Ah, to live long, to be one hundred years old, to even be 120 years old.  So said a person with whom my wife and I had dinner last night.  In her seventies, she does everything she believes she can possibly do to maintain her health and, she hopes, longevity.  She aims to live well into the second decade of her centennial birthday. "There will be so much to experience," she says.
     True enough.  Given the rapid pace of technological advancement we experience today, we have every reason to think that the next forty or fifty years of human existence on planet earth will be full of incredible scientific, medical, and cultural developments. We have much to which to look forward.  Most importantly to our friend, perhaps even life itself will be extended.
     However, no one who is studying such things has posited that, even in the face of all these changes, life itself will not, eventually, end.  One day, the life that all of us live, appreciate, and love will come to a close.  One day, we will stop experiencing our earthly existence.  Whatever else we make ourselves, we will not likely to be able to make ourselves imperishable.
     So what's next?  Maybe nothing, but on the other hand, maybe everything.  As I read this morning through Luke's account of Jesus' resurrection, I was struck anew by the enormous challenge it presents to human thought:  could someone really rise from the dead?  Everything we know about the human body says otherwise.  Yet everything we know about the rest of the universe, physical as well as metaphysical, says that, yes, it could indeed happen.  We therefore face a most challenging choice:  do we accept what we see perceptually, or do we accept what we see perceptually and spiritually?  On this planet, we cannot have one without the other.
     There is so much that, this side of death, we will never understand about its aftermath.  There is so much that, from our earthly vantage point, we do not grasp about what follows it.  But that's not the point.  It is rather that we look at the larger picture of what truth ought to be:  something that we, finite beings, cannot, ultimately, fully define.  We're not absolute.
     By the way, I'll be traveling for a few weeks, exploring and hiking through several sets of mountains in the American West, so will not be posting for a while.  I look forward to reconnecting when I return.  Thanks for reading!

     Having talked about Amy Winehouse and her soulful music and torturous life yesterday, I write today about the artist Nick Cage.  I'm thinking about Cage's vision of participatory art, art as something we put on or do.  Cage creates clothes, shelters, and other life appurtenances to encourage people to not only admire art visually but to step into and experience it.  If, as the saying goes, life imitates art and vice versa, then Cage understands us very well.  And, whether he knows it or not, he understands God.
     

           
                     (one of Cave's "Soundsuits")

     If we picture God as the ultimate artist, the one who, be through his word or natural agency, shaped and fashioned the entirety of the cosmos, then we can look at this world (and the universe as well) as a work of art into which we are constantly stepping and continuously exploring, every moment of every day.  We can also see our life as a work of art, a work which we are given as well as a work which we create.  We bask in the artistry of our creator.
     And the creator basks in ours.  God didn't make us robots; he made us to explore and create, to search out the most complex intricacies of the universe.  Though he knows that, as do we, we will never know about everything we see, God has granted us the capacity to roam, with insight and understanding, through the world he made.  We revel in what we can discover and know.
     Yet God also wishes for us to explore and come to grasp what is in truth the most fundamental (and, from his standpoint, the most evident) thing about us and our world: at one point, a long ago point in time, he became, in the person of Jesus, like one of us. He enlightens us, he guides us, he saves us.
     God became the artist he made.

     Poor Amy Winehouse.  Though I have not seen the newly released documentary about her, and though I am aware that her family is unhappy with how it was done, as I reflect on her too short life, I think about someone who, many decades ago, met a premature end, too, for many of the same reasons:  Janis Joplin.  Both of these women defied the norm, challenged convention, and rode horses, metaphorically speaking, which most people may not have thought they should.  But ride them they did, with often dazzling effect.  Those of us who saw Janis Joplin in concert could not help but walk away amazed at her aura and power:  she gave it her all, her absolute all.  The little footage I've seen of Amy Winehouse in concert presents her similarly:  she threw herself into her music.
     And her life.  We weep for these two women.  We weep for their early demise, we weep for the talent lost, and we weep for a world, a world which too many of us see in terms of black and white, but a world which, our artist friends tell us, is decidedly gray. Our lives are incredibly multifaceted, confusing, and diverse.  We shun its depths at our peril.
     So we ask:  why do so many of us miss life's greater point?  Or is there one?
     Not only do I hope, for the sake of these broken and seemingly unredeemable lives, there is, but so I also believe that, precisely because of these shattered existences, there must be.  There is value, there is a point:  God is bigger than the most broken of broken dreams.

