Over the weekend, I joined a Zoom conversation between a group of some of my oldest friends, people I met decades ago when we were all, to paraphrase one book's title, college students and young.  A couple of years ago, we held an in-person reunion; for now, however, we must resort to Zoom.

     We all shared our lives.  Many of us have retired, some of us are still working, full and part-time.  All seemed happy.  After I read through the first chapter of Ecclesiastes this morning, a chapter rife with observations of the seeming futility of existence, the almost frightening way that life and its rhythms repeat themselves over and over again with no explanation of why other than this is just the way it is, and the writer's conclusion that because everything that has been done is what will be done and that one day no one will remember us anyway, however, I thought anew of the point of our time on this planet.

     None of us would deny that it's been a grand time.  None of us would say that being alive has not been worth the cost.  And none of us wants to leave life anytime soon.  All of us would agree that each of us has mattered.

     No argument there.  What always makes me stop and think, however, is how we come to this conclusion.  The easy answer is to say that, well, we're human beings: aren't we and our lives important?  The far more difficult question that this answer poses, however, is, why is this important?  We're only affirming our own importance!

     And then we die.  REM once wrote a song called "The Great Beyond."  Without repeating its exact words (copyright laws), I will say that this song states, in sum, that life is nothing if it were not for the Great Beyond.

     It's hard to disagree.