Nearly three weeks ago, my wife's uncle, the only surviving member of her parents' generation, died after a brief--he was gone barely a month after he received the diagnosis--battle with pancreatic cancer.  Athough Carol was there, she unfortunately missed his last breath, coming as it did around 1:30 in the morning.  But Ralph had a good life and we were thankful that at 85 he had done everything he had ever wanted to do, even, after living over fifty years in San Antonio, Texas, moving his wife and himself to Grand Junction, Colorado a little over a year before.
     More broadly speaking, Ralph's passing, as should every human passing, gives us pause at the enormity and inevitability of death.  No one can avoid it.  It also serves to remind us, again, of the powerful wisdom expressed in Ecclesiastes 12:13 that, "above all else, fear God and keep his commandments."
     Though we can define the fear of God in a number of ways (the Hebrew word being used here is also translated in other passages as "reverence"), what we want to take away most from this is the fact of God and the moral structure which he implanted in the universe.  If God did not create the world with a moral structure--commandments and moral order--the world simply could not exist, for even to exist is a moral condition.
     Moreover, God's morality is one with his love.  God loves us, God endows us with morality and moral purpose.  Ralph died in God's love, a love of crystal clear moral vision, a vision that, rooted as it is in God, holds all things together with meaning, substance, and purpose.
     We miss you, Ralph, but we are grateful that you died in the compass of the beatific moral vision.