Artist and poet, Bruce Baillie has turned many eyes with his creative takes on life and its landscapes.  One of his most famous works is "To Parsifal."  In it, he moves rapidly from one image to another of the American West, turning sensibilities over and over again until we are not sure on which image we ought most to ponder.   But this is his point.  Life is anything but static, and existence is anything but predictable.  We live in a sort of illumined darkness, suffused with joy yet caught in mortality.


     As we do, as we balance these contradicting points, we find ourselves blending, Baillie observes, our interior thoughts and the external space in which we have them.  We mix our inner with our outer, weaving them together, day after day, year after year, in a continuous attempt to come to grips with the facts of our finite existence.
     If I may, I will expand on Baillie's point to say that, yes, all of us need to be aware of the relationship between what is within and outside us, that we all must attend to our form while not overlooking our content.  I will add, however, that unless we ground our quest in something other than ourselves and our world, we are really not going anywhere.
     We go around and around only to return to where we began.  Materially, maybe this is enough.  Existentially, it will never be sufficient:  how can we explain that which we have no inkling of why it is here?

     If you are Irish (I'm one quarter), you know.  This year marks one hundred years since that Easter Day on which the Irish people took up arms against their British overlords to assert their independence.  It is a sacrosanct day in Ireland, and a revered moment in the lives of many Irish in other parts of the world.  In recognition of this centennial year, many books have appeared about the particulars of the revolt.
     One of these books, which I came across recently, has to do with the legendary Irish warrior Cuchulainn.  In a pensive moment, Cuchulainn is said to have remarked, "I care not though I were to live but one day and one night if only my fame and deeds live after me."  Do not all of us, to an extent, identify?  Cuchulainn wished for the Irish people to remember his deeds, to always find inspiration and glory in what he had done.
     Cuchulainn's sentiments find parallel in Gabriel Conroy's poem, "The Dead."  As he writes, "Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age."  Catholic to the core, these Irish revolutionaries wedded their challenge of British rule to the wonder of the life to come, fusing present ardor with certitude of coming celestial bliss.
     To a point, shouldn't we all?  Perhaps we do not want to be revolutionaries, and perhaps we do not want to be famous.  Yet we can certainly agree that if this life is lived in the compass of another, we do well to live it with vim and zest.  Just as we only live once, so do we only enter eternity once, and for all time.
     Every day, everything, absolutely everything we do, matters, not once, but twice:  eternity is that big.
     Long live present--and future--revolution.  In particular, the revolution that overturns everything we ever thought we knew.

     Anderson Cooper, known to many of us as an intrepid reporter of several decisive national and international events as well as a correspondent for the CBS news program Sixty Minutes, recently published a joint memoir with his equally famous mother, Gloria Vanderbilt.  In a documentary made to accompany the memoir, Anderson offers a telling observation of his mom.  She is, he said, "an emissary from a distant star, marooned on this planet and trying to make sense of it all."
     In the public eye since birth, Gloria Vanderbilt, heiress to a vast fortune and whose name was later attached to a pair of blue jeans, has never led a "normal" life like most of the rest of us.  How could she?  If we are not "celebrities," we cannot really know what fame is like.  While it seems glamorous and dashing, it is often laced with immense angst and loneliness.  "Who am I?," has many a "famous" person asked.  "Am I really marooned on planet Earth?"
     Unlikely, of course.  Perhaps Cooper's point is that although all of us are trying to make sense of this existence, it is the famous who maybe feel the most unequipped to do so:  are they only here for others' pleasure?  For that matter, what do any of us mean? Are we all marooned in this existence?  After all, none of us made a choice to be here.
     Planets near, planets far:  unless the cosmos has a larger and transcendent purpose, regardless of who we are and where we are from, we are nothing more than vacuous wisps of materiality in a vast, impenetrable, and unexplainable sense of being.
     
