Norbert Schemansky, who won weightlifting medals at four Olympic games early in the last century, died last week at the age of 92.  If you've never heard of him, you're not the only one.  Very few people have.  Although Schemansky shone in the tiny community of Olympic weightlifters, he was a virtual unknown everywhere else.  In fact, when he returned to his home town after winning a medal at the Olympics, he had to flag a cab to get home.  No one was there to greet him, no one was there to remember him.
     In an interview he gave later in his life, Schemansky observed, "You give up so much. Yeah, sometimes, I wonder why I did it."
     It's a familiar dilemma, one we noted yesterday in considering a quote from Franz Kafka:  why do we do anything, anything at all?
     Because we're here, because we can.  Because we live.
     True enough.  The far larger question, however, is this:  why do we live?
     In ourselves, we'll never know.  How can we?  We're finite.
     That's why we need God.  Though we can live with mystery, and do so every day of our lives, we may not find it as easy to die with it.
     Absent God, we will leave short of understanding the greatest puzzle of all.