story with many unusual turns, remains on my shelf, no matter where I live. I often pull it off, brush my hand across the cover, and flip it open to a page I have nearly memorized.

The story begins in Beirut, Lebanon, a country that boasts of warm hospitality, platefuls of hummus and tabouli, the Mediterranean coast, and beautiful cedars. Coelho describes his heroine, Athena, as an unusual girl who possessed a sense of spirituality from the time of her youth. She married when she was nineteen and wanted to have a baby right away. Her husband left her when the baby was still young, and Athena had to raise him alone.

During one Sunday Mass, the priest watched as Athena walked toward him to receive Communion, and his heart was filled with dread. Athena stood in front of the priest, drew her eyes closed, and opened her mouth to receive. I picture her standing there in vulnerability, asking to receive Christ’s body, given for her. She was hungry for the grace that it offered.

But he did not give it to her.

The young girl opened her eyes, terribly confused. The priest tried to tell her in hushed tones that they would talk about it later, but she would not be turned away. She persisted until she received an answer.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – For the Weary →

Many years ago, I had the opportunity to travel across the country from Massachusetts to Montana. While I had often traveled across the country on family vacations, I had never driven through South Dakota. But on this trip I was able to see quite a bit of the state that makes up part of the Great Plains in the United States. Having lived near the city, I remember being struck by the vast expanses of what appeared to be uninhabited land. Rolling grasslands, without many trees, offered a view of the landscape that was as far as it was wide. I remember wondering why anyone would make a home in such a desolate place.

Several years after this trip, I read Kathleen Norris’s book Dakota and marveled at her poignant description of this land. Her memoir both enticed me and made me wary of life in the Dakotas. The opening paragraphs of her book explain why:

“The high plains, the beginning of the desert West, often act like a crucible for those who inhabit them. Like Jacob’s angel, the region requires that you wrestle with it, before it bestows a blessing… This book is an invitation to a land of little rain and few trees, dry summer winds and harsh winters, a land rich in grass, and sky and surprises.”(1)

She concludes by saying that “the land and the sky of the West often fill what Thoreau termed our ‘need to witness our limits transgressed.’ Nature, in Dakota, can indeed be an experience of the holy.”(2)

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In John Bunyan’s abiding allegory, Pilgrim’s Progress, hope is personified in two ways. Hopeful is the traveling companion of Christian, the story’s protagonist, along the winding journey toward the Celestial City. Hopeful was born in the town of Vanity and grew up with great expectations of the things of the fair; honor and title, ownership and ease were his great hopes. But he had suffered bitter disappointment in these pursuits and found only shipwrecks of his own optimism. In this valley of emptiness, Hopeful was able to recognize the full and solid quest of Christian. And thus, Hopeful’s drastic conversion of hope begins with pilgrimage and community.

The other character marked by hope in Bunyan’s tale is encountered near the river one must cross on foot in order to enter the Celestial City. Vain-Hope is a ferryman, who offers to ferry travelers across the River of Death so that they don’t have to cross on their own. Yet as one man discovers, it is a promise that gets him across the river, but destroys all hope of staying there. In the end, Vain-Hope is a deadly end.

With these two lucid pictures, Bunyan divides hope in two, possibly simple, but maybe wise, categories: the life-giving and the destructive. Considering all the ways in which we use the word, it seems easily an oversimplification. In the painting above, for instance, artist George Frederic Watts shows a female allegorical figure of Hope, for which the painting is titled, sitting on a globe in a hunched position, blindfolded, clutching a wooden lyre with only one string left intact. According to Watts, “Hope need not mean expectancy. It suggests here rather the music which can come from the remaining chord.”(1)  G. K. Chesterton, who was far from alone in his criticism of Watt’s image, suggested that a better title for this work would be Despair. Chesterton describes the lone string of Hope’s lyre as “a string which is always stretched to snapping and yet never snaps. . . the queerest and most delicate thing in us, the most fragile, the most fantastic, is in truth the backbone and indestructible. . . Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all its conquerors.”(2)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The End of Hope →

Almost everyday, we are beset with news of daily atrocities, murders, and tragedies that continue to shake us. I sit in a somewhat curious state as I hear certain phrases so often repeated. “They seemed like such a normal person.” “My kids played at his/her house regularly.” Then the reporter chimes in, “How could such an ordinary person do such a thing?”

