Thinking about my post yesterday, one in which I reflected on the apparent vacuity of existence, to be, as Bob Dylan once sang, like a rolling stone, no direction, no home, and how the universe is, in so many ways, precisely like that, here for billions of years then, in the space of more billions of years, returned to darkness, I was rereading this morning the ancient Germanic saga Beowulf.  If you do not know this work, I recommend you read it; the movie made about it some years ago does not capture the fluidity and excitement of the story it unfolds.  It is a tale of fantasy and intrigue wrapped in the rich undercurrents of ancient Danish and Icelandic lore.
     At any rate, one thing that caught my eye, at least this time, was the way that the poem conveys the rhythmic flow of existence, birth, life, death, birth, life, death, over and over, and that despite the heroics of Beowulf in killing the dragon, in the end, he, too, died, left to be buried on a hill overlooking the sea.  Though his life was grand and will be long remembered, when it was over, Beowulf was alone, apart, journeying through a vast, distant, and mortally unfathomable eternity:  like a rolling stone.
     If we believe in an eternity, something which I suspect most of us would like to think exists, that although this earthly life will one day end, life itself will in some way continue, we would hope, I think, that it is more than travel through an unfathomably dark emptiness.  I would bet that we would like for this eternity to at least have a face, to have a means to experience it with passion and feeling, that it would not be incomprehensible but rather something into which we feel perfectly at home, not like a rolling stone.  It would be an eternity made for us.
     After all, as finite creatures, how could we ever expect to make our own?