As Thanksgiving ends and most of us, at least in the West, proceed, ready or not, into the Christmas season (although many retailers, regrettably, opened for shopping on Thanksgiving Day), we do well to remember the essence of the moment before us.  It is not about shopping, it's not about supplying our loved ones with as many material goods as we can afford, it's not about draining out bank accounts to throw a lavish party, it's not about diverting every thought into an experience that in most households lasts barely an hour, if that, but rather it is to remember that, as Jesus put it in Mark 1:15, "The kingdom of God is at hand."
     Though we may cringe at the idea of a kingdom in the largely democratic West, we miss the point if we summarily dismiss Jesus' words.  He is not talking about a kingdom in the sense of knights and castles and hegemony but rather a kingdom of the heart, a kingdom that calls us to love, to care, to move ourselves toward inner transformation of mind, body, and soul, and be better citizens of the planet and the greater realities in which it sits.  Jesus' kingdom is not one of arrogance and might, not a kingdom of dogma and exclusivity, but a kingdom of welcome and grace, a kingdom of community, a kingdom of community rooted in a profound truth:  God, the ultimate and overwhelmingly real beginning and repository of existential meaning, the great and longed for Emmanuel, the Christ, is with us, with us now, tomorrow, next year, and forevermore.

      As America prepares to celebrate Thanksgiving, I find myself giving thanks for, among other things, its religious diversity.  Although on one hand I do not agree with everything that adherents of other religions believe, although I might at times wish that other people believed what I believe, on the other hand, I am grateful for what I learn from examining and studying the countless other spiritual perspectives that dot the American landscape.  If, as many theologians have observed, all truth is God's truth, then we ought to be able to find truth, that is, that which is consistent with and accurately reflective of reality, reality, that is, perceived physically as well as spiritually, in a wide range of metaphysical (and, at times, materialistic) viewpoint.  Americans live in a massively large and variegated country, one with plenty of room for many, many worldviews, each of which represent, in their own way, uniquely human expressions of the perennial human quest for meaning.  We don't need to agree with them to learn from them.
     In short, this Thanksgiving, in addition to giving thanks for the many familial, intellectual, and material blessings that flow through your life, give thanks to God.  Give thanks to God that, despite the fractured state of modern spirituality, he is nonetheless able to communicate and present himself--and his son Jesus--in just about any place you look for him.
     Wherever and whoever you are this Thanksgiving, be grateful for the grace and ubiquity of God.

     A couple of weeks ago, the morning of November 17, a young man named Nicholas Mevoli attempted to break the existing record for free diving, that is, diving as far down as one could get without using any artificial aids or additional oxygen.
     The record was 70 meters; Mevoli was aiming for 72.  When he reached 69 meters, however, for reasons no one knows, he paused, seemed to hesitate, then continued down.  He made his way back to the surface safely.  However, once he removed his goggles, he began to cough up blood.  He died an hour and a half later.  It's a tragic story.
     What struck me most about this story was the achingly painful fact of a life lost so young for a relatively arcane reason, a life that was once infused with the most fervent of dreams, the most compelling of drives, now a life over, forever.  Many young lives are of course lost every moment of every day, most of them, unfortunately, from causes that are preventable, such as hunger, disease, and accidents.  Yet this lost life seems, at least to me, to take on a hue and shade of its own, a life, and a short one at that, spent pursuing a goal of which very few people in the world are aware, a life devoted to vision of which only a handful of humanity even cares about.  And now it's over.
     This is not to say that Mevoli's life was not important or valuable.  If God exists, it surely was.  We mourn his passing.  It is to say, however, that as the writer of Ecclesiastes 11 reminds us, seek adventure, seek challenge; yet remember this:  life is ultimately out of our hands.  We walk in a shadow we do not make.
     So I conclude:  thanks be to God for existential purpose--and for presenting himself in his son Jesus for us to see it.

