Have you heard of the punk rock group Green Day?  If you do, you know that Green Day has been rocking the music world for over twenty years, turning out one hit album after another, doing wildly successful concert tours around the planet, and stirring up substantial media notice with some of its members' issues with drugs.

     It has produced several DVDs about its concerts, too.  A number of years ago, I had occasion to watch one:  "Bullet in a Bible."  I've watched it many times since, and never tire of how it presents one of the band's most famous songs, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams."  Why?  Even as the camera shows a perspiring Billie Joe Armstrong belting out the lyrics, it pans the audience, mostly millennials, mostly people who know the words by heart, and mostly people who, for any number of reasons, seem to connect, in an almost visceral way, with them.


     Armstrong sings of wandering amidst broken dreams, hoping that someone "up there" would find him, but concluding that in the end he will "walk alone," his shadow his only companion.  Powerful words, yet words which fit, I daresay, how many of us view the larger issues of our existence.  Most of us hope that, somehow, someway, there is a bigger picture to our lives, that there is a larger reason why we are here, that we do not live and die without any reason.  Most of us do not wish to live alone, be it alone among our fellow human beings, or the vast maw of the universe.  We want to feel connected to something more than us.
     After all, we're only--and only--human.  Happily, God was once, too.