Have you been alone?  Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, is the story of a woman scientist who, due to an accident high above the Earth, finds herself adrift in space, alone, apart, utterly trapped in a vast and unyielding nothingness.  There is no air, no sound, no other human being.  No one knows where she is, no one can tell her where she is, no one can tell her where to go.  She is a person without a place, even, in a way, a person without a face.
     When, in 1972, I was backpacking through Alaska's Brooks Range, the dense and forbidding range of mountains that sweeps majestically across the northern stretches of the state, I was similarly alone.  Dropped off by helicopter by a high mountain lake, hundreds of miles from road, town, radio, and human being, I could have been on another planet.  No one knew where I was, and no one, except my parents, who were thousands of miles away in Southern California, cared.  However, I was still on planet Earth.  I was still in an environment with which I was familiar.  I was still connected to a home.
     Not so in space.  There is no home to be found.  And we wonder:  what is the real nature of home?  Consider, if you will for a moment, that enigmatic thing we call the love of God.  Admitting to the love of God is to bend the apparent and seen.  It is to say that something of profound value and joy lies in the midst of an empty universe, that the universe's darkness is far less powerful than its light.
     Gravity, or the lack of it therefore remains, yes, but the space in which it is acting is not wholly empty.  It's filled with a larger truth:  we 're always home.
     And reality becomes a real friend.