     

     Growing up in California, I had many opportunities to camp in the desert.  At any given moment, I was only a couple of hours from thousands of acres of expansive stretches of cacti, sagebrush, empty rivers, and vast mountains of sand.  Over the years, I grew to love desert camping.  Though I still loved the mountains foremost, I found in the desert a starkness of beauty, a sublimity and equanimity of geological expression that I could find nowhere else.  Pushing all the superfluous and extraneous away, the desert reduced life to its raw essentials:  there was little else beyond its presence.
     The early fathers of the Christian church (and the elders of countless other religious traditions as well) enjoyed the desert, too.  They found its emptiness ideal for spiritual reflection and existential contemplation.  Reveling in the silence of the voiceless landscape, they found themselves drawn ever more deeply into meditating on anything but the ordinary and mundane.
     You may never come to appreciate the desert.  Yet you can perhaps come to accept that we will never find what is most important without letting go of everything else that we think is.  Though God is everywhere present, he remains apophatic.  In this world, he is a hidden God.
     Ironically, more often than not, we're the ones who hide him.
     As we do not see the surreal majesty of a nighttime desert sky, its black darkness sprinkled with innumerable stars, without leaving our urban lives far behind, so we will not see God unless we set aside the busyness of the present for the greater and illuminating presence that lies within and beyond it.
     It's hard to see in the quotidian dark.

     Lost civilizations?  In his House of Rain, author Craig Childs tells a fascinating story of the years he has spent tracking down the remains of the Anasazi Indian tribe that occupied many parts of the American Southwest in the first and second millennium A.D.        The fascination is that although we have copious evidences of the Anasazis, we do not know why they disappeared.  While we can document the causes of the disappearances of other Indian tribes, we cannot do so for the Anasazis.  Their demise, like that of the Mayan civilization of Central America, remains a profound historical mystery.
     As I have been wrapping up my writing of a book about memory, I have thought often about the Anasazis.  We know of them, and we know about them.  But what we do not know is them.  Our memory of the Anasazis only extends as far as their artifacts; it does not encompass who they are.
     So it is for countless other bygone civilizations.  One after another, for thousands and thousands of years, they come, and they go, emerging, flourishing, and dying, often without any notice or clue.  How will we know them?  How will we remember them?
     We will only remember them as memory itself.  And memory will only remember if it is remembered in turn.  Absent a starting point, memory has no form.  Only as memory begins will it end.  And memory cannot begin unless there is a beginning of remembrance, a remembering God.
     Otherwise, one day, one day far into the future, no one will remember anything at all. And what will life have been all about, anyway?

     Although seismologists can tell us where an earthquake is likely to occur, rarely can they predict when it will occur.  Poor Ecuador.  Pummeled by a devastating earthquake a few days ago, and hit once more with an aftershock yesterday, Ecuador is struggling, struggling immensely, to cope.  So much loss, so much pain.  For those caught in it, the suffering is unfathomable.  Never had they before experienced such physical and spiritual deprivation.
     If you have the means, consider sending money to the many relief organizations that are already on the ground, trying their best to reach those hurt in urban areas as well as those in some very remote rural regions.  For the latter, help may be long in coming.  It's tragic, as they are often the poorest people in the country.
     A colleague of mine whose family still has many connections to people in the country, has talked me poignantly about the pain Ecuadorians are feeling.  "Nothing," she says, "has happened like this in Ecuador before.  No one was ready.  Everyone is hurting."
     Yes.  We may know what to expect, but we do not as often known when to expect it. The world is highly capricious, its systems on the one hand highly predictable, yet on the other hand deeply prone to recondite surprises.  So we ask:  what is God doing in all of this?  If he ordered the world, why would he order this?
     Unfortunately, this is an unanswerable question.  We end up either questioning God or ourselves.  And neither God nor we will be able to answer satisfactorily.  We're back to square one.  I wish I had some answers.  I wish I knew why.
     Despite everything, however, I will continue to seek solace.  Yet I will seek it not in the notion of a faceless and empty cosmos but, however difficult it may be, in the fact of an omniscient God.  I would rather know, eventually, than not.
     Pray for Ecuador.
     I'll be traveling for the remainder of this week.  See you on Monday:  thanks for reading!

     A couple of weeks ago, American author Jim Harrison died at the age of 78.  A prolific and creative writer, Harrison penned dozens of books, articles, and poems about living lustily and fully.  His plots are brazen, his characters singularly memorable; his poems intricately entangled in the puzzles of the present.  I share here part of a poem Harrison wrote while thinking about the poet Sergei Yesenin, who committed suicide in 1925 at the age of 30.
     "And what a dance you had kicking your legs from the rope--We all change our minds, Berryman said in Minnesota halfway down the river.  Beauty takes my courage away this cold autumn evening.  My year-old daughter's red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop."
     Such poignant words about about the beauty, the tarnished and difficult beauty, of earthly existence.  Life is confusing, yes, yet it's lovely, its vertiginous ripples generously dappled with moments of adventure and discovery and profound personal joy. It's all good.
     So it is.  Harrison relished in stirring up the waters of our existential complacency, ever reminding us that finding life's goodness is in the living of it.  I can't disagree.  Nor do I disagree with Harrison's position that this life is the only mortal one we will have.  Carpe diem.  Yet I'm also persuaded that unless I want to live with the existentialists' ongoing contradiction of life's freedom and life's death, I need to know that life and death occur in a much larger ken.  I need to be able to explain why both have to be.
     And this is very difficult to do if we've living in a world that is its own sum.  For this raises another question in turn:  how do we know?

