CATTLE

Life is not safe.  It is always fraught with perils.  At lovely, quiet pastoral moments, terrifying situations can simply creep up on you.  It happened to our big puppy, Nickleby and me today.  There is an old cattle track along Loch Corrib, here near Ballycurrin.  I’ve walked that track several times.  After half a mile or so, there is a gate.  Beyond the gate there is a big pasture, divided by a hedgerow and some big trees.  On the lakeside of that hedgerow and trees, there is a lovely hill overlooking the lake.  Sometimes, there is a small herd of cattle, mostly bullocks (which is what the Irish call castrated male cattle) grazing near the shore.  If we see the cattle, we generally turn back, but if they are in the field to the other side of the trees, I’ve usually gone on to climb the hill.  Today, we came to that gate and saw the cattle on the other side of the hedgerow, so we untied the gate and headed through the field and up the hill.

There was a gentle breeze blowing and from the top of the hill you can see miles of the lake spread out below.  It’s a beautiful spot.  After we stood there for a while, I saw a small peninsula a quarter mile on past the hill and decided that we would walk to the end of the peninsula before turning back for home.  And so we headed down the hill and across another bit of the field.

We found a lovely little glade at the end of the peninsula, lined with trees, surrounded on three sides by water and we sat on a rock and gazed at the quiet beauty of Loch Corrib which never fails to move me.  Then we turned and headed for home.

As we came off the peninsula, I saw in the distance, a bullock coming over the next hill.  It seems there wasn’t a fence through that hedgerow as I had thought and as we got to the other end of it, the other field simply opened into the one we were in.  I tried to get Nick to hurry across the fifty yards or so of broken field before we could head back along the lake shore.  But that bullock was heading straight towards us.  As we started to run, another and then another of those cattle came down the hill.  They were clearly curious about Nick, as Newfoundlands or other big dogs are seldom seen in this part of Ireland and certainly not by this particular herd of cattle.  As more and more cows came over the hill, we started to run for it.  They began to run for us.

Maybe Nick could have gotten away if he had run, but I had snapped the leash on him to keep him away from the cattle.  I kept him close to keep him from being trampled.  But now, here we were pinned against the shoreline with nowhere to run and a herd of, now twenty bullocks heading towards us.  As they closed in, there was nowhere to go but to jump onto some rocks just off shore.  And so we found ourselves, me sitting on a large rock, three feet from the shore, with Nick at my feet.  The entire herd came to the edge of the water, extending their big noses to sniff the dog.  He went nose to nose with several off them.  We were surrounded.  Twenty bullocks trying to get their noses close to the dog, grunting and snuffling, just a couple of feet away.  The tumble of rocks at the edge of the water upon which they wouldn’t step was the only barrier between us.

I couldn’t think of a thing to do in the situation.  We were marooned on a two-foot long rock, three feet from shore with twenty noses stretching towards us.  There was no place to run to where they couldn’t easily run us down.

It was one of those rare moments in my life when I had no idea of any kind what to do.  I was at a total loss.  So we sat there.  I figured, in time, the herd would drift away.  Twenty minutes past and, sure enough, half of the herd wandered off a few dozen feet and started chewing more grass.  But there was this absolutely stubborn core of ten or so that would not budge or lose interest, and so there we sat.

Finally, in frustration, remembering my boyhood among the cows of New Jersey (that’s not a joke) I decided to scare them away.  I banged my walking stick of the rocks, shouting and making menacing, grunting sounds.  Many of the cows began to back away.  Heartened, I stepped off of my sanctuary rock, moved to the shore and banged and grunted some more.  While Irish bullocks are certainly not as easily intimidated as New Jersey dairy cows, I seemed to be making some rough progress when, pushing its way through from the back of our little herd came the actual bull.  He was huge.  His chest was far wider than the boulder that I had been standing on.  He had a brass ring through his nose.  The look in his eye was one of the scariest things I have ever seen.  I jumped back to the safety of my rock and pulled the dog close to me.  The bull came right to the waters edge and sniffed the dog—nose to nose.  I was terrified that the bull would keep coming and splash through our little three-foot moat of protection, but he, like the bullocks, stopped at the water’s edge.

