For the first twelve days of each month, I try to read one chapter of the Hebrew Bible's Ecclesiastes (it contains twelve chapters).  Highly enigmatic yet singularly profound, Ecclesiastes presents much wisdom from which all of us, regardless of our religious or spiritual loyalties, can profit.

     A few days ago, I read chapter twelve.  It opens with a meditation on the decline and end of existence, individual or corporate, and the social ennui and cultural alienation which often accompany it.  At one point, I was reminded of the world portrayed in Cormac McCarthy's novel, The Road.  You may already know that McCarthy's novels (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, No Country for Old Men) tend to be rather dark, and The Road is no exception.  It presents a world in the aftermath of what we might assume is a nuclear holocaust, a world of desolation and utter lawlessness.  It is a world in which, literally, every person is for him or herself.

     Death, whether big or small, tends to do that.  Death levels every existence.  It regards nothing as sacrosanct or sacred.  And it does so without any boundaries.  Death can do whatever it wants, and no one, absolutely no one, can stop it.

     Now the reader at this point may expect me to mention the resurrection, that God is master of death, and we ultimately need not worry about its consequences.  While all this is true, I cite Ecclesiastes and The Road to say although death presents an incomprehensible image of human demise, its bigger point is that life is as full of ends as it is beginnings.  Things begin, things end.  And we do not always know why.

     It's a beautiful and broken world.  How are we to deal with this paradox?  
     We admit that its ultimate explanation is not our own.