If you've been around for a while, you've probably heard of Kurt Cobain.  Once the lead singer for the rock band Nirvana (the term for the Buddhist afterlife), Cobain, tragically, took his own life about twenty-one years ago this year, ending his too brief earthly existence in a room above his Seattle garage.  The musical world mourned his passing greatly, and continues to do so today.  Like John Lennon, whose passing made us ponder the import of the Sixties and Seventies more deeply, Cobain and his premature demise led us to meditate more fully on the state of the world in the Nineties and beyond.  His was a raw sound, but it captured the angst that so many felt, the angst of feeling helpless before waves of societal upheaval and change, of trembling at the emptiness of a world that had become too focused on enriching itself at the expense of, ironically, itself.
     Now, a film about Cobain is set to be released.  It will enlighten us even more about him, I'm sure, yet I suspect it will also cause us to think more about what he left behind. In particular, I think about his daughter Frances who, at the time of her father's death was only twenty months old.  What a legacy she must confront, what a melange of wondering and emotion with which she must deal.  Yet as she indicated in a recent interview in Rolling Stone, she intends to be her own person going forward.  And why not? We cannot remain captives of our past indefinitely.
     Whatever your past may be, I trust that you find the resources to remember it while seeking to exceed it.  Like religion, which calls us to remember tradition, yet also invites us to look at these traditions in new ways beyond them, and like rock music, which, while remaining itself, will be constantly reinterpreted in countless new ways (look at former Nirvana member Dave Grohl and his Foo Fighters), we all owe ourselves, and God, to believe in the inexhaustibility of creation, the limitlessness of potential, the newness that lilts at every turn.  One day of course the world will be no more, it and its past forever gone.  Ensconced in God's eternity, however, its hope will carry on.
     The past fades, the present comes, but newness will never end.