Though yesterday I remembered my father, I was also thinking about a holiday.  It is a holiday sacred to over a billion people around the world:  the Hindu festival of Diwali.  A joyous occasion, Diwali is known as the festival of lights, full of decoration, celebration, and rejoicing over the fact of life and the gods who give it.
     And what could be wrong with this?  Life, however we might like to think about it, can be nothing more--and nothing less--than a gift from God.  Otherwise, it is a random occasion, a capricious occurrence, something into which we have found ourselves,  unknown, raw, and unprepared, and told we must live it.  Unless life is a gift of God, unless life is more than our good fortune--and what, in a random existence, is good?--to be born on this planet, we have no way to explain it, no way to really live it with realism and hope.  As the late evolutionary biologist William Provine acknowledged, if life is not a gift of God, we are no more than plops, born only to die.  Sure, we may enjoy life, but we are enjoying something that, in its deepest essence, has no meaning.
     Enjoy life, enjoy its lights.  Be happy for your gift.  Only, as Ecclesiastes 12 exhorts us, "Remember your creator," the one from whom, as the old hymn goes, "All things come."
     Including you.