I have since learned that bulls allowed to run with herds of cattle are responsible for many deaths each year in Ireland.  The practice of letting them in with the herd is frowned upon but commonplace.  My menacing behavior now, it seemed clear, had aroused his protective instincts.  He certainly seemed to regard us as a threat.

And so we sat again, marooned three feet from shore, with what seemed like a thousand pounds of pure killer sticking his snuffling nose to within a few inches of us.  That nose was almost as wide as Nick’s head (and Nick is no small dog). Once again, no good option seemed to present itself.  This bull didn’t seem even slightly inclined to lose interest in us.  I could almost have cried.

The turning point in this tale was a little accident.  In trying to get comfortable on my rocky perch, I slipped.  My foot, shoe and all, went plunging into the water.  Now, with a shoe already ruined, I plunged the other one into the lake as well.  I realized that we could possibly wade our way to safety.  Of course the field stretched a good half-mile along the lake.  That’s a long wade over rough rocks in thigh deep water, but there seemed no alternative.  I pulled the dog in with me and dragged him through the rocky water along the shore.  The bull and his entire entourage followed every step of the way.  Nickleby was having a lot of trouble.  The water was too deep for him to walk.  He still refuses (even though Newfoundland’s are supposed to be skilled water dogs) to swim.  So I just dragged him on his leash through the water.  He swam a little and clamored over a lot of rocks.  Eventually, the collar around his neck stretched enough in the water that he pulled his head right out of it.

He ran onto the shore just feet in front of the following bull.  I yelled desperately for him to come back, but I was standing in four feet of water and he seemed more ready to face the bull.  He’s never been good about coming when called and I called with every tone of voice I could think off, to no avail.  That is, until the bull charged at him and he leapt into the water and tried to climb into my arms.  I put the collar back on and we continued our arduous rocky trek.  Luckily, the ground along the lake got rockier still as we travelled down the shoreline.  The herd began to have trouble walking on the big stones.  Eventually, even the bull stopped following.  We gradually worked our way into the shallows and onto the shore, moving as fast as we could. 

That rocky ground only extended for about a hundred feet and the cattle only had to go around it and we would have been just as stranded on the other side, running to the gate that was two dozen yards from the safety of the lake.  But, thank God, people are right about cows—they’re just not that smart.  As we reached the far side of the rocky stretch, they just stood and watched us as we fled towards the gate.  Had that bull figured out that he only had to walk a few extra yards to get around the rocky area, we would have been in real trouble.  But there he stood, pawing the ground (I’ve since read that that is not a good sign) in frustration at our escape.  Celebrating the narrow (and rare) victory of brains over brawn, we ran to the gate.

Nick was cut on the rocks.  I lost a good pair of shoes and much of my self-respect.  But we sat down in the next field in exhaustion and relief.  There were hugs all around.  I gave Nick the rest of a pocketful of treats.  We vowed never to go into strange fields again without a little more investigation.  Our education in the ways of the Irish (and their animals) continues.

Deep Ruminations

I envisioned this blog as being actively filled with reflections on life here in Ireland.  Somewhere along the way of our transition to life here, I lost the thread.  I've been so intent on being active and engaged with this place that I love.  I haven't felt like reflecting, only doing, seeing, experiencing.  But as autumn has deepened, the pace has slowed, it gets dark early and the weather leaves many days for nothing but thinking and maybe writing.

Maureen and I have had this ongoing conversation almost every day since the first week.  We love it here.  It's beautiful.  The people are lovely and we feel comfortable in this culture.  And so we endlessly discuss our future and our options.  Could we move here?  Do we want to go back?  What do we most miss?  What are the pros and cons?  Could we divide our lives?  We go back and forth.

