Karl Marx.  For some people, like his long time friend and supporter Friedrich Engels, Marx was a man whose influence would reverberate nearly indefinitely across the prism of human experience.  For others, Marx was a person whom they would just as soon forget, a person whose ideas have spawned untold amounts of pain and destruction.
     Ironically, both sides are right.  Marx's ideas will probably never go away completely, and we do not need to read much history to realize that his ideas, however wrongly they may have been interpreted, have indeed brought significant misery upon the human race.
     This brings me to Marx's daughter Eleanor, the daughter who Marx said, "Is just like me."  And so she was.  Growing up in a household frequented by the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century, set loose to read voraciously in the Marx family library, eyewitness to the birth of some of the most powerful ideas in Western history, Eleanor was, in every way, a Marx for all seasons.  While her father lived, she worked tirelessly to promote equal rights, equity for workers, democratic government, and freedom of speech and, after her father died, continued to work unceasingly for such things.  Her commitment was unwavering, her energy unabated.  Eleanor took the best of her father's thinking, that is, fairness between employer and employee, equal treatment for men and women under the law, freedom of speech and association, and more, and devoted her life to promoting them.
     And for this, we can thank her.  However, when she was in her forties, Eleanor learned that her long time companion and lover had married another woman.  So distraught was she that she took her own life, poisoning herself with prussic acid.  It was a tragic end.  So much verve, so much passion, so much life, now irretrievably gone.
     Although we can disagree on the worth of what we believe Marx and/or his daughter advocated, we all can weep over Eleanor's premature demise.  As the existentialists pointed out, life is passion, full of experience and growth.  How much more, I might add, when life is set in the compass of God, the fount of eternal passion and discovery.
     The psalmist said, "The human being is a mere shadow, a phantom."  With God, however, the human, and her passion, is forever.