I guess what intrigues me in this constant replay from daily and weekly life is the surprise. The reporters genuinely seem surprised by the actions committed and in joining in with the social narrative’s rules, so do we! Many \centuries ago, the ancient writer Herodotus wrote, “The most hateful torment for men is to have knowledge of everything but power over nothing.” This is perceptive.

The modern era was birthed in the consciousness of rational men and women in control of their own destinies. It was the age of reason; we can and would figure everything out. It was the age of man; no need for god, the gods, or superstitions of any kind. It was the age of science; the new insights, techniques, and technologies would allow us to build our brave new world. It was the age of progress, as many believed we would grow from good to great, and perhaps end up in something like Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek future, where all need has been eradicated and all live for justice and the good of all.

The problem with this, and with all utopian dreams, is that they are illusions or delusions. They are fantasy constructs of the very sort Schopenhauer and Freud attacked in terms of religion. Despite promethean promises, guru advice, or our deepest sincere desires, wanting it badly enough does not make it so. What kind of a world do we live in? Who and what are we? What is wrong in life and with me? How can anything be improved? These are world and life view questions.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Misdiagnosing ‘Normal’ →

“You are nothing but a Pharisee,” said Maggie with vehemence. “You thank God for nothing but your own virtues; you think they are great enough to win you everything else.”(1)

Whether familiar or new to the scathing words of Maggie Tulliver to her brother Tom in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, it is clear that she is not speaking complimentarily.

The word “Pharisee,” as this interchange illustrates, is often used as something of a synonym for hypocrite, a haughty individual with a holier-than-thou air about them. Webster’s dictionary further articulates this common usage, defining the adjective “pharisaical” as being marked by “hypocritical censorious self-righteousness,” or “pretending to be highly moral or virtuous without actually being so.”(2) To be called a Pharisee is far from a compliment; it is to be accused of living with a false sense of righteousness, being blind and foolish with self-deception, or carrying oneself with a smug and hypocritical legalism.

The etymology of the word from its roots as a proper noun to its use as an adjective is one intertwined with history, drawing on the very tone with which a rabbi from Nazareth once spoke to the religious group that bore the name. In seven consecutive statements recorded in the book of Matthew, Jesus begins his stern rebukes with the scathing introductions: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites!” “Woe to you blind guides!” His conclusion is equally pejorative: “You snakes! You brood of vipers! How can you escape being sentenced to hell?”(3) The word “Pharisee” has become far more associated with this critique than its greater context. Thus Maggie can call her brother a Pharisee and not be thinking of the Jewish sect of leaders for which Jesus had harsh words, but of the harsh words themselves.

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“God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life” was a slogan I heard over and over again as I grew up. As a young person, this slogan meant that all my plans would be wonderful because God loved me. Now that I am older, I understand that this slogan had more to do with the Christian Gospel’s understanding of salvation than it did with guiding me down the primrose path of life. Yet, it still reverberates in my head when I experience hardship, pain, and loss. For it is often difficult to square a belief in the love of God with a series of life experiences that run counter to the expectations for a wonderful plan.

The seeming contradictions between stated beliefs and life experience often make faith complicated. For me, many of the cherished beliefs I held imploded and what I once thought was an invincible fortress came crashing down as life experience smashed up against them like a battering ram. C.S. Lewis described his own spiritual dismantling after the death of his wife, Joy, this way: “God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.”(1) Yet having to dwell in the rubble of what is left of one’s faith doesn’t feel as if it is the work of a God who desires to smash all our false conceptions.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Tearing Down the House of Cards →

A story told in the Hebrew scriptures offers a dramatic interplay of manipulation and honor, kings and kingdoms, power and powerlessness. It is the story more commonly known as “Daniel and the Lion’s Den.” But this title, accurate though it is in terms of the dramatic climax, actually misses the main actors entirely. Ultimately, the story is a depiction of power and weakness at play in two very different kingdoms and communities. On one side stands Darius, the mighty king and ruler of the people and nations, powerful sovereign of the powerful majority. On the other side is the God of Daniel, king of a community in exile, the ruler of a minority people whose city lies in ruins. The question of sovereignty seems as though it has already been answered quite definitively.