The big issue, of course, is all of the people that we love.  There' my wonderful daughter and Maureen's extraordinary son,  our beautiful passel of grandkids that we love so deeply, our many dear, dear friends that we could never live without, even the lovely home that we've made out of the old parsonage in Gorham.  Neither of us could ultimately walk away from the people that make us so fortunate and so blessed.  Every conversation and every weighing of our options seems to come down to that simple fact.

Of course, in the background of our thinking is always the even bigger questions that are harder to articulate and have no real connection to the where of our lives, but they lurk in the background of every discussion.  What do we really want to do with the rest of our days?  Is it really time to just relax and enjoy the slow flow of rather self-indulgent weeks or is there another act to our lives-- some further purpose to work toward or to strive for?  Can this time of life really be just a slow winding down toward the inevitable end?  Can we simply be content to enjoy ourselves on one long last, for us, permanent vacation?  Does life still have meaning without some clear purpose or direction?  Or can enjoying it to the full be its purpose?  The whole issue of where we live is just really a distraction from that deeper question.  Are we mostly finished with the work, the struggle, the need to achieve something, to fight for something; or is there something more that we need to do, not just for us but for something deeper and bigger?  

While I have been hiking, climbing mountains and exploring, Maureen has blossomed in a whole new direction that has been surprising.  She signed up for a poetry workshop in Galway with a terrific poet and wonderful man, named Kevin Higgins.  While she has long dabbled at poetry (often writing startlingly beautiful things), she has never had much confidence or motivation.  Kevin has managed to set her on fire.  She's written extraordinary things and was asked to read her work at a reading at the Galway public library (sharing the podium with amazing published poets from several countries).  She's been an inspiration.  She's used our time here to work and explore this new direction even in her older age.  I think she may have found a whole new vocation at age seventy.  I'm jealous.

But of course, this week has changed every conversation.  It's been almost a week since the election.  We've thought of little else.  Obviously, like everyone, we were shocked and, like most people that we know (and everyone here) horrified.  I won't go into my analysis of why this travesty took place or even what it signifies, but it was a life changing moment that deepens and complicates all of our questions.

I've spent my life as a minister, preacher and writer, working toward only one thing; trying to inspire a little more love, graciousness and compassion in my little world.  I never cared much about the institution of the church or getting people to believe stuff that they were supposed to believe.  Instead, I just want to inspire deeper and richer and more loving lives.  And now, we come to a moment where love, graciousness and compassion have been eclipsed by forces of ugliness, cruelty, bigotry, and hatred.  Whatever else we believe about this election, it is hard to escape the conclusion that love and inclusion were the losers.  Whatever impact I might have imagined that my life's work had achieved founders in the overwhelming tides that have come upon us.

And so our dilemma deepens.  It would feel so much better to sit out the remainder of our days in a neutral country where we don't feel the raw and ugly polarization that is the current American disease.  People are kinder to one another here and they are kinder even to the immigrants who are actually more plentiful here.  It would be easy to pretend right now that we are not really Americans and simply embrace this lovely and quirky little island and make a new home.

But somehow, that just feels too easy, even for a couple of old retirees.  I can't imagine that my presence in America would make any significant difference.  I no longer have a pulpit or some captive audience to work with.  I have no role to play that gives me a voice or any real influence on anyone.  But shouldn't we try nonetheless?  Shouldn't we just be there even if it is to just hold the hand of one Latino, or Muslim, or gay or lesbian friend?  Shouldn't we find some way to continue to inspire hope and love and light in this dark time?  Shouldn't we at least help our little grand children to grow up with a little more love or spirit in their lives?  Shouldn't we, at least, throw a big Christmas party once a year and remind everyone we know that love abounds?

Well, feel free to comment on our struggles and deep thoughts, and I'll try to get back to enjoying Ireland, in this moment, at least.  Love to all who read this.

So Now The Weather

We've been here for well over three weeks now and I have been terrible about keeping up with this blog.  Some of that is because most things about life here have already become so normal and ordinary.  We walk, we read, we eat and drink in pubs, we meet a few people here and there and mostly we "figure things out."  There are a million little cultural differences that require investigation, questions, and trial and error to ascertain how things are done here.  Most of them are too petty to dwell on (although, right now, laundry methods are looming large in this regard).