     Do we see or feel God?  Maybe we do both.  Majid Majidi's film Color of God, usually titled in English The Color of Paradise, explores this question.  The Color of Paradise tells the story of a blind boy who wants to see God.  Although he senses he feels God when he roams the hillsides near his home, he really wants most to see him.
     Meanwhile, as the boy's (Mohammad) father, a widower, prepares to remarry, he is reluctant for his bride-to-be's family to know about Mohammad.  He fears they will see Mohammad's blindness as a bad omen.  So he sends Mohammad away to live with, ironically, a blind carpenter.  When Mohammad tells the carpenter that he wants not just to feel God, but to see him as well, the carpenter reminds him that God is everywhere: wouldn't you, he asks Mohammad, therefore know him as well as anyone who sees him?
     As the story continues, Mohammad's father's fiance's family learns of the boy's blindness and calls off the wedding.  Crestfallen yet now realizing that he can bring Mohammad back, his father fetches him and begins the journey home.  Along the way, however, a bridge on which they are walking collapses and Mohammed falls into the water.  As the current carries him away, his father hesitates, then goes after him.  But soon he, too, is caught in the swift flowing water.
     In the closing scene, Mohammad's father finds himself on the shore of the Caspian Sea, shaken but alive.  Then he sees Mohammad's lifeless body, washed up nearby.  He weeps As a woodpecker then hammers away overhead, his father sees Mohammad's fingers move, seemingly tapping to the sound.  In a moment of magic, much like the magical realism of Gabriel Marquez's novels, Mohammad's father thinks:  maybe his son finally sees God. Maybe now, in the land beyond death, in the land of green fields and profuse gardens, Mohammad's wishes have come true.  Though once he could only feel God, perhaps now he can do far more.
     Aren't we all like Mohammad?  In this life, we will never see God.  One day, however, we will.  Yet I like to think that the greater the deprivations of sight we suffer in this life, the greater will be our wonder when we finally lose them.  Now, we see the earth, we feel God.  How much greater will it be when we can no longer see the earth, but see only God?

     In America, today, April 15, is tax day (although due to a quirk in the federal government calendar, this year the actual day is April 18).  It's the day on which every working American must, unless she applies for an extension, file her income taxes.  It's also the day on which many an accountant can finally take a break, the day on which countless tax attorneys can finally kick back.  Their work is, for a brief season, over.
     Until next year.
     No one enjoys paying taxes.  No one likes giving their money to a government which they believe is not spending it wisely.  Very few of us appreciates that paying taxes is a privilege, a "perk" that attends working for a living. Very few of us would miss filing our income tax returns.
     Sure, all of us know the argument:  taxes fund the governments that in turn, we hope, provide us with order, safety, education, and protection.  But we disagree on how much of our money ought to go to the government to do these things.
     Without stepping into the debate here, I suggest that we can perhaps look at taxes in a larger light.  According to the New Testament (Romans 13) because governments are ordained by God and exist for our good, we pay our taxes.  But this raises other questions.  Does God ordain every government--even clearly evil ones?
     It's a difficult position.  Maybe the point is rather that, this dilemma notwithstanding, we pay taxes because we believe that regardless of how the world looks, God remains in it, working out his purposes for it.  It's a good world with (mostly) good people.  It is a world created by and infused with God.  It's also a world in which, as a result, we are present.
    In the biggest possible picture, everything, though we do not always see or know it, has a point.  Even taxes.