     Reviewing Jeff Chu's recently published and favorably received Does Jesus Really Love Me?  A Gay Christian's Pilgrimage in Search of God in America, Lauren Sandler, a confirmed (and straight) atheist, writes, "[this book] lays bare a vast national offense:  valuing identity over experience, judgment over love."
     Ms. Sandler's first comment makes an intriguing point.  Do we construct our sense of self on the basis of an unchanging dynamic of person, or on the basis of our experience?  Or put another way, using more technical language, do we construct ourselves ontologically or existentially?
     In truth, it is both.  We are born with a certain set of genes and its attendant characteristics, but we become ourselves as what we inherit responds to what we experience.  We cannot completely escape the tendencies and mannerisms to which our genes incline us, but we also cannot totally evade our own capacities to shape or direct such things through the effects of what we encounter in our life experience.
     If I am understanding Ms. Sandler correctly, it is our experience that is more formative and significant in determining who we are.  She may well be right, in part; the "nature vs. nurture" argument will never be resolved fully.  What we can say, however, is that whether identity or experience are prime, our call is to love each person identity, experience, and all, unconditionally.  In the end, each person is a human being, made in God's image and imbued with nearly infinite worth and value.  There is purpose in why each person is here.

     Have you seen Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors?  Made in the Eighties, it's portrays a opthamologist who, late in his career, has an affair with another woman and, one day, this woman threatens to tell his wife.
     Alarmed beyond measure, the doctor becomes so desperate that he summons his brother, a man who has spent his life on the other side of the law, for advice.  When his brother mentions that this woman "can be gotten rid of," the doctor is aghast.  "How could we?"  he asks.
     A few nights later, however, he relents and tells his brother to go ahead with it.  I won't tell you how the story works out, but I share this much to make a few points about the way the doctor saw the world.  As he wrestles with his dilemma, he asks a rabbi (he is Jewish) friend of his for advice.
     You and I see the universe in very different ways, the rabbi replies.  You see it as cold, heartless, and indifferent, and I see it as pervaded with a moral structure, an unbending moral code.  Indeed, he adds, "I couldn't go on if I didn't believe that at the heart of the universe there is love and forgiveness."
     If you ever watch the movie, however, you will see how the doctor's worldview breaks down, badly.  On the one hand, he insists that the universe is without heart or meaning; but on the other hand, he insists with equal fervor that, at least initially, killing his mistress is absolutely wrong.  But in a meaningless world, how can he really make a moral judgment?  It's impossible.
     As the rabbi notes, morality can only exist if there is moral structure.  And there can only be moral structure if we have meaning.  For if we or the world have no reason to be here, nothing else does, either.

     Earlier this year, I commented on a movie, God on Trial, based on a book by Elie Wiesel.  Today, I return to it, as a recent conversation I had about it brought one more thought to mind.  At one point in the movie, one of the Jewish inmates at Auschwitz makes the point that God is not good, but merely "on our side."  In other words, the only reason a Jew might say that God is good is because he has made them his covenant people and is therefore "for" them.  If God wasn't on their side, then perhaps he would not be good.
     The man makes a good point.  Is God not therefore on the side of those who do not believe in him?  Are those who do not believe in him simply doomed to lives of misery and pain?  If this is the case, and if God supposedly loves all of his creation, is he really in fact good after all?
     Let's look at this from another angle.  If there is no God, if there is really just you and me in a vast and insouciant universe, where do we get off asserting that anything is good or, for that matter, bad?  How can we know?  In an accidental and indifferent universe, we have no way to determine such things.  We can assert certain things are good, but we do so in a moral vacuum:  there's no reason why we cannot just as easily say that these things are bad.
     Whether God is good, however, does not matter nearly as much as whether he is there.  Indeed, if we experience any sort of goodness at all, we cannot say that God, if he indeed exists, is altogether bad.  But if God is not there, we cannot explain why we experience good or bad other than to say that they just happen and therefore mean nothing.  It's an exercise in epistemological futility.
     Better--and more logical, as we are reasoning beings--to say that God is there and is good than to say that he is not and not even know what good is.

