Memory.  In one section of my latest book, I share some thoughts from an article I had read some years before in the New York Times Magazine.  It featured photographs of the childhood bedrooms of men and woman who had been killed in Iraq, bedrooms to which, tragically, they now would never return.  Stuffed animals competed with video players, brightly patterned spreads with military paraphernailia. Notes from Mom and Dad appeared along with high school textbooks.  Some bedrooms had a Peter Pan feel, those of a person who never wanted to grow up, but who did, in the most poignant and final of ways.  Memories flood every photograph.  It's so moving.

     The parents of these fallen soldiers will of course never forget their children.  They hope that their sons and daughters did not die in vain; they hope that they died happy to be doing what they were doing; they hope they have a better life than this earthly one. They manage with hope.  It's a hope driven by love, a love driven, for many of them, in a belief in a loving God.  It's a hope that acknowledges that quite apart from the active presence of God, suffusing the cosmos with potential and meaning, hope in what is earthbound, has no real basis. It doesn't last.  Yet if a loving God is there, even the most distant and invisible and hopeless of earthbound hopes has reality, thoroughgoing tangible form and working presence.

     Apart from God, though memory be powerful and strong, it remains what it will always be:  an ending.  With God, although death will come, the memory it leaves becomes a beginning, the most wonderful beginning of all.