The end of last week's work week was September 9.  Here is the blog I wrote but failed to post.
     Sixty-six years ago on this day in Los Angeles, California, my parents were joined in marriage.  Though they are now gone, my father since 1983, my mother since 2010, I cannot help but remember the import of the day.  Had it not happened, neither I nor my three siblings would be here, would not have had the opportunity we've had to live this life and experience some of its wonders.  So we are all thankful for September 9.
     We all have our dates of memory, signal points in our lives, days of liminality from which much significance has sprung.  We delight and rejoice in them even while we touch the pain with which they leave us when the people involved in them are gone.  It's a funny, life, a curious blend of dark and light, an enigmatic mix of insight and ignorance. We know it, we love, but we can't own it.  Regardless of the date, irrespective of the event and moment, when all the dust settles, we are still powerless to retain it beyond what they will give us.
     This is of course frustrating, even depressing, but what can we do?
     On the one hand, nothing:  life is how it is.  On the other hand, everything:  life is precisely how it is.
     Is life about God or is life about us?  Or is it about both?  In his sermon (Acts 17) on Mars Hill in first century Athens, the apostle Paul observed, "In him [God] we live and breathe and have our being."  This seems to hit the mark.  We will wrestle with finitude's vexations until the day we die.  And we do so because, in ourselves, we will never know anything else.  But we are not everything there is.
     I miss my parents, but I would miss them even more if I knew it was just me and a dark, insouciant universe.