Most of us are not familiar with the devastating encounter of the powerlessness of exile and the forcible display of the powers that created it. Nonetheless, every aspect of our lives is touched by issues of power and weakness. The question of control and power is common to our relationships, communities, politics, business, education, and religion. Unfortunately, our common experience of the struggle is not to say we are well or healthily adjusted to it, far from it. Of course, it is easiest for those who actually hold any given power to be the most unaware of the dynamics of powerlessness upon others. For others, the struggle to be in control, to challenge authority, to make a name for ourselves, is largely thought of as a dynamic that is outgrown with adulthood. So in the face of authority issues, we say things like, “Teenagers will be teenagers!” Or we diagnose the battle to be in control as “middle child syndrome” or “terrible twos,” all the while failing to see our own struggle with similar dynamics. Still for others, questions of power involve wondering if they will ever have a voice, if anyone with power is listening, or if they have been forgotten and silenced indefinitely. Admittedly, to be conscious of the struggle is far better than being complacent about the question of power in general.

The story told in Daniel 6 begins significantly with a king who is for all practical purposes very much in control. Daniel, a Hebrew slave in exile, is found by king Darius to be distinguished in a way the king believes he can make use of and Daniel is given a position of authority in the kingdom for the sake of the king. But as the story moves forward, we see king Darius played like a pawn and Daniel is found guilty by the law of the land. To his utter dismay, king Darius finds himself bound by the law that his own lips decreed. Darius is the most powerful king in the world, and yet he is powerless beside his own decree, powerless to save his trusted servant. Whether Darius himself sees the irony in his power and position, we are left to wonder.

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Dale Henderson gives cello concerts in New York City subway stations because he fears the day when classical music will be no more. He plays for free, focusing primarily on Bach Solo Cello Suites because their “power and beauty unfailingly inspire great appreciation, joy and deep emotion in those who hear them.”(1) Some commuters stop and stare, curious or captivated, many having never heard a cello or Bach concerto before. For Henderson, the music is an offering of something meaningful, seeds for future generations of classical music admirers who would not otherwise know it, beauty well worth lugging his heavy cello down into the subways to protect.

It is not always easy to talk about beauty without a minefield of objections or at best complicating list of qualifiers. Its modern place in the “eye of the beholder” gives it a tenuous feel at best. Its ancient place as a perfect and ancient ideal is equally held with abstraction. While Henderson describes a world without classical music as soul-less, others may not miss it so much. And the contrast of beauty in a broken and breaking world makes its distinctive encounters increasingly stand out.

One author describes the common, but individual, effect of our varied encounters of the beautiful this way: “‘Beauty’ seems suited to those experiences that stop us in our tracks. Whether it’s a painting called Broadway Boogie-Woogie or a scherzo by Paganini, the beautiful is conducive to stillness. It doesn’t excite us, or necessarily instill in us the desire to replicate it; it simply makes us exist as though we’re existing for that very experience.”(2) His words are rife with the power of beauty to create longing, a desire to somehow participate. Beauty indeed leaves us with the ache of longing for another taste, another glimpse. And for each of us, this longing can come at unique or unsuspecting times—at the spectacular sight of the giant sequoias or a tiny praying mantis, at a concert or watching a First Nation powwow and taking in the colors, the drums, the survival of a betrayed people.

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Paradigms of Beauty →

Why isn’t God more obvious? This question is often asked in many ways and in many contexts, by people of all levels of faith. When prayers go unanswered, why is God silent? When suffering or tragedy strikes, why would God allow this to happen? Why wouldn’t God want more people to know God’s good news? When all the “evidence” seems to counter the biblical narrative, why doesn’t God just give the world a sign? If God was revealed through many wondrous signs and miracles throughout the Bible, why doesn’t God act that way today? All of these examples get at the same issue: the seeming “hiddenness” of God.