     Does challenging one's faith undermine it?  Some would say so, others would say not.  During the atheist discussion group which I attend once a month, I made the point that I would rather see a person of faith challenged on what she believes, to be forced to work through why she believes what she believes, rather than live her life without really thinking about why she has faith.  That is one reason why, I added, I attend the group, to dialogue with and explore the other side.  We can often learn significant things from views with which we do not agree.
     "But doesn't this tend to subvert the cause of faith?" one person asked me.  To this, I said that if a person is reasonably grounded in the fundamentals of her faith, and has (or has had) meaningful objective as well as subjective experiences and evidences of her faith, she can only benefit from such stretching.  Whenever we are living in a box, be it one of faith or unbelief, we cannot see what's outside of it.  We do not know what else there is to know.  Better that we be exposed to what is beyond or outside of what we believe than to live our lives ignorant of what our faith really means.  If all we have is our faith in a world that only our faith has created, that is really all we will ever have, that is, faith that has no genuine credibility or foundation or staying power.
     Besides, if indeed God is ultimate truth, he ought to be able to withstand any challenge raised against him.  To paraphrase Augustine's famous observation that, "I believe that I may understand," I suggest, "Believe, but explore; explore, but believe."  A real faith need not fear the world, for the world is in truth the work of God.
     So, I concluded, if my faith cannot successfully surmount questions about its veracity, then it is not a faith worth having and, if this is the case, real truth remains to be found.  And truth, after all, in its purest form, is the most important thing.

     Have you heard of Kilian Jonet Burgada?  A native of Spain, Kilian is a remarkable ski mountaineer and long distance trail runner who, for the last couple of years, has been developing an enviable reputation for his ability to run, seemingly without any effort, mile upon mile through some of the most rugged terrain on the planet.  Those who compete with him find themselves awestruck at his capacity to keep going, hour after hour after hour, as they race along rock strewn trails at elevations routinely exceeding 10,000 feet.  Mountains are no obstacle for Kilian; in fact, he seems to do better on hills and dales than at sea level.
     It may come as no surprise that Kilian's VO2 max is an astounding 92, one of the highest on record.  His lungs have an extraordinary ability to utilize the oxygen they take in.  He rarely seems to even break a sweat.  He can probably outlast a wolf as it lops, day after day, through the mountain high country.
     Why am I talking about Kilian?  Simply to note that despite our spiritual brokenness and existential uncertainty, we humans are capable of extraordinary physical achievements.  Although we will never be as fast as a big cat or strong as a gorilla, we can do remarkable things with our bodies.  Moreover, unlike the other animals, we can also engage in the things of the spirit.  We are more than our bodies, yet we are more than our spirits.  We are both.
     And this, I suppose, is the ultimate wonder, that a being so physical can be so spiritual, that in the human being what we see is so inextricably wedded to and aligned with what we do not.  We, and the universe are more wonderful than what we can imagine, occupying reality physically even while we, through our spirits, wrestle with what is beyond it.

     “I think the image that we have put forward in a lot of ways has been a scary, mean, we want to tear down the walls, we want to do destructive things kind of image is what a lot of people have of us,” he said.  “I’m really excited to be able to come together and show that it’s not about destruction.  It’s about making things and making things better.”
     So said a "preacher" at a so-called "atheist" church in Los Angeles recently (more on this innovation later).  Many years ago, Joseph Schumpeter proposed the idea of "creative destruction," that sometimes we need to destroy, to destroy well, to create something better.  It’s not a new idea, really:  ask a farmer.  When a seed is planted, it is dead, but set into good soil, it grows into a beautiful plant or tree.  In many ways, death and destruction lie at the heart of reality.
     And that’s the paradox of existence.  We long for life, yet we know, in our deepest hearts, that sometimes life has to end before it can begin, that sometimes what is now and present must fade into what is past in order for time to move forward.  Death is painful, but death births as well.  Destruction undermines and eliminates, but it also enables emergence.
     So the larger question is this:  why would God create a world like this?  Why would a God of life put death and dying at the center of what will come?  If we read Genesis 1:2 closely, however, we see that in the beginning, there was chaos and darkness, and then, verse three tells us, there was light.
     If everything was always settled and perfect, the world, at least the world as we know it, might not really be.  It's a cause and effect universe; in order for something to happen, something else must happen first.  A closed space can only hold one thing at a time.  Only in eternity, when all accounts are settled and all striving ceases, will death end.  For it is only then that birth will no longer be required:  everything will be alive, always, together, without end.
     As the adage goes, all truth is God's truth.  My thanks to my atheist friends!

