In addition to attending a college reunion of sorts over the summer, I attended a high school reunion.  Like most reunions that happen many decades after the life experience it remembers, this one was amazing.  One particularly remarkable part was a breakfast I attended with people I had known since elementary school (even more years in the past!). There we were, certainly older, hopefully wiser, looking about the same, yet not, enmeshed in life, but in thoroughly different ways, moving across the skeins of our respective existences.
     What does one say to people he has known all those years?  In a word, everything. After dealing with the perfunctories (children, jobs, location, etc.), we began sharing the deeper currents of where we had been.  As we did, I thought often of a novel by the Japanese writer Shikao Endo which I had read many years before.  It is called Silence.  At one point in the story, Endo compares the process of knowing things, particularly things of existential or spiritual importance, to peeling an onion.  We unwrap life, and each other, one layer at a time.  We cannot rush it, we cannot push it.  We must peel slowly, letting each layer move through and touch us deeply, then begin to explore the next in the same way.  Life is complex, and so is unpacking it.
     As we journeyed more deeply into each other's lives, we came eventually to what we really believe about this existence we currently enjoy.  Do we really know what it is?  Do we really know what it is for?  Do we really know why we're here?
     Even if, as I do, one believes in God and that he infuses the cosmos with purpose, we still wonder about "why."  Why me?  Why anyone?  It's love, yes, but a love that is thoroughly unfathomable.
     And maybe that's the point.  God's love is the greatest--and best--mystery of all