Meeting the Living God by William J. O'Malley

Author:William J. O'Malley [William J. O'Malley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-10-15T16:10:00+00:00

Far more saintly folk than I testify to messages from God brought by bright-winged angels. In my humbler experience, such communications arrive through broad-beamed black Labrador retrievers. I kid you not. It's happened to me twice.

I am what might be called a "laid-back compulsive." I like to hedonize in the sun, but I have Irish skin, and I also love to write. So, in recent years I've taken my vacations in two-hour afternoon segments over seven-day work weeks. Crazy, but writing is too exhilarating for me not to be believe I was born for it.

For several of those summers, every afternoon during hedonism time, a big black Lab would sidle up to the chair where I was reading by a lake and nudge me with a stick. She was a really nice old dog, and from many previous afternoons she knew she had me well trained. So I'd throw the stick and she'd go galumphin' into the water after it, come panting back, shake, and start the whole tease over, tail wagging lickety-split. Well, I threw the stick until my arm was limp as linguine, and she was coughing and hacking like a three-pack-a-day smoker. But that old tail kept thwapping away. Why? Because whatever joy a black Lab can grasp came from precisely what she was doing: retrieving. That was her nature; that's what she was born for.

For the last five chapters, we have considered five answers to the question: What are human beings for? What will make us wag our tails-even when we're frazzled from doing it full throttle? What do specifically human happiness, success, fulfillment mean? What is our nature? What were we born for?

The American Dream tells us (or at least acts on the assumption that) human beings are born to be good little competitors and consumers; the more things you have, the happier you'll be. The pop culture tells us, pretty explicitly, human beings are born to serve the beast in us; the more we indulge ourselves, the happier we'll be. Your experience of religion (though not the ideal of it) can convince you human beings are born to adhere to a set of rules destined to keep you from being unbad; the less fuss you make, the happier you'll be. Experience of schooling (as opposed to education) makes many suspect human beings are born to memorize unmemorable facts as a condition of certification for a wellpaying job, which in turn will provide the happiness of the American Dream. Parents and peers, echoing many of those contradictory convictions about human purpose, leave many believing that to be successful and fulfilled, you have to be very, very rich, and very, very humble, and very, very pious, and very, very sexy, and very, very pure. They encourage you to "be somebody," but at the same time not stand out from the crowd.

It can become very, very confusing.

What does all this business about "The Meaning of You" have to do with "The God Question"? In raising the question of the existence of God, we are, automatically, raising the question of the value of you.

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