Have you seen "Cloud Atlas"?  A lengthy (almost three hours), but intensely fascinating movie that spreads its plots over many centuries, "Cloud Atlas" is a soulful and moving meditation on the power of truth and existential consequence.  At its center seems to be the contention that regardless of how little effect fighting for truth may seem to have, and regardless of whether the existing order accepts or accommodates it, people should not go to their grave without doing everything they can to promote and effect it.  Better that a person try and die for truth than to, out of fear that her efforts will not amount to anything, not try at all.  Truth is that important.
     As Jesus put it when he talked about the singular importance of the kingdom of God, the eternal order of truth he announced he had come to establish on earth, "The kingdom of God is like a merchant seeking fine pearls, and upon finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it" (Matthew 13:45-46).  If we have found truth, in this case, the truth of all eternity, Jesus is saying, we will be willing to give up everything we own to experience it--even if our lives, as many of them in the movie were, to borrow a phrase from the Britsh philosopher Thomas Hobbes, brutish and short.  The truth is that important.
     Indeed it is. Why live simply to die?  Why not live to proclaim a truth that will extend, as the movie depicts repeatedly, throughout countless generations (and even eternity) to come? After all, if truth were not worth doing, it would not be truth.

     Truth is that important.

     "I don't care (and I love it)" sings the band Icona Pop in an amusing and fast paced response to what I presume is a person with whom the two singers no longer wish to deal.  I heard this song at a wedding a few weeks ago, and was struck by its carefree look at resignation, rejection, and a life without shame.
     In truth, Icona Pop, whatever the state of their mind when they developed this song, captured words relevant to us all.  Yes, we ought to care about what is in our lives, but when things change in our lives, we can either care so much that we do not grow through the change; we can care so little that we slip into nihilism; or we can strike a middle ground and care enough, but not too much, lest we slip into a past that will never return.
     These are not revolutionary words:  any psychologist will likely share them as well.  Yet they reflect a deeper truth, one posited by many a religious leader, from Buddha to Jesus.  That is, we love that we don't care because we love that our lives have purpose, divinely wrought purpose beyond what they, in themselves, are.  We love that we don't care because we understand that, as Jesus remarked in Matthew 6, we are not to "worry about tomorrow because each day has enough troubles of its own."
     We love not caring because we love that, in the vast compass of a personal and infinite universe, there is care.

     A few weeks ago, I was talking with a group of self-identified atheists about the nature of reality.  If you've been paying any attention at all to my ruminations to this point, you have probably figured out that my philosophical and epistemological starting points are very different from, in fact, the polar opposite of people who would identify themselves in this way.  I do enjoy, however, talking with those of this ilk:  we always have stimulating conversations.
     Recently, one of these unbelieving friends, in talking about science's current inability to explain exactly how the Big Bang came to birth the universe (that is, although many may identify the Big Bang as the source of existence, they will admit that they still do not know how the Big Bang itself came to be), indicated that it is acceptable to say that, "I don't know."  In other words, we're trying to know, but we're not there yet.
     Fair enough.  There are many things a believer doesn't know, either.  None of us is omniscient.  And it's too facile to respond, "Well, God does know, and that's good enough for me," for that solves nothing:  we remain on square one.
     On the other hand, we know that we can know that we are here, and we know that we can know that we are looking for a reason as to why we are here.  This is simply the foundation and nature of human longing.
     The greater puzzle by far is that all of us, believer or not, must live by faith.  Not necessarily faith in a divine being, although it could be, but faith in that we understand that however we frame our world, we do so by faith.  How could we do otherwise?  We're finite.
     So maybe we can say that we don't know.  But in the end we must admit that we, whether we acknowledge it or not, believe we do.  We all have a starting point.

     Hanging on the wall of the Metropolitan Museum in New York is a painting by the French artist Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) called Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun.  It shows Orion, the mighty hunter of Greek mythology, the hunter who roamed the earth almost at will, slaying a number of fierce and formidable animals, now unfortunately blinded and looking for the sun, whose rays he believed would restore his sight.  He wanted to see again, to see another picture of the world over which he had once traveled so relentlessly.
     We are a bit like Orion, roaming the world, our five senses taking in and interpreting reality.  Yet although we have sight, we will not see everything; and though we have hearing, taste, and touch, we will not hear, taste, and touch everything, either.  But we are moving through the world, regardless.  Like Orion, we believe certain things about the world, and like Orion, we process the world.  We may not believe everything and we may not consciously process everything.  But we keep going anyway.
     We cannot do otherwise.  As the writer of Ecclesiastes observes (3:11), we are made to wander, to explore, to ponder, to search and seek out purpose and meaning.  But why would we look if we did not believe there was something to find?  And why would we, like Orion, think that we will find it in something that we ourselves think we have already explained?
     If we are to find a "more," there must be a "more" in which it can be found.

