"It is a day that will live in infamy," said Franklin Roosevelt after the attack on Pearl Harbor.  For those who were alive when it happened, the attack on the naval base at Pearl Harbor, whose 82nd anniversary is today, changed their world forever.  Never before had America been attacked, never before had such devastation been visited upon its shores.  Life was turned upside down.

     But isn't that the nature of existence?  It's capricious, random, and unpredictable, a series of unexpected waves in an unfathomable sea, an illusory skein on an abyss whose bottom we will never see.
     
     Yet we go on.  We grieve for those who lost their lives in this attack.  And we grieve for the thousand and thousands of additional lives that were lost redressing what happened.  The pain and carnage defy all form and sensibility. 
     
     And we continue to believe in meaning.  As we should.  No one should die unremembered, no one should die alone. No one should leave this life lost and abandoned, a forgotten and abandoned image of God, an entity without a point.

     Advent's light, however, reminds us that the horrors of existence are never the end.