Have you heard of Charles Manson?  People who grew up in the American Sixties do.  Mr. Manson is remembered, infamously, for sending, on an August evening in the Los Angeles of 1969, a group of his followers to murder, brutally, everyone who happened to be staying at a particular house in an wealthy enclave in the hills above the city.  The gruesome character of the murders shocked the city, and the nation.  Manson's group quickly followed with another, equally horrific one the next night, frightening the residents of L.A. even more.
     Why am I recounting such a painful memory?  I've been reading a recently published biography of Charles Manson, who is now almost eighty years old and still living in a high security prison in California.  He will die there, I'm sure.  Although I have so far found many interesting things in the account, one that I have thought about for the last couple of days is the life of one of the sons Manson left behind.  This particular son was named Charles Manson, Jr.  He could never live with this name; he was always haunted by the image he thought it presented to the world.  He eventually took his own life, shooting himself on a deserted highway in Colorado in 1994.  It's a sad and tragic story.
     And it's a sad and tragic story that underscores to me the aching difficulty of making sense of the ultimate meaning of existence.  Why was this young man, out of all the young men in the world, fated to be born with this name?  Why did he have to suffer such a destiny?  What does this say about the real purpose of life?
     These are hard questions.  If we say that it's all part of the master plan of God, we are left wondering why God planned such a thing.  Yet if we say that it just happened, that it was a purely random twist of fate, we are left wondering whether anything in this existence means anything at all.  Why him?  Is it just bad luck?  Is it just bad luck that his young man had only this one chance and now he is gone forever?
     Maybe it is.  If so, however, we walk in a life that is totally random and, like anything that is random, without purpose.  What is the point?  On the other hand, grounding life in God raises questions of its own, questions to which I alluded above.  However, with God comes, difficult as it may be to discern, glimmers, gossamer glimmers, and inchoate intimations of abiding, even in the darkness of existence, purpose.  It is not a purpose, but purpose, purpose that, unfortunately but, ironically, is, often and inevitably, shrouded in mystery beyond our human ken,
     So:  random or purpose.  Which mystery will yours be?