     Have you seen a snow leopard?  Very few people have.  I ask because this morning I chanced upon a series of photographs of the elusive cats, taken by Inger Vandyke, an Australian photographer.  After seventeen days of looking and waiting, Vandyke managed to photograph and film one of the cats chasing and capturing a bharal (blue) sheep. According to her account, posted on the internet, she found this experience "almost spiritual."
     Many decades ago, the now deceased writer Peter Matthiessen wrote eloquently about his quest to see a bharal sheep and snow leopard in a compelling book titled The Snow Leopard.  In it, he recounts his journey through some of the most remote sections of the Himalayas to find these fascinating animals.  As he traveled, he also visited numerous monasteries and, when he could, contemplated the recent passing of his wife Deborah. Like Vandyke, Matthiessen found his trek and the glimpses of life it presented to him a deeply spiritual experience.
     Unless we totally reject that a human being can entertain even a semblance of spiritual sensibility, we cannot help but identify.  When we come face to face with the raw and unvarnished mien of nature, we almost instinctively turn our thoughts to awe and the metaphysical.  How, we wonder, can such a thing produce such profound feelings of "otherworldly" marvel in us?
     The French mystic Simone Weil once wrote that one way we see the love of God is by witnessing the beauty of nature.  Indeed.  Whatever our etiology regarding the existence of the universe may be, we must still reckon with the ability of its many wonders to provoke our awe and metaphysical imagination.  Does this beauty really not have a name?

     Freedom and order:  the grand challenge that all of us face.  How do we balance our individual freedom with our desire for corporate order?  Tilt the balance too far toward freedom, and we descend into anarchy and lawlessness.  Push it too far toward order, and we welcome dictatorship and authoritarianism.  Freedom and order is not a black and white issue.  It's highly complex, replete with many, many shades and hues of gray.
     God understands this well.  From the first page of scripture to its last, we see God wrestling with the balance between the effects of the choice making capacities he granted to human beings and his innate omnipotence and sovereignty.  Though we cannot pretend to know exactly how God manages this, we can at least come to appreciate, in ourselves, the difficulty of balancing two things that are both true but when put together create an essentially unresolvable tension.  We live in a world of gray.
     This is not to say that certain things will not always be true.  It is to say that saying that one thing is true means that its opposite is not.  Really?  If freedom is true, is order false? No.  It simply means that, as finite beings, we must resign ourselves to never knowing, in full and with exact precision, almost anything.  For instance, if we believe in God, we understand that we do so by faith.  We will never understand our belief completely.  Conversely, if we do not believe in God, we should know that we do so with incomplete understanding, too.
     Isn't being finite fun?  We're free, but we're not; ordered, but not.  But really, would we want it any other way?  Being human is immensely challenging.  Perhaps the apostle John can help us here.  In the fourth chapter of his first letter, he remarks that, "God is love."  No more, no less.  If this is indeed true (which I believe it is), then everything else, even if we cannot see it do so, falls into place.

     "We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year, running over the same old ground.  What have we found?  The same old fears.  Wish you were here."
     So goes the chorus to Pink Floyd's song "Wish You Were Here."  Does this sound depressing?  Perhaps it is.  If we stretch our purview to the limits of this universe, however, we see that it is, in truth, what life is.  As Martin Heidegger puts it, we're just "thrown" into this world, without a choice as to where we are born and what we are born with and, as Paul Sartre adds, for this reason, we are lonely, very lonely beings in a vast and uncaring cosmos.
     If this universe is all that is, Pink Floyd, Heidegger, and Sartre are all indeed more than correct:  though every one of us is born uniquely, every one of us will live with the same hopes and fears, running over the same old ground, the material of planet Earth. And we wish all of us were here; social animals that we are, we want to be with each other.  We like community.  We are in this together.
     True enough.  But then why, if we are no more than errant cosmic dust, do we want so desperately to make existence meaningful?
    Are we really all that is "here"?