     Pray for the people of the Philippines.  Pray that they will get help, pray that they will get surcease and relief from the horrific effects of the typhoon that swept through their country last week.  The damage this storm wrought is terrifying; photos do not communicate the enormity of the carnage it visited upon thousands and thousands of people.
     In the face of such devastation, whether you are religious or not does not matter, really.  We are all human beings.  When one of us suffers, we all suffer.  We all are called to care for one another.  It is our obligation and, indeed, destiny as well.  What else would we do?
     In the wake of such tragedy, many of us who believe in God probably wonder why we believe in God.  Why, God, we might ask, did you not prevent this from happening?  Why are you allowing these innocent people to suffer such misery? What is the point?
     These are exceedingly difficult questions.  There are no easy answers.  One thing, however, is this:  if God did not exist, if the world is random, we, and everyone affected by the storm, would have absolutely no point.  We would be accidents caught in an accident.  We would care, yes, but if the world has no point, why would we, as many an unbeliever has pointed out, logically, bother?  Yes, faith is hard, yes, faith is challenging; yet without faith, trying to make sense of this disaster is an even more formidable task than without it.  True, the question of God—theodicy—remains, but if we discard this question, we encounter a bigger one still:  in the face of meaningless upheaval on a meaningless planet, how can we justify our existence?

     In one of his many essays, the English writer C. S. Lewis, who died nearly fifty years ago, November 22, 1963 (the same day, I might add, that John Kennedy and Aldous Huxley died as well), pondered the meaning of the German word Sehnsucht.  Although Sehnsucht is generally translated as a longing or wishing viscerally for something, Lewis chose to describe it as a “inconsolable longing” for “we know not what.”
     At first glance, we might wonder how we can long for something we “know not what.”  On the other hand, I suspect all of us have found ourselves, at one point or another in our lives, wishing for something, something intangible, something unimaginable, maybe even something unspeakable, yet something we feel that we must have, something we believe we cannot live without—but we do not always know why.  We may not be able to describe it fully, we may not be able to define it completely, but we know—we sense—that we long for and want it.  It’s mysterious, it’s elusive, but it’s real, too.
     Some, including Lewis, called this longing a longing for God.  Others, those who perhaps do not share Lewis’s Christian sentiments, would call it our natural human bent, our natural human inclination to know more than what we know at the moment.  Maybe, in their own way, both sides are right.  Unless we long, we are not really human.  But unless we long for something beyond ourselves, we are not human, either.  If we never longed for anything beyond ourselves, we would be complete.  But we all know that we are deeply fractured and damaged beings.  We are far from complete.  And we cannot, try as we might, put ourselves together completely.  Impermanence cannot make itself permanent.
     Only what is permanent can satisfy the longing of what is not.

     We who live in the twentieth-first century, enamored as we are of the seeming infinitude of human achievement and possibility, largely bent on maximizing our existence, on living life to the absolute fullest, yet oftentimes rejecting any notion that a personal God could have any genuine connection to our lives, may forget that, at one point in history, one glorious moment, human possibility and divine order came very close to reconciling and coinciding, to wondrous effect.
     I speak of the Renaissance, the grand "rebirth" of civilization that surfaced at the close of the Middle Ages in the West.  The Renaissance was marked by a powerful belief in human possibility and destiny, that humanity was a special and anointed creation of God and therefore fully capable of doing anything it wanted.  Its future was limitless.  Simultaneously, however, the people of the Renaissance (for the most part) never stopped believing in God and his guiding light and presence in the world.  Though they firmly believed in unlimited human potential, they also believed, with equal fervor, in the fact of God, in the reality of the one who, as Nicholas of Cusa put it, "is the center of the universe, namely God, whose name is blessed . . . the infinite circumference of all things."  The people of the Renaissance demonstrated that we can believe in human greatness and magnificence while acknowledging and submitting to the presence of a living and personal God and, in so doing,underscored the truth of Ecclesiastes 7:18 that, "It is good to grasp one thing and not let go of the other, for the one who trusts God will come forth with both of them."  The Renaissance confirmed that if we properly manage and understand our boundaries and possibilities, we really can have it all.
     God has made humanity infinitely special, and so we are:  infinitely capable of astonishing and amazing things, yet infinitely bound to acknowledge from whom we have come.
     Would that we always strive for both.