     Many decades ago, the late (Beatle) George Harrison asked, "What is life?"  Then, and now, this remains a very good question.
     If one is a believer in God, she might reply that life is a gift of God, one we are to handle with care and use for the glory of God.  If one is of another (even opposite) perspective, she may say, as did Paul Sartre (and countless others) that life just is and we are obligated and compelled to do the best we can with it.
     Regardless of one's perspective, however, we realize that as we did not have a choice to be, yet we are, we should make the most of it.
     Yet it seems that unless we see life as a gift from above, a creation of something greater than we, we still do not have a good answer as to why or what it is.  Simply saying that life "just is" is circular, as it is using itself to affirm and prove itself.  Its starting point is its ending point.  We can of course live without knowing why, but at the end of our days, we will still not know why we ever lived.  And then we will ask ourselves:  what was the point?
     To live, goes the reply, to enjoy, to adventure, to grow, to learn, to do our best with whatever cards we have been dealt.  Well enough, but can we honestly use these to give our lives meaning when we do not know why life or its meaning ever were in the first place?
     Put another way, can we agree that we must be more than a massive contradiction?

     Ah, summer.  Now that the solstice has come and the full "summer" moon not far behind it, those of us in the Northern Hemisphere can once more rejoice in the warmth and bounty that accompanies, indeed, seems to burst out of this timeless pattern of rotation, orbit, and diachronic splendor.  Of course, for those of us who live in the tropical areas of the world, or even those who live in the sunnier climes of Europe or North America, summer barely comes:  the air is temperate, if not warm all year around.  Nonetheless, as our ancient ancestors always did, we still tend to mark our lives by the movements of the sun, noting and engaging each passing phase of the seasons with various and different activities and remembrances.
     Curiously enough, however, if we look at the word solstice carefully, we see that it literally means, "the sun stands still" or "the sun doesn't move."  People who live in the Arctic know this firsthand:  for a couple of months during the summer, the sun never slips below the horizon.  For people who live further south, although the sun rises and sets every day and night, on some days, time does seem to stand still.  Everything seems to shine, grass, trees, flowers, lakes, streams; the sky seems endless, not a cloud in it; and the air seems as though it could not get any better, any better at all.  The world almost seems, at this moment, and no other, perfect.  It is as if heaven, in the broadest sense, has come upon earth, as if a spell, a wondrous and glorious spell has been cast:  peace and harmony and bliss flood the land.
     Yet however we experience summer, we can be sure of this:  somehow, some way, it always comes.  Despite its troubles, our planet remains remarkably predictable and resilient, a work of love and grace beyond our imagination.
     Rejoice!

     In an interesting book published last year, French scholar Guy Strouma suggest that following the end of antiquity (the fall of the Roman empire), people in Western Europe largely abandoned the idea of physical sacrifice (offering animals or grains to the gods) as a means to interact with the divine.  Henceforth, he concludes, people chose to come to God through the direct actions of their heart and spirits.
     Mr. Strouma makes a telling point.  Wouldn't we rather come to understand and enter into exchange with things beyond us directly, to use what is already in and around us to see what is beyond us?  After all, if we are made in the image of God, designed to interact with him directly, why would we not do so?  We do not need intermediaries to find what is already there.
     What we do need, however, is an inclination and reason to look.  It is ultimately a question of will, not, per Nietzsche, the will alone, but the will as an holistic and continuous integration of spirit, mind, and heart.
     So sacrifice remains, but in an entirely different and far more challenging way:  the sacrifice of a willing and open heart, the heart that is willing to look, the heart that is willing to see.  As the worm in Dr. Seuss's The Big Brag, responding to a rabbit and bear who had been boasting about, respectively, their sense of hearing and smell, said, "Well, boys, you can hear and smell well enough, but how far can you see?"