     If you are at all familiar with the horrific waves of violence that swept through the Balkans in the late 1990s, you have undoubtedly heard the name of Radovan Karadzic. Recently, upon being convicted by the International Crime Court of the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in Bosnia, he turned to his lawyer and said, "I am astonished."
     To the very end of the trial, Karadzic demonstrated no remorse or regret for what he had done. In fact, he acted as if it had never happened.  Srebrenica, he often remarked, was a "fiction."  Karadzic's heart was one of utter indifference to justice and pain.
     Yet to those who knew him, even to the diplomats with whom he interacted, Karadzic was the most gracious of hosts, a man of thoroughgoing courtesy and conviviality.  He appeared to be a person who would do anything for his guests.
     Much ink has been poured about the perfidy of the human heart.  Unfortunately, much of it is true.  Even if we do not behave like Karadzic, we are in truth far darker than we imagine.  Beneath our veneers of civility, horror lurks.  Yet we rarely see it.  Why would we want to?  Though we are good, magnificent creatures made in the image of God, we are capable of acts of singularly overwhelming violence and pain.
     Why is this?  Psychologically, we label it a neurosis.  Theologically, we call it sin. Either way, we see, again, that finitude has limits, powerful and unbridgeable limits. While we may well be able to save the world from our acts of degradation, we in no way will ever save ourselves from who we are.  Our moral compass simply isn't large enough.
     We may not be a Karadzic, but we--all of us--who, because we live in a divinely endowed universe, remain in tremendous moral need.
     We all need Jesus, we all need God.
     

     Have you heard of the Ramones?  Widely considered to be the founders of punk rock, the Ramones burned a brief yet influential flame amidst the candles of contemporary music in the Seventies.  Related not by name but common cause, the Ramones produced some of the rawest rock and roll music the genre had yet seen.  Bitter, rebellious, questioning, and filled with angst, their songs touched countless hearts, hearts disappointed with the state of an empty and helpless existence, hearts burned by the promises of a distant and opaque economic and political establishment.  The Ramones were an inevitable response to difficult times.
     Sadly, however, after breaking up in 1997, one by one, the four members of the band passed on.  Joey died of lymphoma in 2001; Dee Dee of a heroin overdoes in 2002. Johnny succumbed to prostate cancer in 2004, and Tommy to cancer of the bile duct in 2014. Tommy was 65; Joey was 49.  In almost every way, it was a tragic end to a band built on the premise of a life guaranteeing the same.
     We all wrestle with angst; we all struggle with uncertainty and doubt.  We all wonder what life is about.  We all grapple with the fact of our presence in an often bewildering existence.  And we should:  life is far from simple.
     And believing in God doesn't necessarily make life any less so.  In fact, it often makes life even more complex.  Faith is difficult.  I appreciate the depth of the Ramones' beliefs, I value the enormity of their honest struggle.  Together, they were willing to take on life for what it is:  to wit, apart from any external purpose, a wisp of air atop a windless sea.
     Whatever you believe life to be, be sure, be absolutely sure that it is what you think. Finitude is grand, yes, but ultimately finitude is a journey of inexplicable smoke and unfathomable mirrors.
     Rest all, Ramones.

     Perhaps you've heard of the story of the Prodigal Son.  One of Jesus' most well known parables, the Prodigal Son tells a moving story of love and forgiveness.  Given the audience to which Jesus told it (a mix of people who believed they were sinners and people who believed they were not), the Prodigal Son gives us powerful insights into the nature of God.
     For those who are not entirely familiar with the story, it tells a tale of a father with two sons.  One day, his youngest son comes to his father and asks for his share of the family estate.  Though this was an unusual request in its time, the father grants it.  Upon receiving his share, the son leaves home and proceeds to squander all of it on a life of debauchery and decadence.  When a famine hits the land, he begins to starve.
     Then he has a thought.  He will return home, ask his father's forgiveness, and work as a hired hand.  So he sets off.  Barely had he entered his father's land when his father saw him from afar.  Delighted, he ran to his son, embraced him, and held a great feast in his honor.  "Once my son was lost," he said, "and now he is found."
     Did the father reject his son?  No.  Did the father even scold his son?  No.  He simply loved him.  Many years ago, when I was seventeen years old, I returned home after a summer spent backpacking in the mountains of California.  Ragged and dirty, I was a sight few wanted to behold.  As I rang the bell of my family's home, I wondered:  would my mother, the mother whose heart I had broken repeatedly with my wild behavior in high school, still invite me back?  Would she make me sleep in the backyard?
     Would she still love me?
     Flinging the door open and kissing me on my cheek, my mother not once mentioned the pain of the past.  Not once did she remind me of what I had done.  She simply loved me.
     In the prodigal son's father response to his erstwhile son, in my mother's welcome to her wandering offspring, in any response of unconditional acceptance and forgiveness, we see the heart of who God is.  All God really wants to do is love us.  All God really wants to know is that we know he loves us, loves us totally, loves us completely.  He doesn't want to ask us questions, he doesn't want to reprimand us; he only wants to love us.
     As the apostle John wrote centuries ago, "In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us . . . (1 John 4:10).
     Calling all prodigals:  come home!
    

