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.