     In one part of the mysterious continent of Antarctica lies what scientists call deserts.  Not deserts as in Sahara, but deserts in that very little precipitation falls on them.  Buffeted by frigid katabatic winds that do not allow water to linger and fall, these stark landscapes subsist on virtually no moisture.  Their presence on one of the coldest places on earth represents one of the more intriguing anomalies of the created order, a paradox of form and structure that causes us, once more, to marvel at the remarkable and often eye popping diversity of divine imagination.
     In a photo I saw of these deserts recently, a group of scientists, their tiny persons dwarfed by the immense scale of the terrain, made their way across the barren land, their red and blue parkas looking woefully out of place amidst the overwhelming brown (no snow here) and brumal silence.  Who are we, I wondered, who are we, we who tread across such desolate lands, lands that do not care whether we are there or not, lands that do not seem to be anything other than empty bursts of ambiguity?
     Such thoughts led me to remember the time, many years ago, when I set out, alone and apart, trekking with my sixty pound pack, to explore part of Alaska's Brooks Range.  Who was I, I often pondered, wandering as I was, three hundred miles from another human being, moving through such immense wildness, caribou, Dall sheep, and grizzly bears my only companions?  Who am I to set foot into such a unworldly place?
     We are, it seems, a paradox:  rational creatures imbibing in what at times appears to be a wholly unfathomable world.  But what else would we do?  If life were not a paradox, if life did not seem a puzzle, why would we bother?  It is in the mystery that we find what is most complete and whole.

     "I want my work to act as a catalyst to help a visitor reclaim their belief in their own power . . . to [help them] want to believe in something outside of themselves."  So says artist Heather Hart, who is at the moment building a "roof" in the Olympic Sculpture Garden on the waterfront of Seattle.  Set on a hill overlooking the beginnings of Puget Sound, Ms. Hart's "roof," asphalt shingles on a frame that sits atop what appears to be half a house, captures the dilemma of human meaning:  although we have power to think and imagine nearly anything, we frequently realize that we do so in a universe whose power is beyond our capacity to grasp.  On the one hand, we have total power; on the other hand, we have none at all.
     In climbing the "roofs" of our lives, we also climb to the limits of what we think and, if we're fortunate, we break those limits apart.  We find things we never expected to see.  And that's Ms.Hart's point:  when we climb to our oracle, as she puts it, we find the truth--whatever it may be--that comes to, because it constitutes and reflects a compelling depth of power and insight we didn't see before, sustain, at least we hope, us.
     And we also find, I think, that this power becomes our weakness:  we see that although we come into this power through our individual questing, our own journey to the roof, we do so in the grip of a roof of contingencies beyond our human capacity and ken.  In the end, we're but little waifs in a vastly personal (for why else would we pursue purpose?) but often epistemologically confounding universe.
     Isn't life a marvel?

     Born again?  In the course of some traveling I did recently, I had occasion to discuss with people exactly what these words means.  Jesus uses the term in the Gospel of John (chapter three), as does William James, in his insightful studies of religion (which he presents in his Varieties of Religious Experiences).  Yet it was in the Seventies that the term "born again" received the most attention in the West.  Millions of Christians, led by then president Jimmy Carter, proclaimed, on the basis of an experience which they believe they had with God, that they were "born again," made new people by Jesus.
     Many of us may respond that it is not God who is the author of such experiences.  But how do we know?  Using psychology and corporate manipulation and hysteria to explain what someone believes to be a supernaturally induced experience only goes so far.  Eventually we must realize that, in truth, we have very little way to explain why thoroughly rational and generally well-adjusted people decide, usually on the basis of significant thought and reflection, that they have had an experience of the supernatural.  Why would they claim such things when they had every reason not to?
     Compounding the challenge is that people who claim to be "born again" remain, for the most part, the people they were before.  They do many of the same things that anyone else would do, enjoy many of what they had before.  However, and this is an important however, they affirm a very different starting point to all that they do.  Now everything begins with God.
     Yet what does this mean?  Only that although the world is the same and much that such people do remains the same, they have a new lens to see them.  Significantly, however, it is not a lens which they themselves made.
     So who did?  This is a question for all of us to ponder.  If someone had genuinely encountered the supernatural, could she really go on as if nothing had happened?

     We're all traveling, traveling through time, through space, through mind, through all the possibilities this existence bequeaths us.  And the wonder of it all is that we have a world before us, a world in which to do what we do, a world which found us, and not we it.

