"I went down to the countries beneath the earth, to the nations of the past; but you have brought up my life from the pit, O Lord, my God."  Jonah understood life well:  so is the fate of all nations.  None will last forever; none will endure indefinitely.
     Neither will we.  One day, we, too, will descend to the lands beneath the earth, slip out of this existence into another one, one far darker than this present experience, fade from all that we know and love, never to return.

     As I try to come to grips with the fact of Good Friday, the day of absolute nadir and blackness, the moment in which time itself ran away, the point when all that we love tumbled into the heart of what it ultimately is, a heartbreaking picture of form and evanescence, I wonder about Jonah's words.  We will not know what death is like until we die.  And we will not know life until it is gone.
     It can seem a cold world, a cold and insensate world, a world that for too many of us often seems to not care one whit who we are.  Or whom we one day might be.  We may tremble, we may leap.  We ponder our joy, we avoid our ephemerality.  But we are both.
     And what will we do?