Atheist Bertrand Russell was once asked what he would say if after death he met God. Russell replied that he would say: “God, you gave us insufficient evidence.”(1) While many who have found God quite evident would balk at Russell’s audacity, a similar struggle ensued between the psalmist and his hidden God. “Why do you stand afar off, O Lord? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” Indeed, the psalmist accuses God of being asleep in these plaintive cries: “Arouse, yourself, why do you sleep, O Lord? Awake, and do not reject us forever. Why do you hide your face, and forget our affliction and our oppression?”(2)

In fact, belief in a God who can be easily found, a God who has acted in time and space, makes the hiddenness of God all the more poignant and perplexing. Theologians have offered many explanations for God’s hiddenness: because God seeks to grow our faith, because our sins and disobedience hide us from God and keep us from seeing God properly, or because God loves us and knows how much and how often we need to “find” God. If we are honest, we are just as likely to hide ourselves from God just as the first humans did in the Garden when God sought after them. Even so we cry out just like Job did and wonder why God stays hidden away in unanswered prayers and difficult circumstances: “Why do you hide your face, and consider me the enemy?”

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – God in the Pews →

Few of us would be able to recollect from our childhoods the moment when consciousness first came into being and the process of waking to self began. For most of us, awareness broke through in pieces. We found ourselves then as we continue to find ourselves now: at times stirringly wakeful to what it means to be human, aware of self and lifetime, and startled by the abruptness of its end. Essayist Annie Dillard articulates the progression of consciousness with stirring lucidity:

“I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. I woke at intervals until, by that September when Father went down the river, the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not. I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.”(1)

Dillard describes the rousing of self as strangely recognizable—”like people brought back from cardiac arrest or drowning.” There is a familiarity in the midst of the foreignness. We wake to mystery, but so somehow we wake to something known—and knowing.

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“Silence is golden” flashes across the theater screen just before a film begins. In other words, stop talking, listen to the film, and allow others to listen as well! Yet, for many used to the relentless noise in our lives, silence is far from golden. Silence is disruptive, even threatening to us. When I lost my husband several years ago, I was struck by how loud the silence had become in my own life. Days would go by without my having spoken audibly to anyone, save my two dogs.

Yet, I was not without sound during this period of my life. I began to pay attention to all the sounds that made up my day to day existence. The din of traffic noise, airplanes, and nautical sounds from the harbor all made for a symphony of sound. Because I wasn’t speaking out loud to anyone, I was able to intentionally listen to a whole new world of natural sounds. I heard the wind in the trees, or the soft patter of my dogs’ feet as they walked across the hardwood floors. I listened for the distinctive sounds of a variety of birds as they went about foraging for food or calling for a mate. At the time, I didn’t realize how unique it was to be able to truly listen because I was by myself, nor would I have viewed it, as I now do, as a gift.

According to audio-ecologist, Gordon Hempton, it’s not easy to find silence in the modern world. “If a quiet place is one where you can listen for 15 minutes in daylight hours without hearing a human-created sound, there are no quiet places left in Europe. There are none east of the Mississippi River. And in the American West? Maybe 12.”(1) We live in a noisy world.

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A favorite scene from the story of Jesus’s birth is of the far-seeing elderly Simeon reaching for the child in the young Mary’s arms, content now to die for having seen the Messiah with his own eyes. His words to Mary, more eerie than most mothers could graciously accept, always seemed a cryptic little note from a strange and saintly old man. Simeon walks up to Mary and says to the infant as much to the mother:

“This child is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed.”(1)

I have long tried to imagine how I might hear his words as a mother. I have tried to imagine what Mary might possibly have said in response to those words, her newborn’s fingers wrapped around her own. Surely, the elderly Simeon’s reaction must have taken her breath away.

So I had spent much time considering this exchange. But the prophetic words of the old man never struck me as the very pivotal introduction to the gospel writer’s story itself. Is Simeon the prophetic voice that initiates Luke’s overarching motif of suffering throughout his telling of the story of Christ?

Starting with Simeon, theologian Roy Harrisville draws out this side of Luke that surprised my reading of his Gospel and passion narrative—if only the surprise of seeing plainly something I’d never noticed.(2) Again and again Luke points out the necessity of Jesus’s suffering, long before Jesus is approaching the cross. Nonetheless, I was left with a plaguing question perhaps less for Harrisville than for God—or Jesus along the road to Emmaus: Why was it necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into glory, as he tells the men as they walk toward Emmaus? Why was Christ’s suffering a matter of “divine necessity”? Why did he need to suffer?