     Many people have wondered why, if Adam and Eve sinned, every one of their descendants (including you and me) are still paying for it:  why are we born with the damage they have done?
     Some suggest that this simply reflects the idea, an idea very prevalent in the time the Bible was composed, of corporate sin:  what the mother and father do affects the children, their children's children, and so on.  Sin never occurs in isolation.  We see hints of this in some of the Greek tragedies.  Here, a male or female head of a household commits an act of egregious injustice, and although he or she may continue to live, relatively unscathed, as time passes, the effects of his or her deeds eventually bring his or her entire house down.  Their families are never the same.  They're warped for eternity.
     There is much in this that is true.  Obviously, what an individual does may well affect those who around her and, if this person is a political leader, perhaps her nation as well. It's the nature of cause and effect.  In the writings of Ezekiel (chapters eighteen and thirty-three), however, we see a different perspective on this.  While these chapters do not reject the idea of corporate sin altogether, they do let us see God's ways in a different light.  Whereas before, God says to the prophet, you believed that what the father does, the children will also inevitably do, too, I'm telling you today that, nonetheless, I look at each person individually.  Each person's sin and transgression is unique to and contained in her.  I look at a person's individual deeds, God says, not what her father or mother did.
     If we apply this idea to modern Western jurisprudence, we see that it makes sense. We cannot hold a parent totally accountable for her child's wrongdoing, and we certainly cannot hold a child totally accountable for her parent's error and sin.  Although blame, in part, remains, in the end, our actions are our own.
     Adam and Eve made a colossal mistake, yes, and we all are still paying for it, yes, but we are each paying for it in our own way.  We're individuals before God.  It's the beauty of human uniqueness.
     Would we really want it any other way?  

     How do we balance politics and faith?  As the American election season heats up, many of us are trying to come to grips with this question.  Though I do not pretend to have all the answers, I share a thought from my recent reading of some of the parables in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew's gospel.  In this parable, one of the parables of the kingdom of God (note, however, that in an effort to avoid angering what he hoped would be Jewish readers, Matthew calls these parables of the kingdom of heaven; even today, many Jews assiduously avoid mentioning God's name outright, often preferring to call him as "Shem" (the name)), Jesus tells the story of the wheat and the tares.  A farmer, he says, plants wheat seeds in his field.  They soon grow into strong and firm stalks of wheat. Along the way, however, when the farmer is not around, an "enemy" comes and sows weed (tare) seeds.  The wheat is compromised.  But when asked whether they should dig up the weeds, the farmer's servants are told not to.  Let's wait until harvest, the farmer says, and we will dig up the weeds when we glean the wheat.

     Jesus' point is that although in him God's kingdom has been established on earth, until the end of the age, when he returns to make all things right, weeds will grow right alongside the wheat of the kingdom.  Expect challenges to one's faith in God, anticipate skepticism to matters of belief, plan for human nastiness (and not just in regards to faith):  after all, it's a fallen world inhabited by fallen (and glorious) people.  And wait.

     We can apply this parable to faith and politics in several ways.  The angle I offer is to invite people of faith to consider that although you feel led, even compelled to speak out on issues which you believe affect your ability to worship God openly or which you believe are compromising America's moral integrity, historically, it seems that the more loudly you have shouted, the more the weeds have grown.  The people of faith who have made inroads into the secular imagination are those who have waited, those who have let go of the immediate and lived their lives intelligently and uprightly, speaking out, yet not alienating those whom they are trying to persuade to accept their point of view.  In a pluralistic society like America is today, this is perhaps all we can do.  We should live and speak for our faith, yes, but we should do so in a way that honors the person in whom we believe, recognizing that it's more important to ensure that we do not compromise our "wheat" while we are trying to pull up the weeds we see, than to hector and badger people to accept what they are not likely, outside of faith, to do so.

