This summer I had occasion, with friends, to do some outdoor grilling over an open wood fire. It brought back memories of campfires I had started and stoked in the past, and it led to some reflections about life and its meaning. I think the first thing everyone notices about a campfire is how beautiful, hypnotic and attractive it is. Campfires are involving objects of quiet meditation. There is little need to talk in the presence of fire, and whatever talk does arise is usually significant rather than small talk. It occurred to me that perhaps watching fires throughout the ages has enabled human beings to evolve the capacity to meditate. There is an urge to bring fire into our sacred ceremonies. The Hindus are particularly known for Vedic fire rituals. They set up sacred fires in temples for many important holidays, weddings and funerals. In church, we have the vestiges of this impulse as we light candles with no particular need for light in our beautiful buildings. In an age of instant-on lights, it is worth remembering firelight and its centrality to the home and the temple. We even speak of hearth and home in one phrase as if the two are coequal, primary symbols of human experience. Recently anthropologists have argued that fire and cooking food have led to important evolutionary changes that divided humans from the other higher primates. (A theory that, by the way, puts women at the center of an important evolutionary advance because typically women kept the fires and did the cooking.) A second impulse we have at a fireside is to keep it going. It is hard, so long as there is fuel, to let it die. The ancient Persian Zoroastrians tended an eternal flame, and today we honor John F. Kennedy with a similar flame at his gravesite. Controlled fire reminds us to respect the moment and to remember the cosmic energy from which we arise.