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O'Malley's Best Taking on God One of the sayings on my classroom wall asserts: “Things would be a lot different around here if God were as smart as I am.” I think I made that up myself. I’ve certainly tried more than once to act as if it were true.I wonder if the core of the story for us might be the original tenants’ conviction they could take over the vineyard and run it themselves, when the Landlord’s conspicuously absent–as God seems so often to be. The story certainly fits that time-tested myth of Adam and Eve, the not very bright nudists who started the whole screw-up rolling. “Eat this, and you’ll become like God.” You won’t need him anymore. You’ll have the lead! No more walk-on parts for you, baby! It certainly fits the philosopher Protagoras and his much-delayed offspring, the Enlightenment: “Man is the measure of all things.” That dream later bore fruit in the work of the great Karl Marx, who proved beyond doubt humankind, freed from bosses and the illusion of God, would ultimately evolve a paradise on earth. All the problems we formerly surrendered to religion–to witch doctors and pharisees and canon lawyers and papal officials who presumed to do our thinking for us, we can now figure out for ourselves! Let’s cut loose, baby. That “Who Needs the Landlord, Who Needs God” attitude triumphed in the atomic bomb, in genetic engineering, in wholesale abortions. At last, we’ve assumed our birthright! One day, science will solve all human problems! The universe is ours! We can finally banish that senile benevolence we once credited for all our good fortune and yielded to when things went wrong. Human history and literature are crammed with repetitions of that defiant story: Pandora, Prometheus, the Caesars, Genghis Khan, the renaissance popes, Catherine the Great, Faust, Napoleon, Doctor Frankenstein, Doctor Mengele, Doctor Strangelove. Ever notice humans are the only species who refuse to settle for the nature we’ve been given, the only species who either degrade themselves to lower levels or inflate themselves, refuse to serve and want to be the Landlord? All other species seem humbly content with their lot. On the one hand, no rock gets fed up just sitting there and decides to self-destruct; no cabbage refuses to take nourishment; no bunny just lies down and vegetates. But perverse humans routinely do vegetate, refuse to learn and grow, let their potential wither and die. Check any study hall, any subway car, any inner-city street corner. With the questionable exception of lemmings, humans are the only species we know who kill themselves–most often without actually dying. Apathy isn’t the most dramatic form of suicide, just the most common. On the other hand, no rock gets uppity, climbing on another rock, bumping awhile, and months later spitting out new little pebbles. No carrot figures the grass is greener on the other side of the fence and uproots itself. The smartest dog or dolphin isn’t interested in inventing germ warfare, saturation bombing, ozone-melting engines, seductions to brainwash children to greed. No other species we know has pretensions to playing God. Only humans can defy the will of their Creator evident in the natures of things, because we’re the only creatures God gave freedom. Hugh Hefner and Calvin Klein can treat human bodies as if they were merely objects, not subjects. Power-mad despots and their brain-dead adherents treat human beings like merely inconvenient obstacles. In Nazi Europe, men and women who wouldn’t even kick their neighbor’s dog could process children in gas ovens with the unshakable belief they were merely trash. None of us is a real first-class rebel like those mutineers. Our defiance is far less daring. But we are still free to treat gin like ginger ale and sex like two-handed solitaire. We’re free to degrade our nature by pigging-out, vegetating, using others as stepping stones. We’re free to defy the inescapable truth that credit cards come due, deadlines don’t stop approaching because we ignore them, laziness and lethargy and procrastination don’t go away without our painful cooperation in their deaths. The puzzlement is why God left this one species free to degrade itself or to deify itself. Why is our species so special? My hunch is it has something to do with loving. We’re also the only species that can freely love. Animals can show affection for their own, even to the point of death in their place. But we can give our lives (often without actually dying) for people we don’t even much like at the moment–ask any parent or teacher. That’s what real love means. So in order for there to be love, it has to be freely given. Love isn’t love when it’s the result of inner programming or some love potion or mere self-serving passion. It has to be “from the heart,” unreserved, willed. So if God wanted love, God had to allow freedom. In order to achieve the possibility of loving, God had freely to limit his own freedom, put up with the only species that doesn’t automatically obey its God-given programming–like rocks and vegetables and animals. And he had to accept the very real likelihood that we would withhold love, turn from him in absolute ingratitude, and use our freedom not to serve but to dominate. Strange. Even perverse. To create this multi-wondered universe, God found he had to produce a species that’s free to crap it up. Absolutely authentic love like that is really puzzling, isn’t it? |
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Copyright © 2008, McQuaid Jesuit |
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