     Have you seen "Inside Out"?  California-based Pixar Film's newest offering to hit the theaters, "Inside Out" presents, in the emotional life of a young girl named Riley, the inner workings of memory.  Identifying four emotions--joy, sadness, fear, disgust, and anger--as prime in an individual's personality, "Inside Out" paints a tale, centered in a significant and enervating move Riley's family makes when she is twelve years old, of how although we may want "joy" to be uppermost in our minds, sometimes it is "sadness," not unmitigated happiness, that leads to genuine joy.  When "joy" (the emotion) realizes that Riley is unhappy with her new situation, she tries to fill her with even more joy.  Along the way, however, it becomes apparent that what Riley needs is not superficial happiness but rather to grapple with the sadness she encounters and consequently transform it into lasting joy.  She needs, as our Buddhist friends might say, the journey, the good, bad, and ugly, to become whom she is supposed to be.  Riley needs the full span of her memory to become herself.  Though we might conclude she should lose her recollections of sadness, it turns out that she needs them as much as she needs her recollections of joy.
     As I've been working on a book I'm writing about memory, I've thought often about memory and sadness and joy.  If we are to set memory into the context of an afterlife, for instance, our first inclination would be to say that we would not want any sad memories in it. However, as "Inside Out" (and countless psychological studies) suggest, everything that we experience and remember goes into shaping who we become, here and in the next life.  Do we really want to remember only the good?  Would we really be ourselves if we forgot about the bad?
     It seems that the only way that we could enter the afterlife with the full effect of our memories would be if God, being God, transforms them into something totally new.  We will remember, but we will remember in a completely new way.  How God would accomplish this, however, I'm afraid I cannot readily say, as I would be probing intimations of the metaphysical whose full purview I simply cannot access in the present moment.  (Nor can, I might add, anyone else.)
    For the time being, then, if we believe that we carry our memories, in some way, into the afterlife, we walk in a mystery.  We believe that we will carry them, but as to how we will do so, we cannot now say.  We know only that if God is there, and if God is greater than heaven as well as earth, he is fully able to make all things, joy or sadness, new.
     So does "Inside Out" tell us:  memory presents what life, now and later, most is.

     Perhaps you're familiar with the book or movie "Alive," the harrowing account of how a group of South American rugby players traveling from Uruguay to Peru to play in a tournament in the winter of 1972 survived after their plane flew into a peak (due to the heavy cloud cover that day, the pilot did not see the peak coming) in one of the most remote areas of the Andes Mountains which, after the Himalayas, is the highest mountain chain on the planet.  For seventy-two days, the survivors of the crash endured the intense cold and loneliness of the vast and unsparing mountain landscape.  Some of them died, but a remnant endured.  Most controversially, those who lived did so by eating the flesh and body parts of people who had perished in the crash.  Aside from a few nuts and bits of chocolate they found in the wreckage of the plane, this was all the food they had.
     After a number of weeks of discussion and preparation, two members of the group, in a herculean effort that almost defies description, trekked over the massive summit looming over the fuselage and into Peru, where they found help.  Theirs was an epic journey, one that takes its place among the most revered annals of mountain survival.
     After reflecting many decades about his experience, Nando Parrado, one of those who climbed over the mountain and found aid, wrote his account of his achingly difficult sojourn.  As he remembers his time on the mountain and looks at his life now, he finds that although some in the group are convinced that God delivered them, he is not.  For him, God seems a distant myth.  If there is a God, why did this happen anyway?
     It's an unanswerable question.  In concluding his account, Parrado speaks of the primacy of love.  To love, he says, is the most important thing.  Nothing, he offers, is greater than love, and no pursuit is more worthy than that of love.
     In a way, this makes perfect sense.  If we are persuaded that God does not love us enough to keep us from experiencing unbearable misery and premature death, then, yes, we should love only ourselves and our lives.  It's hard to love a God who doesn't seem to care. On the other hand, from where, in an accidental and meaningless universe, could love have come?  How did we come to love?
     God's love can stir enormous vexation and frustration, yes, but unless it was there before anything else was, I'm not sure how I would ever be able to love:  if I'm only seeking to survive, why would I love anyone and anything other than myself?

     Do we all need ritual?  In a dinner conversation I had over the weekend, one person stated that it seemed that the human being cannot do without ritual.  In particular, she said, people cannot do without some type of religious ritual.
     Addressing this statement requires that we first define ritual.  All of us, I wager, engage in ritual.  This could be something as simple as drinking a glass of water in the morning, any type of activity in which we almost instinctively engage each and every day. Moreover, some people might say that they do these simple "rituals" religiously, meaning that they do them consistently.  Indeed, the root of the word "religion" refers to the erection of some type of fence, boundary, or structure designed to shape or order some level of human activity.
     Clearly, however, "religious" rituals and rituals of religion, are not always the same. Most of us engage in personal rituals religiously, but not as many of us engage in rituals of religion.  On the other hand, religion, belief, or not, every person on this planet functions on the basis of various assumptions and presuppositions about what life is. Everyone begins with some type of belief.  We can call this belief religious, or we can call it secular, but we cannot avoid what it is:  a belief.  And adhering to any sort of belief demands adhering to some type of ritual.  In a very real way, we all begin with a degree of faith, a ritualistic faith, in something.  After all, we're thoroughly human.
     So do we need religious ritual?  We only need religious ritual if we need religion.  And we only need religion if we agree that we cannot understand ourselves and our world fully, if we agree that we must in some way live by faith.  For this reason, though we can dismiss religious ritual, we cannot dismiss that we would be hard pressed to make sense of reality without it.
     We're very little creatures in a very big universe.