     But who found the world?

     "Come on, baby, light my fire . . . try to set the night on fire!"  Most of us are familiar with these lyrics, written by the late Jim Morrison of the Doors and, through countless replays on radios and concert halls across the world, indelibly engrained in our listening minds.  Their force and passion are hard to forget.
     When I read of the passing of Ray Manzarek, organist (and bassist for the band), I thought of these words, and reflected, once more, on the wonder of the artist muse, the poet creator, the kind of person who seems to possess an extraordinary ability to peer deeply into reality and find things most of us do not.  It's a rare gift, one that Morrison, for all his personal foibles, ignited time and time again in his music and the numerous poems he wrote.  For those of us who lived through his heyday, he seemed most amazing, the reincarnation of the Byronic hero in our time.
     Whatever we may think of Bryon and his fellow Romantics, and whatever we may think of Morrison today, we can, I think, nonetheless see them as windows into the marvel of human creativity and imagination.  Perhaps they broke boundaries some of us wish had not been broken; perhaps they went places some of us wish they had not gone; perhaps they communicated things some of us believe are better left alone; or perhaps all of the above.  But they were willing to take the journey.
     In singularly profound ways, we can see in these creators a mirror of who all of us are:  studies in magnificence and tragedy.  Magnificently gifted in so many ways, but tragically condemned to deal with inner angst that at times seems to defy reason.  Incredibly blessed and favored, enormously burdened with emptiness and sin:  flawed pictures of the image divine.
     This is one of the grand challenges of our time, really, to embrace the glory of our magnificence while bracing ourselves to confront and deal with our angst.  For we will never have one without the other.  That is who we are.
     Light your fire, whatever it may be, and remember that when you do, you are in fact affirming the truth of a ground exceeding all form and imagination.  And if you're ever in Paris, take time to visit Morrison's grave.  Thousands of others, the numerous memorials left at it attest, already have, all drawn to, whether they know it or not, the rich and remarkable wonder of a human who, though bent by angst, nonetheless expressed the fact, image, and gift and life giving capacities of God.
     Life is deep, but God is deeper still.

     Is freedom a burden?  In many ways, yes.  As the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov observes, although the freedom which God has given to human beings has led them into great and marvelous discoveries and things, it has also enabled them to venture into and experience existential conundrums and dilemmas that have brought them immense and untold pain.  Friedrich Nietzsche's understood this very well.  If we humans have absolute freedom, where, really, are we going?  Though we live without boundaries, we also live without a point.  What is freedom if everything is free?
     Freedom for freedom's sake is the great challenge of existence:  the marvel is great, but the angst of its emptiness will never end.  But why did it ever begin?
     Yes, the Inquisitor reminds us, be free.  Forget about God and be totally free.  Yet be aware of this:  ultimately, it's all absurdity.

     In its recent, albeit furtive, New York appearance, the Russian punk group Pussy Riot noted, among other things, that, in its deepest visions, it does not see itself so much a musical group as a group of artists who endeavor to take the world apart and reassemble and repackage it in new ways.
     Whatever else we may think of the group, and however much we may question their choice of venue (a Russian Orthodox cathedral) for their most public and well-known escapade, we can, in the same way that we have now come to acknowledge how Picasso and his cubism forced the world of art to enlarge its perceptions of what is possible, look at Pussy Riot's vision of art as protest (and vice versa) as a call to look harder at who we are and who we might be.  For many reasons, most of us see the world as a good but often fractured experience, one that we do well to frequently examine and take apart so as to put it back together in a more meaningful way.  As anyone who, like my brother often did in his younger years, has taken apart a piece of machinery just to put it back it together again, knows, the more we pick something apart, the more we can improve on it.
     As Jesus said many centuries ago, we cannot put new wine in an old wineskin, lest that wineskin rip apart.  We can, he added, only put new wine into new wineskins.  Sometimes we can't find something new unless we completely remove or divest ourselves from the old.
     It goes without saying, of course, that we venture into treacherous territory when we dismantle without having an alternative immediately in mind.  Many revolutions have demonstrated this all too well.  Nonetheless, Pussy Riot and all else aside, the point remains:  whether it's a person, idea, or God, we won't see it if we don't look.

