If you're a Baby Boomer, you remember.  Fifty-seven years ago yesterday, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was killed, gunned down by an assassin in Dallas, Texas.  For those of us who lived through this day, we will never forget it.  Although a number of presidents had been assassinated previously, JFK's occurred in our lifetime, in our time, in our day.  We didn't read about it in history books; we experienced it, experienced it directly and personally, in a profoundly visceral way.  Our world would never be the same.

     Setting aside the seemingly endless debates about assassination conspiracies, the relative value of JFK's presidency, or intimations that JFK might be the "AntiChrist," and looking at the bigger picture, we see one simple truth:  we live in a frighteningly capricious and unpredictable world.  Though we build our lives on concrete particulars, we construct our life meaning on universals, on hopes and dreams we cannot always see.  We are finite creatures living in a bottomless world.

     At JKF's grave in Arlington cemetery, the flame burns eternal:  only in transcendence will we see what is really true.