"Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, King of the universe, who didst create the heavens by thy command, and all their host by thy mere word.  Thou hast subjected them to fixed laws and time, so that they might not deviate from their set function.  They are glad and happy to do the will of their Creator, the true Author, whose achievement is truth . . . blessed art thou, O Lord, who renewest the months."

     So says a portion of the revered Jewish Amidah, a beautiful collection of eighteen benedictions that anchor the Jewish liturgy.  Whether or not you believe in God, and whether or not you believe that God acts in human lives, I hope that you find some weight, some measure of meaning, perhaps an avenue of meditation or reflection, in this prayer.  God or not, we marvel at the order of the cosmos.  We are grateful for the rhythms of the seasons.  And we long for truth.
     God or not, we cannot live and function without the immensely fine tuned structure of the universe, cannot make any cogent plans apart from the certainty of seasonal change.  We rejoice that we can find meaning, we delight that we can find truth.
     Perhaps, perhaps if you are on the other side of faith, perhaps if you do not believe in God, perhaps you can at least believe in a meaningful universe, an intelligible cosmos.  If so, then perhaps you might be able to imagine that, like the prayer before us insists, undergirding everything we see and experience is something that enables it to be real and, most importantly, true.
     After all, we cannot really aver that we are true by looking only at ourselves:  how do we know?