I trust everyone had a good New Year, full of joy, gratitude, and thanksgiving, as we look to the year before us.  In addition to this being a leap year, it is also, as Americans doubtless know, an election year.
     However, I will not write about the election today.  As I regrouped yesterday after returning from my backpacking trip (about which I will have more to say), I noticed that musician David Bowie died earlier that morning.  He was 69.  The cause of death was cancer, an ailment with which I was not entirely aware he had been struggling.

     
   

     I had always watched Bowie's musical evolution with interest, initially wondering how much was show and how much was genuine creativity.  After a couple of decades, I decided that it was more the latter, that like many other musicians who have crossed the paths of Western culture, Bowie managed to blend his musical vision with prevailing cultural mores and circumstances to produce some highly innovative, and memorable, work.
     A few years ago, I blogged on one of his songs, "Heroes."  I said that we all want to be heroes, we all want to take hold of a destiny, we all want to be free, free to make the world for us, free to capture our life wonder.  And so, I added, we should.  We are made for destiny, we are made for vision:  kings and queens, as Bowie put it, of humanness.
     Granted, we can pursue our destiny regardless of whether or not we believe in God. God or not, we remain thoroughly human.  God's presence, however, places our destiny in a vastly different framework.  It sets our lives in purpose, a purpose we would not find apart from a created universe.
     Rest well, David Bowie.