At an art exhibit my wife and I attended a couple of weeks ago, I came upon a mixed media work entitled "Running Alone in a Chaotic World."  It depicted a figure running into (or perhaps out of; maybe that's the point) a tangled golden red horizon, the ground looking almost on fire, the sky singularly opaque.  For me, this communicated for me the way that many people feel about existence.  Though most of us live bravely and purposefully, dealing with life's challenges as they come, finding happiness in a host of pursuits, uncovering meaning as we confront the full nature of reality, we do so alone. We may have friends, we may have family, we may have community, we may have God, but we ultimately face existence alone.  It's us and the universe.  And while it may be a highly ordered universe, unless God is in it, it is, at best, an accident.  It's here, but it has no reason to be here.  It happened, it become, and that's all.  It's a wonderful world, but it's a world lilting on the edge of nothingness.
     It's too facile to simply say that if God is there, we are not alone.  Though I do not dispute that this is true, I think it's deeper than that.  We're still running in a chaotic world.  The larger question is, are we running into an existence that one day will end without a whimper or sound, swallowed up in its own destiny, or are we running into an existence that one day will, paradoxically enough, never end?  We run, we run alone.  Yet in a world of opaque skies and shimmering but finite gold red horizons, where are we running to?