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Revealing Mysteries →

Researchers believe they have come up with a questionnaire that can measure a person’s chances of dying within the next four years.  According to one of the test’s designers, it is reported to be roughly 81 percent accurate among those who are 50 years or older.  Their report, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, claims the assessment will be useful to doctors in offering prognostic information and to patients who want a more determined look at the future. Regardless of the questionnaire’s effectiveness, however, the headline still strikes me as ironic: “Test Helps You Predict Chances of Dying.”(1) It brings to mind the lines of Emily Dickinson, “Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me.”  We don’t need a test, of course, to tell us our chances of dying.

British statesman and avowed atheist Roy Hattersley writes in the Guardian of an experience at a funeral. It was a funeral, he said, which almost converted him to the belief that funeral services—of which he has disapproved for years—ought to be encouraged. His conclusion was forged as he sang the hymns and studied the proclamations of a crowd that seemed sincere: “[T]he church is so much better at staging last farewells than non-believers could ever be.”(2) He continues, “‘Death where is thy sting, grave where is thy victory?’ are stupid questions. But even those of us who do not expect salvation find a note of triumph in the burial service. There could be a godless thanksgiving for and celebration of the life of [whomever]. The music might be much the same. But it would not have the uplifting effect without the magnificent, meaningless, words.”

I had never been to a funeral until I was the seminary intern for a small rural church in Oklahoma. I had attended a visitation once and a few memorial services years earlier, but I had never watched a family move from planning to wake to service to burial, until I assisted more families through the entire funeral process than seemed possible for the small congregation. The number of deaths seemed to me grossly disproportionate to the number births in the church that year.

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The story of the twelve Thai boys in the cave, which gripped the attention and held the breath of the world for over a fortnight, has, thankfully, ended happily. One is quite aware that this real-life story, as all such poignant stories, should be taken in its own unicity and integrity. Real stories are not mere stories to be insensitively and carelessly “used” for analogical or allegorical purposes—an infraction of which (we) preachers are often guilty.

And yet, irresistibly, the 18-day saga of the “Dingy Dozen” is an almost-perfect dramatic enactment of the gospel story. In the first place, we have the twelve members of the “Wild Boars” football team, who went on a “wild bore” into the cave. These boys were no ordinary boys. They were all ably-gifted with fine genes, ample talent, and bright futures. But through a mixture of daredevilry and delinquency, chance and circumstance, they ended up where they ended up, precariously perched on a ledge, helpless and hopeless—“between a rock and a hard place” and “between the devil and the deep blue sea” rolled into one!

This ordeal and predicament of “The Twelve” is a snapshot of the human condition, as diagnosed by the Bible. “Twelve Tribes” or “Twelve Apostles” created good and glorious, but invariably “foolish, disobedient, led astray, enslaved,” find their way into lostness.(1) They got there on their own, but they can no longer get out on their own. No way forward. No way back. No light. No food. No air. No help. No hope:

“Out of the depths I cry out to you, O LORD!”(2)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The (Other) Allegory of the Cave →

One is never more aware of pluralism’s sticky presence then when sitting in a round table discussion about faith. Like a wad of well-chewed gum that has been stepped in again and again, the strings of religious thought and life are many, and often messy, sticking to our souls at times unbeknownst and unannounced. In the end, the sticky web is not only hard to identify for what it once was, but everyone feels polluted by it. On a bad day, this is my hopeless image of the pluralistic world around me. In this picture, pluralism is far more than a mere plurality of options, but an intricate, gooey mesh of amalgamating outlooks, ideas, objectives, and practices—through which all shoes must step.

Our current cultural landscape takes on both kinds of pluralism in this sense—plurality and relativism. There are more options and isms at our reach than we know what to do with. There is also the sense that all of these options are relative, easily mingled, and chosen by personal preference. For the Christian who confesses one choice that is not relative, chosen not because it is preferred but because it is true, the oddity is obvious. The unpopular stance leaves the pluralist convinced of Christian arrogance and the Christian wondering if he must resign himself to a life of cultural naysaying. And while the former will likely hold onto the conviction of Christianity’s arrogance, perhaps for the later there is another option. The Christian indeed lives in a world where the challenge of pluralism is great because the scope of pluralism is extraordinary. Yet while this may lend itself to gloomy pictures of being stuck in horrific webs of chewing gum, the reality of this pluralistic context can also carry with it images of opportunity and hope.