     "Is this the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end?  Losing control or are you winning?  Is your life real or just pretend?"
     So asks the rock/heavy metal band Black Sabbath in one of the songs on its latest album, the first album it has released in many years.  Without trying to divine why the band is asking such questions, as much of their writing (like that of the Rolling Stones, a fact to which Mick Jagger has admitted repeatedly) is designed to titillate and does not always represent how they really feel, we can nonetheless consider what, if we ourselves are asking such questions for our lives, these words mean.
     As the band points out, so many people hover on the edge of sentient existence, constantly wondering what their lives are for, constantly stepping into life as a struggle, a relentless struggle against seemingly insuperable odds, a desperate effort to keep afloat.  As a result, just as many people try, in turn, to control as much of their lives as they can, to do whatever they can to "win," so that they can insist to themselves that their lives are not so much the "beginning of the end" but the "end of [a constantly emerging and ever glorious beginning."  People want their lives to be real, vastly and impenetrably and mysteriously (for in truth they are such things) real.  They do not wish to think that life is just an illusion, a pervasive maya, a figment of our churning imagination.
     Oddly enough, however, unless we stop trying to control life, it may well continue to be an illusion, not necessarily a physical one, but certainly resident in the depths of our minds.  We are finite; we will never control the caprice of the infinite, the unpredictability of a seemingly limitless and transcendent existence.  Never.  And if by some miracle we do, we will have only succeeded in surmounting edifices that we ourselves have built.  We will have solved nothing.
     Life means nothing, really, unless it is lived in the awareness that its beginning, and its end, are in fact rooted in a meaningfulness from which we should not run--for where would we run to?--but instead embrace, because it is only in this meaningfulness that we find the reason we can think we are real and are not, as the Smashing Pumpkins put it, running around like rats in a cage.
     In other words, how else can we suppose that we are "here" if there's nothing here anyway?

     "I believe," said many a revolutionary in the Western Sixties, "that we can make a better world.  I have faith in our ability to make things better than they are today."
     Though this is a composite quote, it captures, I think, the essence of what people, including me, were thinking at the time.  We believed that we could do better.  Why did we believe this?  We believed it because we had faith in ourselves.  We trusted ourselves to do what we believed we could do.
     Herein lies a crucial difference between belief and faith.  We may believe many things, but we may not necessarily trust them.  We may like to think about them, but we may not think, in our deepest heart, that we can trust them to do what they claim--or we think--they can say or do.
     This is precisely the dilemma that Jesus' disciples faced, as John records it, in the sixth chapter of John's gospel.  As many people, unclear, confused, frightened, or otherwise uncertain about what Jesus was saying, were abandoning him, Jesus turned to his disciples and asked them, "Will you go, too?"
     "To whom would we go, Lord?" Peter replied.  "You have words of eternal life."  In his uniquely succinct way, Peter captured the essence of the issue at hand.  Believing what Jesus said was easy:  even if he did not always seem clear, everyone agreed that he displayed extraordinary insight into God, the world, and how people were to live.  But to trust Jesus, to put one's life and heart into his hands, well, that was a different thing altogether.  It set people under the weight of eternity.
     And that makes all the difference.  We can believe whatever we want, but in the end, do we trust it--do we really trust it--to determine our eternity?

     To claim that "immortality is the natural feeling for us," writes Michael Wood in the London Review of Books, "not an error but a postponement or bracketing of indisputable knowledge, a feeling of uncertain duration but potentially lasting all but a lifetime, until bodily evidence makes it a form of idiocy rather than gaiety."
     In other words, to assert that immortality is an inevitable, maybe necessary human feeling is to make it foolishness.  On the one hand, Mr. Wood is correct:  just feeling something does not make it true; this side of death, we can't physically see immortality.  We may believe it exists, but we cannot empirically prove it.  Maybe it is foolishness.
     On the other hand, perhaps we need to frame immortality differently. If we had absolutely no sense of transcendence, then, yes, we could conclude that immortality is a myth.  Yet all of us experience, in some shape or form, transcendence.  We are creatures of transcendence; indeed, rejecting immortality is in itself a backhanded acknowledge-ment of our transcendence.  And if we are transcending creatures, so is the universe:  where else would this possibility come from?
     Then God must be true, too.  Materiality cannot create transcendence.  So ask yourself this:  would a God really give humans feelings for something that doesn't exist?
     Only immortality makes mortality genuinely real.

