So many times did I read over Thanksgiving weekend one of the closing verses in Ecclesiastes, "Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.  'Vanity of vanity,' says the Preacher, 'all is vanity'!"  It doesn't seem appropriate for a day of giving thanks, does it?
    It was on Thanksgiving a few years ago that I received word that my ninety-one year old aunt, the last living member of my parents' generation, had been admitted to a hospital with pneumonia.  Her prognosis was not good.  In fact, I learned the next day, Aunt Patty was dying.
    Sunday morning, Patty did die, passing out of this world, this life, forever.  I'll never see her, in this life, again.  It's very final.  And yes, despite the best efforts of the morticians, not too many months will pass before she is, well, dust.
    In a book, He Held Radical Light, which he published a few years ago, poet Christian Wiman writes of our deep desire to "reconcile a deep intuition of otherness with the adamantine materialism that both science and our clock-logic lives seem to confirm."  We instinctively know life is more than what it is, yet we just as strongly want to believe it is not.
    Put another way, the fact of otherness demands that truth and belief becomes one and the same.
    It also enables us to know life as it is most meant to be.

    By the way, next week I'll be traveling in the American West.  I'll catch up with you in a couple of weeks.  Thanks for reading!