As it did for Paul who used the signs of all religions to specifically encounter one, pluralism can present an occasion for believers to engage a world that is “very religious in every way.”(1)  It can bring out questions that may not otherwise have been asked, both for ourselves and others—Is Buddhism really claiming anything different than Christianity? Is this particular belief cultural whim or sustainable hope?—thus serving as a catalyst for examination and discovery. Our pluralistic context can also offer a chance to live without the social power to which Christians have grown accustomed, without the cultural control, or the comfortable existence that so often becomes the faith’s downfall. As one author notes: “[M]ulticulturalism and extensive religious plurality can offer an opportunity for Christians to shed the baggage of cultural dominance that has often impeded or distorted the spread of the gospel. It may be, indeed, that the decline of Christian hegemony can offer the Church the occasion to adopt a new and more effective stance of humble service toward societies it no longer controls.”(2)

Continue reading Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Pluralism as Privilege →

On a typical sunny day in my neighborhood, folks flock to the beach. This beautiful public park with nature trails and a sandy shoreline meanders alongside Puget Sound. Children play in the sand, families bring picnics, people walk, bike, and skateboard, and the dogs of the city frolic in the nearby dog park.

I often wander along this beach as a regular part of my walking route. I suspect that similar scenes of bucolic life are played out all over the world in communities just like the one I live in, homogeneous groups gathering to enjoy all of nature’s bounty together. Seemingly without care, life rolls along gently with abundance and blessing.

The film No Country for Old Men presents scenes radically different from the ones I see at my neighborhood beach. Random, cruel, and senseless violence committed against innocent persons serves as the bleak backdrop of a nihilistic world in which cruelty and evil conquer goodness. There are no bucolic landscapes to enjoy. The ravages of savagery fill scene after scene. While not based on actual events, the violence depicted in the film could accurately capture the climate in many cities around the world, where the innocent and the guilty alike are gunned down in cold blood for no reason. Theirs is a world where the will to power is the only rule of law.

This film, unlike any other, made me wonder about the reach of the good news of the gospel that Christians proclaim. In other words, is the good news only good for those who dwell on the beach, in bucolic landscapes of comfort and joy with others just like themselves? Or is it something intended to go beyond a close circle of friends? Is the gospel reaching beyond those who are like me, and reaching out to those who are different from me? Does the gospel make a difference in a world like the one depicted in this harrowing film? For if the gospel isn’t making a difference in places where violence and suffering are a way of life, is it making a difference at all?

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“I don’t believe in God,” begins Julian Barnes in his book Nothing to Be Frightened Of, “but I miss him.” Though he admits he never had any faith to lose (a “happy atheist” as an Oxford student, Barnes now considers himself an agnostic), he still finds himself dreading the gradual ebbing of Christianity. He misses the sense of purpose that the Christian narrative affords, the sense of wonder and belief that haunts Christian art and architecture.

“I miss the God that inspired Italian painting and French stained glass, German music and English chapter houses, and those tumbledown heaps of stone on Celtic headlands which were once symbolic beacons in the darkness and the storm.” Such are the thoughts that surface as Barnes attempts to confront his fears of death and dying in this memoir. He believes Christianity to be a foolish lie, but insists, “[I]t was a beautiful lie.”(1)

There is certainly room for beauty in the description the apostle Paul gave of the gospel. Like Julian, Paul saw its foolishness clearly as well: “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe” (1 Corinthians 1:21). He also noted the weakness inherent in the Christian proclamation. At the heart of the Christian religion is one who “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness, and being found in human form” (Philippians 2:7). On this much Paul and Julian agree: however beautiful, foolishness and weakness imbibe the Christian story.

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I have often referenced the quote by the talk-show host Larry King, in his response to a particular question:  “If you could select any one person across all of history to interview, who would it be?”  Mr. King’s answer was that he would like to interview Jesus Christ. When the questioner followed with, “And what would you like to ask him?” King replied, “I would like to ask him if he was indeed virgin-born. The answer to that question would define history for me.” The first time I requested permission through a common friend to use this quote of his, he sent word saying, “And tell him I was not being facetious.” I believe him. Who would not like to interview Jesus Christ?