However, I have said nary a word about the biggest adjustment of all, the weather.  In three weeks, there has not been one single day without some period of rain.  This is a particularly sticky problem because today is the first day when I have felt able to do laundry.  Well, to be honest, there was no judgment to be made because my limited supply of clean underwear officially ran out this morning (I know that means that either I have double used or brought an impressive supply and it's actually a little of both).  The problem is that we have no dryer.  We are told that not very many people do have them here,  but, HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE, when it rains every day.

When I got out of bed today, the skies were clear and the sun was shining.  Since that has never before been the case in the morning here, I thought that, "thank God" today was the day for laundry.  I rushed downstairs and loaded the washer.  While I may have rushed, the washer definitely doesn't.  One small load of wash required over three hours to complete its cycle.  The washer seems to have this sort of languid pace, where it turns a few turns clockwise and spritzes a little water on the clothes, comes to a complete stop, rests, and then turns a few turns in the opposite direction.  The rest periods throughout the cycle are infuriating.  Nothing at all happens, and then just when you are convinced that the things is broken, defective, or just stupid, it springs back to life and runs for a while.  This all goes on interminably.  It was twenty minutes before I was even convinced that the clothes had all gotten wet.

During the three hours of slow motion washing, the skies grew cloudy, then it drizzled, then it poured, then the sun came out, then it drizzled, then it poured, then a huge wind blew, then it grew calm, then the sun came out, then it grew cloudy, then it poured, then it cleared, and on and on it has gone.  How is clothes-drying ever going to be possible.

But todays weather pattern is not unusual in the west of Ireland, in fact, a weather change every fifteen minutes IS the weather pattern in the west of Ireland.  They say that the weather in Maine is changeable, but we in Maine have no idea what changeable means.  Every day here has sunshine (usually brief), but every single day also has rain and wind and clouds and mist and, God knows, what else.  Temperatures vary with the sun, and so short sleeves, long sleeves, parkas, sweaters, shorts, and slickers, may each be necessary in one single day.  This is the biggest adjustment that we've had to make.

Locals keep telling us that we'll hate the winter here because it rains "practically" every day.  We assure them that we a ready for it, but the conversations are a bit surreal coming in the midst of a month of September when IT HAS RAINED EVERY SINGLE DAY.

Anyway, I've just hung out my first load of wash.  There is another one languidly going through the endless washing cycle in the machine.  The rains will return no doubt before long.  I am not hopeful of any drying happening at all.  The neighbor says that we can hang the cloth inside if we need to.  She has pointed out a contraption leaning against one of the walls.  We've been looking at it for weeks, having no idea what it could possibly be.  It seems it is a drying rack.  So no doubt our living room will tonight become a drying room for dripping laundry that, in this damp place, might dry somewhere around Halloween.  It's alright, my underwear will make a nice decorative touch.

What Now?

Eureka!  Car insurance is in place.  Fidelma the insurance broker is my hero. The car is purchased and sitting in front of our house.  The rental car is returned without incident.  We are now the proud owners of a 2007 Nissan Note named Gogarty.  The last of our practical settling-in details is complete.  

And so on this auspicious night, Maureen and I sat in our living room, in front of a turf fire, alone after the departure of friends Hannah and Rainen, after a lovely lunch with dear Patrick and Anne Towers, who helped us with the exchange of cars.  We relaxed.  We sighed.  We sat in silence.  And then we both realized that now the whole thing really begins.  Maureen said, "Are we nuts?"  I said, "What the hell do we do now?"

There is this slightly terrifying dimension to just picking up and trying life on a new continent.  In some genuine sense, we are more alone here than we have ever felt.  We already miss all of the people who are the almost daily touchstones of our lives.  This place is lovely.  We both enjoy the culture.  But now we have to figure out what to do with the expanse of time that I have filled for years with work and that we have both filled with family and friends and theatre and all of the familiar activities of Maine.  Now, suddenly this retirement abroad begins in earnest and we have to do the work of creating new routines and a new way of life.  This is a wonderful opportunity, but right now it is just disorientingly wide open before us.  We've worked so hard to make this new life happen and now we have to find out how to live it.