     Do you observe or do you experience?  The German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) is famous for insisting that, although he experiences life as a subjective being, he does not observe it.  Herein is the classic position of existentialism:  in a world without God, life has no meaning and we cannot therefore observe, much less understand it. All we can do is experience it for as long as we have it.
    True enough:  absent a transcendent meaning, we are indeed experiencing existence without ever fully understanding it.  Sure, we observe, and sure, we understand, but we ultimately have no explanation for it.
     On the other hand, many a Bible passage avers that because humans are finite beings, they cannot understand existence fully, either.  What's the difference?  The obvious answer is belief in the presence of God.  Yet this frames the issue as a matter of faith. Who can know?  Perhaps it's better to say that, as I was noting yesterday, though we can reject belief in an ultimate being (God), we cannot reject that we will always want to know what things mean, and that if we insist that the universe has no point, we will forever be contradicting ourselves.  Positing God is not so much a matter of faith as it is a matter of rationality and logic.   Do we really want to say that we can make sense of "nothing"?

      You are no doubt familiar with the Russian dictator Josef Stalin, who terrorized, literally, his nation for close to thirty years with his paranoic thirst for power.  Perhaps you are also aware that Stalin had children:  two sons and one daughter.  One of his sons died in a German prisoner of war camp during the War, the other a natural death sometime later.  Because her mother committed suicide when Svetlana was quite young, Svetlana basically grew up with one parent, her dictator father, living from day to day in the shadows of the Kremlin, in the center of Moscow.  Although Svetlana did not initially grasp the extent of her father's campaign of terror, as she grew older, she did, helplessly watching as some of her very closest aunts lost their lives to Stalin's paranoia.  Though she loved her father, she was horrified at the extent of his madness.  In 1967, she sought asylum in the U.S. embassy in Delhi, and eventually made her way to America, where she became a U.S. citizen and even took on an American name, Lana Peters.  She died in 2011 (her father died in 1953).
     I mention all of this because of a newly published book, which I just finished reading, about Svetlana's life.  As I now reflect on Svetlana's life, I keep returning to the enormous extent to which she had no choice in where she was born or how she was raised.  To the end of her life, and despite her intelligence, she never did really recover fully from living amidst her father's machinations.  It's tragic.
     A friend of mine once told me (and many others have used this phrase), "You play the card you're dealt" (he died at age of fifty from lung cancer).  True enough:  unless we step into the ethically tenuous territory of genetic manipulation, we cannot decide our biological starting points.  That with which we are born and that with which we grow up will always be with us.  Although we can may well be able change the way we respond to and deal with these things, we likely will never eradicate them completely from who we are.
     So we wonder what it all means, this seemingly random and unpredictable way in which we come into the world.  Can we understand it?  Does it have a point?  It really doesn't.  We enjoy our life, we enjoy our days.  But why we ever have them, we cannot say.  We die alone.
     Theists will say that this demands that we invest in the idea of a personal and omnipotent and omniscient God.  I can't argue with this.  But we cannot propose the idea of God just to make ourselves feel better.  We must rather see the idea of God as the only rational explanation for why we believe ourselves to be meaningless yet still seek meaning.  We can't have it both ways.  Even if consciousness and purpose are emergent properties, we still cannot explain, nor are we likely to, why meaning is important.
     I do not know what Svetlana was thinking as she entered death's door.  I do not know what she thought as she looked back on her life.  I do wonder, however, whether, given that with which she had deal all her life, she ever asked, why?
     Has there really been, small or larger, a point?