It is not possible to live without asking questions—and what better source for the answers than the one who claimed to be the way, the truth, and the life? If one could only be face to face with him from whom life comes, how delightful would be those moments when the most confounding questions of life are raised. Though unaware that they were walking with the risen Christ, the men who walked on the Emmaus Road said that their hearts burned within them as he opened up the past, the present, and the future. When Jesus broke the bread at the table with them, they realized who he was and a light for all of history had been turned on.

In the same way, it may be that when the time comes to sit across the table from the Lord of history, the answer to the skeptic and the believer will be more visible than it will be in need of utterance.  Ironically, this clue came to me in the form of a question inscribed on a painting I saw in a pastor’s office in Puerto Rico. Just before we went into the sanctuary, my eyes caught a glimpse of it directly in front of his desk. It was the picture of a little girl holding the hand of Jesus, even as he tenderly gazed at her.  She was clasping his hand as she asked him, “Que paso con tus manos?”—”What happened to your hands?”  That question, I suspect, contains the answer to both the doubt of the skeptic and the duplicity of the believer.

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The telling and beholding of stories bears a certain responsibility.  There is a temptation in narrating histories, biographies, and even autobiographies, to reduce the story to one theory or setting, to one secret or encounter that unlocks the mystery of a life.  We want to solve the puzzle that is Emily Dickinson, resolve the curiosities of Napoleon, and know the essential meaning behind our own winding roads.  But while the mode of storytelling may require certain parameters, life is not usually so neatly containable.

The late Roger Lundin, himself a biographer, suggests the necessity of awe in any telling of human story—a task in which we are all, on some level, engaged. “To be able to recognize the competing claims and the intricate complexity of human motivation is a gift and a necessity for writing a good biography, just as it is a necessity for understanding fairly and creatively and justly another human life.”(1) The task of putting a life into words is surely larger than we often admit. How will you come to describe a deceased loved one to children who have never met him? How will you come to articulate the lives of family members, historical figures, biblical characters, and neighbors? The charge is all around us, vying for a sense of awe.

I have always appreciated the terminology employed by Dietrich Bonhoeffer as he described life to his friend. He spoke in musical terms, and in so doing ushered in the idea that life cannot be reduced to a note or a monotone. The cantus firmus, which means “fixed song,” is a pre-existing melody that forms the basis of a polyphonic composition. Though the song introduces twists in pitch and style, counterpoint and refrain, the cantus firmus is the enduring melody not always in the forefront, but always playing somewhere within the composition. For Dietrich Bonhoeffer, life was a great work of sounds and symphonic directions, and the cantus firmus was the essence, the soul of the concerto.

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For most of us, the act of remembering or revisiting a memory takes us back into the distant past. We remember people, events, cherished locales and details from days long gone. Of course, not all memories are pleasant, and traveling toward the distant past can also resemble something more like a nightmare than a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Nevertheless, even if we have but a few, all of us have cherished memories or times we periodically revisit in daydreams and remembrances.

Nostalgia is one such way of revisiting these times. It can be defined as that bittersweet yearning for things in the past. The hunger it creates in us to return to another time and place lures us away from living in the realities of the present. Nostalgia wears a shade of rose-colored glasses as it envisions days that were always sweeter, richer, and better than the present day. In general, as Frederick Buechner has said, nostalgia takes us “on an excursion from the living present back into the dead past…” or else it summons “the dead past back into the living present.”(1) In either case, nostalgic remembering removes us from the present and tempts us to dwell in the unlivable past. Without finding ways to remember forward—to bring the past as the good, the bad, and the ugly into the present in a way that informs who we are and how we will live here and now—all that we are left with is nostalgia.

It is far from a sense of nostalgia that drives the writer of Psalm 78. Instead, the psalmist recalls the history of Israel as a means of remembering forward, bringing the full reality of the past into a place of honest remembrance not just for the present generation, but for the sake of generations to come. The psalmist exhorts the people of God to listen and incline their ears to the stories of the Exodus, the wilderness wanderings, and the entry into the Promised Land. “We will not conceal them from their children, but tell to the generation to come the praises of the Lord, and his strength and his wondrous works that he has done… That the generation to come might know, even the children yet to be born, that they may arise and tell them to their children, that they should put their confidence in God, and not forget the works of God, but keep the commandments.”

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