If you've read Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, you know that they present a highly intriguing mix of piety, critique, and bawdiness to its readers in early Renaissance England.  Chaucer's stories describe a people on the cusp of modernity, poised between the rigidity of medieval dogma and the more expansive theology of early modern Europe. As such, they speak to all ages and times.
     In the "Miller's Tale," we read about a somewhat dense carpenter who has married a lovely woman many years younger than he and the various attempts of men closer to her age to persuade her to focus her attentions on them.  One of them, Nicholas, succeeds, though not without considerable physical hardship on his part.  In the end, the poor carpenter becomes the object of general parody in the town in which the story takes place.

     What's Chaucer's point?  While there are many, the one which I mention today is that however pious someone claims to be--and the carpenter's wife's various "suitors" certainly claimed to be so--it means little unless it is a work of the heart.  Outwardly, we all look good and respectable.  It is inwardly, however, that we find our real selves.
     Yes, we all mistakes, and yes, we all make poor decisions.  The more important point is that we affirm the fact of transcendence as essential to being a human being.  Moreover, a transcendence into which we, finite and very much attached to who we are, step each day, step so that we understand that, in the big picture, we are no more than that in which we place our ultimate trust.  If our world is ourselves, we'll never really see what it means.  If our world invests in transcendence, we will:  humility demands that we need something other than ourselves to know who we most are.