 Are you waiting?  We all wait.  We wait for this, we wait for that; we wait for the mail, we wait for a date, we wait for a check, we wait for, really, almost anything.  In so many ways, life is about waiting.
     What if, however, we wait and wait and wait and never get that for which we are waiting?  What if we wait for nothing?  Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot tells a story of two people who wait for someone, Godot, a person whom they perceive to be a type of savior, at a bus stop, talking, visiting, prognosticating--and the person never comes.  It's a wait that does nothing more than wait:  we are left with no resolution.  The story has no ending.  The world is beyond prediction and incapable of certainty; it's a world devoid of any structure or rhythm or meaning, other than what it is in itself.  And we do not even know why it's here.
     And what, some may ask, is wrong with a world like this?  Should it be anything else?
     Maybe not.  But if it is not anything else, we still need to know how we are to live in it, a world without certainty, meaning, hope, or point.  We will want to know what it means.
     Morever, we will forever ask this:  why is there a conundrum if the world has no point?

     Can we believe and not believe?  At first glance, this seems an impossibility, a paradox in the making.  If we look closer, however, we see that, in truth, this dichotomy expresses the essence of faith.
     Mark's gospel (chapter nine) describes an encounter between Jesus and a certain man whose son, sadly, had been suffering from demonic possession almost from the day he was born.  How this happened, we are not told, only that it had caused the boy and his father enormous hardship and pain.  Hearing that Jesus, whose reputation as an healer of extraordinary powers had by this time reached across the breadth of northern Israel, was in town, the boy's father approached him and asked for help.  If you can help, Jesus, if you can help in any way, the father said, please do so.
     "If I can help?" Jesus replied, wondering whether the father knew to whom he was speaking, namely, the eternal God come in the flesh as a human being.  "I can help you," he said, "if you believe."
     Flustered but entirely honest, the man responded, "I believe, Lord; help my unbelief."
     What are we to make of this?  The father believed, but he did not believe.  If the father had believed without any reservation at all, would he have needed faith, of any kind?  Faith is of course believing, as the writer of Hebrews 11 reminds us, in the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.  The father believed in the basic fact of Jesus' divinity, or else he would not have asked him to heal his son.  And he had had eyewitness testimony of Jesus healing other people.  He believed the substance, he believed the evidence, but he didn't believe that such things could happen to him.  He had reached the boundaries of what he imagined faith to be.
     Jesus burst those boundaries.  He demonstrated to the father that faith is to believe, yes, but it is also believing in unbelief, and that in the face of faith, unbelief is entirely present, for it is the ground and impetus of faith.  We believe because we do not believe, because we understand that we in fact do not believe precisely because we do.

     What is an end?  The novelist Angela Carter, who died, tragically, of cancer in 1992 at the age of 52, is well known for her reluctance, in her many works of fiction, to avoid bringing things to an end.  She wished for, as she put it in many a letter to her friends, to "avoid a close."
     Contemplating the circumstances of a world without an end, however, is an almost insuperably difficult task.  Our finite minds stumble over the idea of endlessness, an eternity.  Try as we might, we cannot fully wrap our minds around the notion that something could continue indefinitely, never to stop, never to end, but rather to simply keep going, forever and forever.  Eventually, everything must come to an end.
     On the other hand, avoiding or refusing an end underscores the nature of the possibility that resides in all of us.  We are born to look beyond the moment, to keep striving after the next thing, the next possibility, the next horizon.
     Fair enough.  But if we continually refuse an end, we in truth deny the nature of who we are, that is, that we are finite and limited beings who really know very little about our world or ourselves.  Ends are endemic to reality.
     Yet if this is in fact the case, we are left with a reality with an unexplainable beginning but a reality which will nonetheless come to an end.  If there are to be no ends, there must also be no beginning.  There must be eternity, not just one in our minds, but one that is implicit in our reality.
     And eternity cannot rise out of nothing, for it always is, and nothing can always be unless it cannot be otherwise, like God, eternal and forever present, present to you, to me, to the entire span of humanity, the divine before us, living, breathing, the embodiment of all that can possibly be true.

     "Morning has broken," so the ancient Gaelic hymn goes, and, it continues, all that is created emerges, shining, rejoicing and, as the stanza draws to a close, it notes that it is all springing "fresh from the Word."
     Old words, yes, but unalterably seminal and true.  The "Word" to which the song refers is the Word of God which, the first chapter of Genesis tells us, spoke the cosmos into existence, a deed enshrined in words with which many of us are aware, "And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light."  Speech lies at the foundations of the universe.  Speech created the world, speech shaped and molded the world; speech made us who we are.
     And it did so, as the medieval Christian mystic Thomas a Kempis notes in his Meditations, with Prayers, on the Life and Loving-Kindness of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, "without any labour."  Speech is the ultimate and unaided power of genesis and being.     If speech connotes meaning, that is, because speech indicates the fact of a conscious and meaningful presence of being, we can say that if speech created the world, meaning is woven into every corner of the cosmos.  Whatever else we may conclude about ourselves or our existence, we may therefore take heart that, over and above all else, we, as beings of this cosmos, are meaningful.     And so is the universe.
  

