As we consider the fact of All Souls Day, which many of us celebrated a couple of days ago, we remember.  We remember our loved ones who are gone, we remember what has gone well, we remember what has not.  We remember existence, we remember life itself.  We ponder the import of memory.

    We also ask, how do we explain what has happened, what has been?  How do we measure the span of our existence?  How do we measure the value of our days?

   

    In ourselves, though we may take pride in reflecting on a life we believe to be well lived, a life that has made its mark, how do we really know?  We have only ourselves and our fellow human beings by which to assess such things.  We can only measure by what we know.  And what we know is frightfully little.  Rarely do we see the big picture.  Rarely do we grasp the full meaning of our years.  We're finite creatures living in a finite world, a world that, one day, according to all cosmological predictions, will be burned up by an expanding sun, gone forever, never to be seen again.  And it will be over.

     Even if we are but dust, we affirm that dust only has value if it has a reason to be.  Absent this, though dust could well be, we have, apart from anything in us, no reason to believe it should.  It all just happened.  But why?

     As we remember, as we look back, as we look forward to, as poet Robert Browning once wrote, what is to come, in this life or the next, we come face to face with the fact of existence:  why must it be?

     Revel in the fact of personal creation.