And so we are early to bed.  Tomorrow will be a genuinely new thing.  "What the hell do we do now?"

Frustrations

Some of the boundaries between our countries and cultures are more impenetrable than others.  Most of them seem to have to do with cars.  First there is the absurdity of different counties not being able to agree on which side of the road we should be driving on.  Cars have been around for a hundred years and different countries stubbornly stick with their own customs.  However, I can get used to driving on the left, in fact, I rather enjoy the challenge.  But automobile insurance seems to be a boundary that just can't be crossed.  We've been here a week and a half now and during all of that time we've been attempting to get insured so that we can begin driving the car that we've already mostly purchased (the purchase can't be finalized until we have Irish insurance).  I've made more phone calls and spent more time in the office of Fidelma, our lovely local insurance broker than I've spent doing any other thing since we arrived, and the miracle of insurance nirvana has not yet happened.  There is always one more phone call or one more checking in with somebody that has to happen and that has to be waited for.  Fidelma is now on first name terms with Darcy, who is our insurance broker in Gorham, in spite of the fact that due to the time difference and their lunch hour schedules, they can only speak during one hour each day.  Tomorrow, I am promised, is the golden day when insurance consummation will happen.  That is if Fidelma and Darcy don't spend their entire overlapping time talking about the weather on Nantucket where Fidelma desperately wants to live.  I can't bear to get my hopes up.

Old Stones

Since yesterday, we've been hosting Maureen's good young friend Hannah and her boyfriend Rainin.  Last night we were visited as well by Jeannie Williams, a friend a more than three decades from Massachusetts.  On a four day trip to Dublin on business, she took her day off to travel here from Dublin by bus.  We had a long night of talk, laughter, stories and Irish whiskey, first in our local pub with dinner and then gathered around the turf fire in our cottage.  Its lovely to be strangers exploring a different country and culture, but how extraordinary to be here with old friends from home.

We saw Jeanie off on another bus this morning and later walked down to the lighthouse on the lake.  The Ballycurrin lighthouse is the only inland lighthouse in Europe and dates from the 1700's.  It is long deserted, as it was lit once upon a time only by a large bonfire on its top.  The steps are stones projecting from the lighthouse on the outside.  We thought of climbing up but were faced with 40 mph winds off the lake.  The whole day has been dark and brooding amid the gale.  In this rather alarming weather we explored the castle next door (about thirty feet from our cottage).  The castle is a ruin from the thirteenth century.  It is partly broken down and covered with massive amounts of ivy.  We had long since discovered the entryway into the ground floor (two large rooms with amazing arched ceilings of a million stones).  But today we found another entry that leads to a winding old stone staircase rising two more stories up into the keep.  The second floor, growing everywhere with moss, ivy, and vines that seem as old as the castle itself, is a magical world that I wish I had been able play in as a child.  I can still envision hours of fantasies filled with knights, swords, armor, and, of course, damsels (in distress and otherwise).  There is a further winding stair that (rather dangerously) brings you out into the open air at the top of the ruin.

The whole place seems enchanted.  But the amazing thing is that this is no tourist site.  It is no protected preserve with roped off areas and explanatory plaques on the walls.  It is just a part of a hill next to a farmers field, here to be explored and wondered over by any passers-by and would be explorers with all the dangers of climbing over old and crumbling stones.  History is just part of the air that people breath here.  And so we get to stand alone on the crumbling battlements of the thirteenth century and view the Connemara mountains across the lough while facing forty mph gale winds.  If that doesn't make you feel fully alive, nothing can.

Tonight we go off to Dublin to celebrate Hannah's birthday with a fine meal.  Life is good.