     I recently heard someone describe the questing (and questing, I might add, is the natural and inevitable bent of every one of us, as we continually seek new ways of framing and understanding our existence) human being as a perforated self.  Only a perforated self, he said, is a being who is open to new input and ideas, and only a perforated self is a being who presents herself to the world and, by extension, he said, God, as one who is willing to be changed by what is not just around her, but over her as well.  A perforated self, he said, is a person ready to really see.
    So what does it mean to really see?  Simply, it is to understand that we do not wander as lonely and autonomous individuals in a cold and insensate universe.  She will see that because there is a God, we are in a world infused with possibility, a world that, because it is not random, is a world with intentional potential and purpose.
     (By the way, yes, the existentialists agreed that we are lonely and responsible, but as they did not acknowledge the presence of God, they left us with no way out of this frightening impasse other than to make choices which, in a random and meaningless universe, really have no point, no point at all.)
     The perforated self will see that in order to learn from this world we must be receptive to what it has to say.  And the world will only have something to say if it has been spoken.  Can nothingness, a somethingess devoid of speech, really create a speaking world?

     Over the weekend, I attended a conference on the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.  Who was Soren Kierkegaard?  He was a Danish philosopher, a Christian, who put forth some intriguing and, for their time, radical views of what it meant to live in a genuinely religious manner.  In contrast to relying on religious dogma, although he recognized its value, Kierkegaard emphasized that true religion is experiential, that we ultimately come into a religious experience with our hearts and not our heads alone.  We discover God not through doctrine (although it is important) but through faith, faith in the reality and value of the divine.
     Whatever else you may think of Kierkegaard's thesis, you should acknowledge that he has a point.  Although we need to be convinced of the historical and intellectual credibility of a religion if we are to invest in or commit ourselves to it, in the end, we come to a religion as a matter of our heart.  We need to feel its truth, not just know it in our brains.  It has to be a story, not a textbook, if we are to really believe it is for us.  For instance, the Hebrews who responded to the Ten Commandments or the Muslims who assented to the truth of the Qur'an did not do so because of the words these documents contained, although these words are important to those who follow them, but rather because they trusted in the God of love and compassion whom they believed had spoken them.
     At its best, religion is not a set of rules we follow, but a relationship we enjoy with a personal and loving divine.  God is not a law; he is a living being.
     Why should we believe a piece of stone?

     Well, it's birthday time again, and so I, as I always do, take time to ponder my life, the flow of my existence on this planet.  The older I get, the more there is to ponder, not because those who are younger have less to think about, but that I have more years over which to ruminate.
      In so many ways, my life--and, really, yours as well--has been a poem, a narrative, a story, an unfolding of time, space, and memory, a journey of adventure and intrigue, of love and love and more love, a voyage of wonder, challenge, heartache, astonishment, and profundity, a marvelous and mind boggling sojourn through existence, a life lived, in the fullest sense, in the compass of eternity and the fact of God.  We're on wonderful treks!
     Yet when I think about my earliest years, years when I wondered why I was here, why I was doing what I was doing, why I was being told to believe the things I was told to believe, and how in subsequent years I looked beyond these things, sought other visions, other perspectives, other ways of looking at this befuddling existence in which I found myself and, along the way, came to grasp what was for me, a seminal vision of guidance and truth, a life, mine (and, really, yours, too), I also see existence, all of it, as a prayer to the encompassing presence of God.
     And yes, life is a promise, a river of promise, really, an unfailing expectation of more, the steady anticipation of a next, a constant inkling and glimmer of what could be, a promise that, like a stream in desert spring, inundates me and you with hope, determination, joy, and the fact of beyond, the assurance of meaning, the fact of beginning and end, endlessly.
     So it is for all of us, our lives a poem that we write, our prayers a life that we make, our promises the hope that drives and molds us, our days lived out in the infinite actuality of a loving God.
     Enjoy your years!