Do you remember the Bee Gees?  Although they perhaps achieved their greatest fame during the run of disco music in the Eighties, they had been making (and continued to make) music for many other years as well.  Yet for all their success, their lives have been marked by immense tragedy.  I was reminded of this a few weeks ago as I read a Rolling Stone profile about Barry Gibbs, the only remaining Bee Gee.  He tells a sad story of losing not one, not two, but three brothers.  First to go was Andy, dead at age 30 of heart inflammation.  Next was Maurice, gone at 53 from a heart attack.  Finally, there was Robin, who died in London, somewhat older at 63, from cancer in 2012.

     Although many observers have cited bodily abuse—alcohol and drugs—as the principal cause of these premature deaths, this doesn’t take away the pain.  Who wants to lose three brothers?  Life can be supernally wonderful, but it can also be insuperably tragic.  Yes, the writers of Job and Ecclesiastes make clear that people are born to die, that humanity is destined to suffer, and that life has a futility which nothing about or in it cannot fully undo, but they also celebrates the marvelous and amazing gift that life is.  "Enjoy life!" says Ecclesiastes 9.  Whether or not we assign the source of the gift to God, we can still marvel—and wonder—at its astonishing proportions:  who thought of life?

     I said “who” because I cannot see how an impersonal nothingness could ever think about, much less birth or "produce" anything, particularly life itself.  Life is a tremendous mystery.  And it's always standing before us.
     So how will we explain it?