New Beginnings

We've been in Ireland for a week, with at least fifty-one more to go, and we still have no idea what this year will be like.  That's because we've spent the time running about the country setting up a bank account, buying a car, getting European cellphones, buying necessaries for our new house, and generally figuring out how to live in a new and very different place.  And yet, along the way, we've still met a dozen new and charming people, had lunch with old friends, sat beside the wild shores of Lough Corrib, and walked country lanes picking and eating wild blackberries from the hedgerows under the suspicious gaze of cows and sheep.  In some strange way, the pace of life is slower and gentler even in the midst of working our way through our lengthy "to do" list.  Perhaps it's because of the way this year stretches out before us as this big empty time where nothing has to seem rushed.  While the people in the streets of Galway rush about as frantically as any crowd of Americans, just 30 minutes away up our country lane in Headford, the grazing sheep, the sleepy cows, the moody lake and the ancient countryside, create a different world all together that is somehow timeless.

There is a twelfth century castle ruin outside our front door.  It's half tumbled-down but you can still walk inside an see the remains of a medieval world.  We drive past the shell of a seventh century church and cemetery on our road home.  The grand manor house beside which our little cottage crouches as if in obeisance, embodies the world of the eighteenth century.  (It's beautiful to look at and to walk around in, but the poor woman who lives there can't keep up with it because it was designed to be run by a staff of at least ten.)  Even the stone wall that keeps in our neighbor's cattle has probably been there for centuries.  When I met the two farmers who own the herds outside our door (brothers from a family of twelve siblings), it even felt like they had been here for centuries.  The life that they lead seems more similar that of their great great grandparents than to ours (and yet, bizarrely, one brother is known as "Jimmy and the Cow" because that is his twitter handle).  Maybe the presence of so much that is so old makes time feel different, and maybe that is part of the appeal of this place.  One can rush about trying to accomplish one's long list of little tasks, but doing that in the midst of this world of ancient timelessness, changes how it feels.  And so I breathe a little deeper tonight as I rest beside the old stone of our ruined fortress knowing that none of the days business matters much at all in this ancient scheme of things.

Belief

I’ve been reading another smart and literate atheist arguing the absurdity of belief in God.  Someone asked me once if I was threatened by the recent self-assertiveness of atheists and, surprisingly, I could offer a confident “no.”  The fact is that I am heartened by the resurgence of atheism because I agree with almost all of it.  The kind of shallow, or at least, immature systems of belief that atheism attacks, should be debunked and I feel like I play my own part in debunking them from the pulpit most Sunday mornings.  But the arguments of the atheists never get to the real point or even address the heart of real faith.

Atheists generally make the mistake of assuming that belief in God is an assertion of fact or truth about the world.  They think of it as a claim of truth that can be examined, debated, argued and then affirmed or found wanting.  And of course it is always found wanting.  But of course, real faith is not some intellectual assertion about the world at all.  What one believes (in the modern sense of the word) has got very little to do with the heart of religion.  As a person of faith, I certainly don’t believe in some kind of a super “being” who lives beyond the stars and controls things here on earth.  I don’t believe in a vast white-bearded person with super-powers.  For that matter, I don’t believe in any virgin births, any water-top walking, any dead bodies escaping from graves or anybody or anything coming into the world riding on the clouds.  But I am still a person of faith nonetheless and even still a Christian.

The atheists make the same mistake of literalism that the fundamentalists make.  They seem unable to understand the metaphoric nature of myth or the role of scripture as a narrative that conveys meaning rather than a factual literalism.  It’s as if they are criticizing poetry for being bad science or condemning Shakespeare’s tragedies for being faulty history.  They regularly lampoon the ideas of God popular in third grade Sunday schools but never seem to wrestle with more abstract conceptions of God or more profound levels of religious understanding.   

