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?