     "I have seen that every labor and every skill which is done," opines the writer of Ecclesiastes, " is the result of rivalry between a man and his neighbor.  This too is vanity and striving after wind."
     Leave it to Ecclesiastes to remind us of the limits of our certainties.  Beginning with Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations, numerous apologists for capitalism have stressed its ability to generate jobs, income, and social well being for the people and nations who participate in it.  Generally speaking, they are correct:  done fairly and wisely, capitalism has produced innumerable economic and social benefits for millions of people through history.
     If we look more closely at Ecclesiastes, however, we see words that, as we consider them today, point to a fundamental flaw in capitalism.  Foremost in capitalism is the idea that people are to pursue their own interests in the marketplace.  To be successful, people must develop their skills and self-interest in a way that, for better or worse, mitigates and even eliminates the skills and self-interest of others, others who are, to use Ecclesiastes' words, rivals.  Not everybody can win, and many people lose very badly.  And many people on the sidelines often fall between the cracks, forgotten by everyone, even the losers, victims of rivalries beyond their control.
     So yes, while capitalism has benefited humanity greatly, we should understand that at its heart it is pandering to and enabling one of the most tragic of human traits:  greed.  If we manage ourselves, that is, if we look out for each other along the way, we--as a human community--will survive.  If we do not, however, we fall apart, as Karl Marx pointed out, under the weight of our pursuits.
     Ecclesiastes reminds us that however certain we are of our certainties, we must understand that there are greater certainties still.  Finitude cannot see everything, and truth is always richer than we think.
     After all, there is God.

     "I enjoy confounding people," said Otto Muehl, the provocative German artist who passed away this week.  "That is my big idea.  I have nothing more."
     While we may disagree with the content of some of Muehl's art (much of his work is very controversial), we can nonetheless learn from his fundamental intention.  When we are confounded, when we are challenged in what we know or what we consider to be conventional and normal, or when we are asked to examine things we would rather not examine, we are forced to look at life from another angle, another perspective, one that we otherwise would not even entertain.  We broaden our horizon of human variation.
     Moreover, we come to realize how committed we are to our starting points.  If we are firm in our beliefs, we realize that in defending them we become stronger in them.  We embrace the challenge because we emerge more richly embedded in what we believe to be true.
     Sure, we may not like Muehl's work, but we cannot argue with the necessary challenge they present:  if our belief systems do not stand up to confounding, perhaps we need to rethink them.  Perhaps we need to ask ourselves whether they are really true.
     Thanks, Otto Muehl, for showing us how vital confounding is to the human imagination.  In your purpose, we see greater purpose still.
     Such a marvel is the human being.

     For those of us who remember All in the Family, that groundbreaking and highly amusing though often hard to watch look at racism in America, we heard over the weekend that Jean Stapleton, the long suffering and always striving to be compassionate and understanding wife in the series, passed away at age 90.  As I reflected, I thought of how Ms. Stapleton is most likely to be remembered:  the goofy and seemingly naïve wife to one of network television's first openly racist characters.  Although this is not necessarily the legacy most of us may want to leave when we pass out of this existence, unfortunately, given the twenty-four hour pundit machinery that inhabits Western media, it is the one to which Ms. Stapleton will probably be attached.
     It's a shame, really, for Ms. Stapleton was a fine actress in her own right, earning credentials and plaudits in many other arenas of drama.  Besides, not everyone could have pulled off the role she played for those many years All in the Family blazed its path through the American heartland.  To a person, the critics agree that she performed superbly.  But the character wasn't who Ms. Stapleton really was.
     By its very nature, however, acting tends to do this:  it asks people to become what they, in any other life, are not.  Yet isn't this the way most of us live?  Most of us tend to live as actors, presenting ourselves in various guises and forms, be it to make a point, sell a product, ingratiate ourselves, accomplish a goal, which we know in our hearts that we really are not.  Very few of us live with total transparency.
     The nature of acting also points to something else.  It tells us that, as Shakespeare once remarked, "the world is a stage," and that whatever we do or become, we are in the end simply actors playing a role.  We have had no choice as to how we came into this role, but we play it anyway, for we somehow know that it is what we are supposed to do.
     Play your role today, play the role you've been given.  Be thankful you're here, be thankful you have a place.  Be thankful that although you didn't create the stage, you nonetheless have one on which to play.
     Isn't it good to know that we in ourselves, but of ourselves, came into the world?  Indeed, how else would we be here?