     "You see, the worst of it is when you admit that it can’t ever change.  When you are young you think happiness will come later on, and you hope for things; and then the same old poverty gets hold of you and you are caught up in it . . . Now I don’t wish anyone any harm, but there are times when the injustice of it makes me mad.
     "And then, if only there were some truth in what the priests say, if only the poor of this world were rich in the next . . . no, when you're dead, you're dead . . . so there it is, we're done for."
     Depressing, isn't it?  Like the movie "Leviathan," a movie I mentioned last week about political powerlessness in modern day Russia, the lines I cited above, from a novel by nineteenth French author Emile Zola called Germinal, paint a similar picture of people who have lost all hope in their own ability to ever change their situation.  And in this case, the change these people crave is not political, but a change far more profound.  The protagonists of Germinal long for a change in their metaphysical destiny.  They want to know that even if they find this life unbearably difficult, they one day will find another life, an eternal life, of joy unbounded.
     But they don't see this ever happening.
     Physical pain and feelings of political impotence indeed make for a raw existence. When these are compounded with the pain of thinking that the remedy of an afterlife is not forthcoming, however, we are left with very few options with which to live a meaningful life.  Although Viktor Frankel in his classic Man's Search for Meaning demonstrated that regardless of one's circumstances, people will continue to strive for hope and meaning, the absence of some level of post-death leveling for those experiencing economic and political oppression can make these strivings seem, at times, rather hollow.  Where is the justice?
     Though I cannot describe precisely how God will one day remedy the injustices of this earthly existence, I do not think this is the point.  It is rather that this life is not an existence from dust to dust, and nothing more.  The fact of divine oversight of all things earthly underscores that no matter what happens here, it is how what happens here will determine what happens next that is the most important.  We do not live in a material vacuum.  We live in a world pervaded by supernatural thought and destiny.  And although we can pretend this isn't true, we cannot pretend that the inequities of this existence do not mean anything to us.  We know they do.
     We can't have it both ways.  Justice cannot exist without purpose, and purpose cannot exist without God.

     The word "leviathan" stirs up a number of thoughts.  For some, it is the title of Englishman Thomas Hobbes' text arguing for a strong and unforgiving central government; for others, it is the variously named animal described in the later chapters of the Book of Job; for still others, it is a generic term for a large and overwhelming governmental authority.
     "Leviathan," a movie filmed in Russia and directed by a native Russian which I saw recently, takes the third view.  It's a sad story, really, a dark tale of how one man, Kolya, attempts to challenge the system, the "leviathan," and loses, horribly.  The tale begins when the government, the "leviathan," announces that it is taking Kolya's "to die for" piece of coastal property for a major economic development.  Unhappy that he has had no say in the matter, Kolya takes the matter to court.  He hires a lawyer to come from Moscow to argue his case.
     As the story unfolds, things go from bad to worse.  First, the courts deny Kolya's petition.  Second, when Kolya and his lawyer then go to the police station to file a new petition, he is arrested after yelling at a police officer.  Third, after the lawyer confronts the mayor of the town about the many financial improprieties underlying the effort to acquire the property, he is taken out of town and beaten up.  Fourth, Kolya's wife goes missing (although we are led to believe she took her life).  When her body is found, washed in by the ocean tide, Kolya is arrested, fairly or not, for her alleged murder.  He is subsequently sentenced to fifteen years in prison.
     As the movie draws to a close, we see a wrecking machine tearing apart Kolya's house, bit by bit eradicating the lives that once existed there.  Then we see the mayor enjoying a meal in a fine restaurant, smug, happy, and delighted to hear of Kolya's sentence. Finally, we see a shot of the prison where Kolya will spend the next fifteen years of his life.
     So what's the point?  Life can indeed be a miserable experience.  Too many people live lives like Kolya's, lives in which they feel as if everything is against them, with no way out.  Existence seems a prison.
     And in many ways, it is.  We did not ask to be born, and we usually do not ask to die. We are, to use Martin Heidegger's word, "thrown" into this existence.  The choice is never ours.
     And even though we can live and be happy just the same, we will still have no answer for why life seems good for some and terrible for others, other than to say, "that's the way life is."  And this solves nothing.
     If we believe God is there, however, do we have an answer for Kolya?  In in this life, nothing definitive.  But we can say that because God, in the person of Jesus, once lived and suffered much more than we, answers, somehow, some way, remain.  Bewilderingly and, in a way, oddly and tragically, because God is there, we are, too, present, purposed, and true.

