"Vanity of vanity," says the author of Ecclesiastes, "all is vanity!"  Is everything really futile?  Of course not.  We generally enjoy our lives, we generally appreciate the opportunity to live on planet Earth for a season, we are usually grateful for the chance to experience the wonders of the universe.
     And when we die, unless we believe in an afterlife, we, as an unbelieving friend of mine remarked to me the other day, are gone.  We hope we are remembered, he said, for what will last, in his view, are relationships.  Yet even relationships do not last indefinitely.  Once our loved ones are gone, we are, too.  It is almost as if we had never lived.
     But we have.  So what do we do?  Do we draw a page from Albert Camus and embrace life's absurdity?  Or do we follow Jean Paul Satre and conclude, as did he, in a world without God, life is meaningless--but we should live anyway?  Whatever we do, we will wrestle with our finitude.  We will struggle with the certainty of our demise.  We will squirm about our human fate.
     It's almost too easy, too facile to say that there is an afterlife and that we will experience another life after this one.  Outside of accepting the fact of Jesus' resurrection, how do we know?
     Yet maybe, just maybe that is the point.  Though we cannot will our lives to be meaningful if life is futile and absurd, we can appreciate the insight of Sartre who, although he was a life long atheist, realized that apart from the presence of divinity, ultimately very little about existence will seem real.