MUSING ABOUT LIFE

When you were 12 maybe you were asking yourself some of the same questions I was. "Why does big Burt always bully me...?" "Why does Mr. Rooney next door always come home drunk...?" "And why in God's name won't Rosie ever smile at me...?" I didn't realize it, but I was pondering some of life's great mysteries: Evil! Tragedy! Love!

Now I don't know if you've come up with any answers. I'm still trying.

Burt was my metaphor for the eternal how-can-a-good-Creator-create-evil conundrum that theologians and my Aunt Rose always talk about. The classic example -- the innocent child suddenly struck down by a cruel disease. Theologians tend to say God doesn't create only allows evil in his world. But why? As Job learned, the answer belongs to God alone. As some theologians put it, evil in life can serendipitously lead to a greater good. As Aunt Rose said at the wake when people wept for her loss, "Oh I didn't lose her; she's waiting for me at home."

Somewhere within the trinity of those ideas is the answer I live with.

As for Mr. Rooney, he was a happy-go-lucky metaphor for the Greek tragedy that lurks in everyone's life. The ancient Athenians staged plays in which a great protagonist experienced a great disaster all tracing back to a great flaw within their own character. Shakespeare carried the tragedian torch into modern times with his Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear. In our own times the world bulges with brooding examples from protagonists like Hitler and Stalin to Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon right down to our latest headliners Bernie Madoff and John Edwards.

In looking for an answer to the tragedy question, we owe a great debt to playwrights like Arthur Miller. In his celebrated Death of a Salesman, Miller show us that even everyday small figures like Willie Loman (and Mr Rooney) are capable of the same tragedies of great figures. If I had known this answer back then, I believe Mr Rooney's bizarre rages would not so much have frightened me, as they might have saddened me into reflecting on the character-flaw hiding in all of us.

Then the ultimate life-mystery -- love. The poets say it well when they say we humans can't live with it or without it. Artists capture the magic in their facial expressions. Composers in their chords and cadenzas. Hollywood in the way 98% of the screenplays end in some version of the proverbial clinch. In the case of Rosie and me, well, her Celtic red hair flashed three rows from me in class. The deed was done at that first sighting, but alas it was never reciprocal.

All through adolescence I reflected on the great unrequited mystery that love can be. Then, lending tragedy to mystery, I met Rosie at our 50th class reunion where we made a date for lunch. A lunch we never had, for she died two weeks later.

At this age and stage, I think to myself: Evil exists side by side with joy, so best to enjoy the second rather than dwell on the first...tragedy is as close to us as us, something to remember when we reach for those stones...love will forever be God's greatest mystery, but having found my beloved Joan I can better let go of all the Rosie's in my life,