     It's a lonely image, that of the "Wandering Jew," and the one below in particular.  You may notice that the person in this painting is wandering past the crucified Jesus, past the one who proclaimed that he had come to deliver the Jewish people--his people--from sin. As the wind blows and the storm rages, however, this person is moving determinedly ahead, resolved to keep going another way.
     In many ways, however, all of us walk the path of this "Wandering Jew."  Whether we believe in Jesus, Allah, Krishna, or some other expression the divine, we frequently forget about him in the course of our daily life.  Perhaps more than we think, we live and breath with nary a thought of him.  We wander through the storms of our lives, our hearts hardened and chin held high:  we will survive, regardless.
     The painting before us captures existence aptly.  Life can indeed be like hiking through a cold and forsaken wilderness.  Small wonder that we try so hard to control it; little surprise that we do whatever we can to contain it.  We want to keep afloat.

    And in most instances, we will.  Yet we all have a choice.  We can navigate life declining belief in anything bigger than what it is, or we can live life believing in the full range of its possibilities.  Only in the latter way, however, will we see the larger point. Otherwise, though we wander determinedly, we will wander from dust to dust, one day coming into being, another day vanishing forever.  It's over.
     It's April:  enjoy the potential--the fullest potential--of what it can be.

     Last week we celebrated the birthday of one of the greatest of the Romantic pianists:  Sergei Rachmaninoff.  Born in Russia, eventually emigrating to America and, shortly before his death in 1943, becoming an American citizen, Rachmaninoff (my wife's favorite musician) composed some of the richest music ever written for the piano. His work blends intense and mournful melody with powerful and intricate chords and keyboard movements, beautifully capturing the deepest spirit of the Romantics.  Rachmaninoff's musician gives us a window, a poignant window into our perennial struggle with the vast and unyielding import of sentient existence.  It shows us that  however intellectual we may suppose ourselves to be, we are, in the end, creatures of heart and imagination.  We live as sensual beings.
     Moreover, though we realize that reason is an essential part of who we are, we understand that we make our biggest decisions with our heart.  To put this in theological terms, although we may believe, as a matter of intellectual assent, that Jesus died and rose, we can only trust it with our heart.
     Long live the Romantics.

     At this point, Easter seems far away (although one of my neighbors gave his children an Easter egg hunt today!).  Messiah isn't played anymore; the special food is gone; church services resume their normality; people have returned to their daily responsibilities.  The glory of the day seems gone.
     For the very earliest Christians, the eleven (absent Judas) apostles and their immediate followers, the resurrection's wonder never left them.  It was literally all they could talk about.  They remained amazed, totally amazed, that though Jesus died, he came back:  he lived again.  Jesus' resurrection confirmed everything they understood about the message of their scriptures.  It validated all that, over the many centuries of Israel's existence, God had promised.  In Jesus' rising, death, that universal scourge of every human being, they realized, was over.
     Nonetheless, in the heat of existence, on the days when we are feeling particularly overwhelmed with the exigencies of being alive, remembering this message becomes difficult.  We may feel as if we are like people who, as Virginia Woolf observed in her "Lives of the Obscure," are "advancing with lights in the growing gloom," heading toward obscurity, the obscurity of a life lived, a life enjoyed immensely but a life one day to end and be gone, never to return.  Believing in eternal life is hard in the morass of the material present.  We cannot see it, so why put our trust in it?
     As Irish poet William Yeats reminds us, however, "And God stands winding his lonely horn, and time and the world are ever in flight."  Though time wears on and the years drag by, unyielding and unchanging, God remains.  Resurrection continues.
     It's hard to see the end of a road at its beginning, yes, but the resurrection tells us that despite everything we might see, there is a road to follow.
     And there's a destiny at its end.
     Have a great day.