But most importantly atheism doesn’t seem to understand that what you believe in your head is beside the point and not really the religious issue at all.  Once, when the English language was younger, the word belief was a pretty good synonym for faith.  It comes from the German word “belieben” which originally meant, “to give one’s heart to.”  Our way of using belief today is very different and this gets to the real distinction.   Faith is about what we choose to live for and live with.  It is about commitment. It is about what it is that we value in an ultimate way—what we give our heart to.  In that sense, of course, there is no such thing as atheism.  Everyone gives their life to something.  Everyone holds something to be of more value to them than anything else.  We all get up in the morning and choose to live one way rather than another because of what we feel is important and what we see as the purpose of our living.  In that sense, everyone has a god even if they would never choose to call it by that name.  We now use the word belief about what intellectual propositions we think to be true.  That sense of the word is not the heart of the issue of faith at all.  Tillich called faith one’s “ultimate concern.”  We all have something that concerns us in an ultimate way.  That is our faith, whether that ultimate thing to us is family, money, success, power, a flat-screen TV, or something that we call god.

Faith is more like falling in love than it is about some logical proposition.  When we truly fall in love, when we “give our heart” to someone, as we know, logic and good sense go out the window.  Some friend can tell us that the person we love is not right for us, or not good looking enough or too bossy, or doesn’t seem like a good match in any of a dozen ways, and it doesn’t matter.  It’s not really about the head—it’s about the heart. 

Being an atheist also has a component of heart.  There is something that feels almost heroic about it.  I know this because this “spirit” of atheism was handed down to me from my own father and I revere it.  It means having the strength to face the hard truth about the world, that we are on our own and death is total extinction.  Friedrich Niezsche once wrote to his sister, “If you want to have safety and security, then believe, but if you want to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.”  The heroic pursuit of truth no matter where it leads, no matter how cold and hard it makes the world seem is an end in itself.  It is noble.  But it is not without its component of faith.  Some abstract vision of truth is the ultimate value.  Some idea of the nobility of the human being standing alone and strong in the face of cold truth, and in the face of so much of humanity choosing to follow the easier, safer and wishful-thinking path of the general herd.  Nietzche sees himself as the beginning of the emergence of the “ubermensch,” reclaiming the power and nobility of human life that religion has childishly projected into the heavens.  To be a real atheist is to give ones self to this noble calling as a seeker of truth.  There is a genuine beauty in that.  It too represents the religious impulse.

At the center of the religious impulse is not a literal assertion of some kind of super-being.  It is, instead, the longing to give ones life to some larger vision, some quest, some purpose beyond just the littleness of our everyday routines.  For people of faith, it is the discovery, at the heart of human life of some connection with a larger reality of which we are a part.  Rather than the nobility of standing strong and alone, faith finds that there is relationship at the heart of life.  The one assertion of the New Testament that, I think, we can take quite literally, is the claim that “God is love.”  God is not some being that we can debate the existence of.  God is instead, this connection between each of us that holds us together.  When Paul Tillich defined God as “the ground of being,” he was saying that rather than God being some separate entity, God is the totality of what is. 

But the key religious claim here is that there is a totality.  Human life is not just a bunch of separate beings; the whole cosmos is not just a bunch of separate worlds spinning in empty space.  There is a connection.  At heart we are all one.  At heart everything is connected and those connections are more important and more central to life than anything else.  God as love is metaphorically like the force of gravity in physics.  We are all these separate beings, so idiosyncratic, so different in background, influences, history, and psychology.  It is so easy for us to simply spin in our separate orbits, with so many centrifugal forces pushing us farther and farther away from one another.  But there is this other force.  Physics calls gravity the “weak force” because compared to all of the others, it hardly seems important, but it is constant, omnipresent, relentless, and unyielding, pulling all of those separate things inexorably together. 

This is how God as love works among us, mysteriously but inexorably drawing us toward one another.  So many things come between us and divide us, but at the heart of each one of us there is this other force pulling us into oneness.  It is expressed in us in sympathy, compassion, empathy, and the need to love and care.  People of faith call that connection God.  We are those who have fallen in love with all of what we call creation and are convinced that our oneness with one another and even with all that is, is what we need to give our lives to.  How we make sense of this love affair in intellectual terms is just not the point.  Whether to call that connection God or something else is just not the point.  We are in love and no one can talk us out of it.  We have given our heart to a vision of reality that sees all of life as this web of connectedness.  No, we are not nobly and strongly standing alone for truth; we are hanging on to each other for dear life and believing that this love between us has something to do with the nature of being itself.  We are part of this grander, unfolding, reality that is in fact eternal and so we are eternal with it.