      It's July!  For many parts of the world, the month of July is a time for celebration, individual, group, and nation.  July 1st marks Independence Day in Canada; July 4th, Independence Day in the U.S.; and July 14th, Independence Day (otherwise known as Bastille Day) in France.  Also, during July, this year, anyway, Muslims the world over will celebrate Eid al Ftr, the joyous occasion with which they commemorate the end of Ramadan.  Finally, unless you are living in the far southern regions of the world, you are likely enjoying July as the high point of the summer, the month in which the season's warmth and carefree character seem to tumble about and come together, effortlessly coalescing in countless moments of thankfulness and joy.
     On the other hand, for some of us, me in particular, July marks the remembrance of another event:  the passing of my mother.  Like Scottish philosopher David Hume and American founding fathers John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, she died five years ago on July 4th.  As I read Ecclesiastes this morning, I kept coming back to a verse I read frequently in the last days of her life.  It's in chapter three.  "There is a time to give birth," the writer says, "and a time to die."
     True enough, of course, but when its reality confronts us, it can overwhelm us.  Life is beautiful, but life ends.  It's the ultimate tragedy of being human.
     As we in the north therefore continue to move through our July and its many celebrations, and as nature's many creatures and plants, free of the throes of winter, continue to give birth, bloom, and shout at the glory of it all, I continue to pray that we will all find fresh occasion to ponder and consider the bigger picture in which it all occurs, the bigger picture without which, as Ecclesiastes also observes, everything is futility:  the love, the eternal and forever love of God.
     As Jesus said, "I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me will live even if he dies, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die" (John 11:24-25).
     Then Jesus asks the question he still asks every one of us:  "Do you believe this?"

     As our Muslim friends around the world venture ever more deeply into Ramadan (which began June 17), I think often of the painfully timed spate of high temperatures that swept across Pakistan recently, killing over one thousand people.  Of particular tragedy is that this heat wave occurred during a time when devout Muslims strive to avoid drinking any liquids from dawn to sunset.  This left many of them with insufficient bodily resources to deal with the heat's effects.
     To their credit, however, the devout carried on, praying, reading, gathering, and more, in every way continuing their Ramadan journey.  Nonetheless, they could not forget their fallen soulmates.  As my Muslim friend Hashim shared with me, "We weep over these deaths."
     So like the Jews of the Maccabean period wept over their murdered comrades or the early Christians who grieved for their martyred companions, so do Pakistan's Muslims, in the midst of their festivities, remember those who have fallen.  To view and interpret the world through the lens of faith is to keep a delicate balance between life and death.  If life is eternal, death is a door; if life is also the present, however (which it clearly is), its loss ends what we now know.  To have faith is to love life even while embracing its successor, yet it is also to love, thoroughly and completely, the present.  A loss is a loss is a loss.
     In the eyes of faith, however, in the end, loss is gain.  Life or death, God remains.

     Now that the two men who escaped from a maximum security prison in upstate New York have been apprehended, one by being shot dead, the other through capture after being shot, we can take a moment to reflect on their lives.  Both, Richard Matt and David Sweat, had spent most of their lives living in various prisons and penitentiaries.  They knew little else.  Both came from broken homes, and both involved themselves in crime from an early age.  Given this, one wonders about the broader purpose of their existence: why did they come into the world only to spend their lives fracturing its welfare and civility?  Why were they born only to suffer through broken homes and shattered childhoods that shaped them for a life of heinous crime?  What is the point?
     Absent a transcendent lens, there seems to be none.  Looking at their lives from a purely Darwinian perspective, we conclude that these men represent a bad mutation in the human gene pool, a failed experiment, a bad toss of the dice.  We decide that humanity can survive, perhaps flourish, without them.
     But doesn't this reduce people to little more than "bad" genes?  Doesn't this make these men merely aberrations of DNA?  It certainly does.  Without a bigger picture of meaning, we have only survival to seek, and we strive to eliminate everything that interferes with our efforts to do so.
     Yet viewing this situation through a transcendent lens doesn't enable us to look at it with significantly more clarity.  We're left peering into a mysterious and unknowable nexus of human agency and divine vision.  We still do not know precisely why these men were born; indeed, we still do not know precisely why any of us were born.  Cavalierly saying that it's all within the purposes of God does not fully answer these questions, either.  Arguing that we will know in eternity fails to satisfy, too.
     So what do we do?  If God is there, somehow, some way we trust that purpose--of some kind--prevails.  Yet we still do not understand fully.  If God is not there, however, we understand even less, for we are left with only ourselves, our purposeless and random selves roaming through an accidental universe, living and dying and never living again.