The older I become the more I enjoy meditating about the meaning of life: why am I here and what purpose do I serve? Given the present set of circumstances (some of which will be discussed below) a passing thought that crept into my meditations has taken on urgent significance: Humans are the most unnecessary of all lifeforms that exist on earth.
Think about it! None of what humans have created from the dawn of their first appearance on earth is essential to any aspect of creation but their own. Long before our first appearance, the birds of the air and the wild creatures of the forests, the waters and the fields plied their lives between birth and death in accordance with the laws of nature and without having to confront the human assault on those laws. They were and are guided by the power that created creation. Then came humans.
Pre-human nature was as violent and chaotic as it is today. Birth was and is painful, death was and is inevitable, and life between its beginning and its end was and is fraught, but at the same time, life was and is beautiful and wonderous. Life is a gift bestowed on every living thing under heaven, as proclaimed in Ecclesiastes.
I like to think that animals celebrate creation: a horse running freely across a field flanked by the magnificence of fall foliage; birds swooping and soaring over tree treetops; and the animals of the forest and plains grooming themselves and their offspring in warm sunlight. Their celebration is instinctive obeisance to the power that created them.
Integral to my meditation is my faith, which is a paraphrase of Reza Aslan’s definition in his book “God A Human History.” My take on his definition is that faith is a conscience decision to believe in a power greater than ourselves, for which there are no words that are adequate to explain or describe. Religion, however, gives us a lexicon of words that enable us to approximate the inexplicable: words whose definitions are more, or less shared, even though there may not be agreement about what the words mean: Transubstantiation, for example.
Woodland creatures have no need to use words to profess their faith. They live it instinctively within the dualities of creation: within the chaos and order, the brutality and peace, the ugliness and beauty, and the dictates of the “balance of nature.” Animals evolve and adapt but they do not of their own volition seek to interfere with nature, which in the absence of humans seems to be self-sustaining.
Humans, on the other hand, plunder nature in their quest for wealth, power, and dominance. We are the alpha-predators with the ability to kill our enemies remotely with modern weaponry. We kill those who do not share our beliefs about the Prince of Peace, notwithstanding that throughout our sacred scriptures we are admonished to love our neighbors as ourselves. We pray for peace, but we make war. We believe that we shall not kill, but we deny health care to the poor and debate whether to provide food to the hungry, while we wallow in surplus. We profess the belief that we should honor our parents, but we seem to prefer allowing Social Security to run out of money rather than requiring the ultrarich to pay their fair share in taxes. And we justify both the yin and the yang of our actions by selective (i.e., distorted) reliance on the scriptures.
In what I suspect is the brief time I have left to live, I want to share my answers to the questions about the meaning of life and why I am here.
I do not think of God as an anthropomorphic being, but rather as the spirit or power that created creation: that created from nothing whatever it was that made the great bang. I believe that the spirit-power, whom I call God, also created the science (for lack of a better term) that controls the chaotic, violent, infinite, and beautiful universe, including the tiny orb that is our home. Humans, from the time of their first presence, sought ways to survive the chaos and violence of creation, and over the millennia — first by word-of-mouth and then in writing — recorded what they had learned. In doing so, they used stories, myths, metaphors, and allegories.
The UCC church teaches that God is still speaking to us. So, based on all that I am learning I believe the understanding gleaned by our ancestors over the ages was based on trial and error and the increase of their knowledge. Thus we see the ancient stories of vengeance, war and violence soften in their tone, so that in the most recent books of the Old Testament and into the New Testament we experience a growing awareness that the meaning and purpose of our lives is to serve each other. Scripture is not proclaiming the letter of the law, but rather the spirit of what the ancients learned, which is love God, and love your neighbor as your self. Our mission is not to make more money than we need, but to care for the poor and to love one another. Without love, humans just take up space. We are more precious than that. It is in our true nature to be kind and to love. Anything else is anathema to the meaning of our life and the purpose we are called to serve.
Jim Palermo lives in Southampton.