ENDURANCE

I hate to complain about things that we cannot change.  And I try, after all these years in Maine, not to be one of the weather whiners.  But seriously, it’s hard not to whine.  After the hardest winter in recent memory, when many of us are beyond fatigue with snow removal and temperatures that try the soul, there’s only one word for what this winter’s end requires of us—endurance.  We cannot know what the next few weeks may have in store for us, but if the experience of this season is any indication, it will be worse than we expect and I, at least, will ever so slightly resent it.  I might even whine.  That said, there is still nothing to be done but to endure it.

I’ve had a recent reacquaintance with Anton Chekov’s great play, “Uncle Vanya.”  The play ends with a long monologue by Sonya, a young woman short on prospects or hopes for any life better than the grim one that she is living.  She expresses beautifully a philosophy that seems to grow naturally out of the Russian way of life (a place with even longer, harder winters than ours).   She says this: “What can we do? We shall live through the long procession of days before us, and through the long evenings; we shall patiently bear the trials that fate imposes on us; we shall work for others without rest, both now and when we are old; and then we shall die, and we shall meet it humbly, and there, beyond the grave, we shall say that we have suffered and wept, that our life was bitter, and God will have pity on us.”

In other words what Sonya says in the parlance of a modern and rather vulgar bumper sticker is, “Life sucks and then we die.”  The Buddha said something very much like this 2600 years ago (and he didn’t even have much in the way of winter weather). 

Most of us don’t feel quite this pessimistic about the future even when it snows.  But the reality is that life presents us with both joys and trials.  There are moments of great pleasure and satisfaction, but there are also times of great pain, disappointment, and most of all, long, difficult struggles.  An important part of our spiritual lives is how we deal with those difficult times and challenges.  Many of us want our faith to make things better.  We want to know that God is on our side and helping us to overcome problems.  We want to feel that faith is a comfort that eases the pains by giving us meaning or reassurance or an answer to our prayers for relief.  We want to know that our God is going to do something to make things better.

But the fact is, God doesn’t seem to remove our griefs or mitigate our trials or take away the difficult stuff.  Sometimes our lives, like our winters, just become grim and cold.  There are bad things that we cannot change and that faith cannot clear out of our path.  In those times, the real gift of faith is simple, the strength to endure.  Sometimes, the only answer is to grit your teeth and tough it out.

A few years ago, when our dear friend, Deb Mathews was first undergoing treatment for cancer, she confessed to me that she just didn’t think she had the strength to go through what they were telling her that she had to go through.  I tried to tell her that she had much, much more strength available to her than she could even yet imagine.  I was sure that she possessed untapped wells of strength and endurance that she didn’t even know about yet.  I believed this because I believe that inner strength; a rock-hard steely core of strength, is available to all of us if we ask for it.  As many of you know, Deb eventually went through years of unbelievably difficult treatments before losing her battle with cancer.  While her body eventually gave out, her spirit never did.  She never reached any limit on her resolve to fight.  She never gave up or used up the strength that was given to her.  She endured.

Lent begins this week.  It symbolically represents the 40 longs years that the Israelites spent in the wilderness and the forty long days and nights of Jesus’ fast in a different wilderness.  It also represents to us the long days and nights that all of us are sometimes called to spend in our own inner wildernesses.  It represents all the long periods of pain or grief or worry or fear that beset every one of us from time to time.  Those are times when we just have to endure; when we have to trust that God’s spirit in us is a source of strength beyond anything that we can imagine.  Whatever life throws at us, we can endure.  Whatever challenge comes our way and threatens to undo us, we can endure.  However much life sometimes hurts, we can endure.

And now, if the weather forecast calls for more snow—let it come.  If this winter plunges us into minus 20 degree nights even unto May—let it come.  I can take it.