God: The Oldest Question

Rating:
Summary: Enjoyed this book
Review: It caused me to think & wonder, even beyond my own beliefs...strengthened my Catholic beliefs & helped me to appreciate others beliefs. A good book.

Rating:
Summary: If the Pope were this Tolerant, I'd still be a Catholic
Review: It's been 35 years since Fr. O'Malley was my favorite high school English teacher. Although I lost touch with him three decades ago, his unique voice is clear and familiar in this book -- wit, insight, scholarship, and respect for both your intelligence and your doubts. Grading your professor is awkward, but I'll try to be fair and frank as he always was.

"God: The Oldest Question" gets an A for its main task -- answering the questions, "Does God exist?" and "If so, what is God like?" O'Malley gives the modern, "sophisticated" doubter an intellectual and emotional basis to believe (again) in a transcendent-and-immanent Ultimate Reality -- with enough food for thought for both the right-side and left-side of the brain. He also does a masterful job of starting the reader on the search for what god is like -- mainly by desribing how peoples around the globe have approached and answered that question over the millennia. His respectful, clear and artful descriptions of the non-Western world's religions and spiritual traditions help to highlight our common threads and common needs.

O'Malley's metaphor of climbers on the Western Face and the Eastern Face working toward the same summit is especially apt and memorable. This is the one book I wish I could get my jaded Baby Boomer "confirmed athesist" friends to read, to shake them out of their fear of the words "spiritual" and "god".

However, "God: The Oldest Question" slips a bit, and only gets a "C" from me, when it comes to fulfilling the expectations of its subtitle, "A Fresh Look at Belief and Unbelief -- And Why It Matters." Like Fr. O'Malley, I am in awe at the feeling of an infant's fist around my finger. The experience does reassure me that we are more than chemicals and electrical impulses, and are part of something transcendent. But, O'Malley does not help me understand how that belief affects my daily life or my lifetime. Frankly, I was expecting another chapter or two while reading Chapter 9, on The Everyday God, and was rather surprised when I turned page 195 and the book had reached its end.

Maybe I brought too many of my own expectations to the book. Maybe the word "belief" is still attached to the words "organized religion" for me. I was looking for a reason to join a congregation again -- to feel a connection with others who are searching to know and understand god, and to be able to sing a hymn or read a prayer aloud in a church without feeling like a hypocrite. Instead, Fr. O'Malley has made me feel comfortable in seeking my own spiritual path up that Mountain without a catechism or set of rituals in my backpack.

Maybe that's what O'Malley had in mind in the first place (did I say he always was sly)-- making it okay to be an ex-Catholic who still wants to climb that mountain. I'll have to re-think that "C".

So, this is also the one book I wish my too-Catholic relatives and friends would read and take to heart -- the ones who believe that those who leave the Church are eternally damned, and who practice a faith and ritual that seems without joy and leaves no room for doubts.

This book was well worth my time. I hope Fr. O'Malley will write a book that tries to re-connect apostates like me with our former religion. I'll definitely read it, with the open, curious mind he helped form 35 years ago.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, lively book on the God question
Review: St. Paul tells us in 1 Thessalonians 5:21 to "Test everything and retain what is good." One gets the impression from reading this book that Fr. O'Malley has been testing his understanding of God for decades. In answering the existence question in the affirmative, O'Malley brings to bear a litany of evidence from his analysis of atheism, science, art, literature, eastern and western religions, and his own personal life.

And the author has read everything: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Carl Sagan, Confucius, Ovid, and many, many others. I don't, however, wish to overstate the case: there are probably a few pages of the IRS code that O'Malley hasn't pondered as he's put his faith to the test.

But if you're looking for an arcane theological treatise, then don't buy this book! This is a very fast-paced, entertaining book! O'Malley delivers his challenging message in short sentences like a jabbing pugilist; you, the reader, are his exhilarated sparring partner.

The central idea of the book as I read it is that there is a difference between knowing God and knowing about God. The former is attained through the heart and the "right side" of the brain. The latter is an analytical, deductive, rational, left brain exercise. O'Malley argues for the former--we can know God through the order of the periodic table and the beauty of music. He writes "If you want to understand Handel's Messiah, I don't hand you a score." We won't get to know God through reproducible, scientific experiments, and still we can take the calculated risk that truly "The world is charged with the grandeur of God".

The book is also controversial: there are some liberal interpretations. For example, the author appears content to leave the Catechism to the "bean counters". He has trouble with the doctrine of expiation. He believes that Adam and Eve are fictional. He says the transfiguration was probably not a historical event. He writes that "Anyone of honest mind would have to confess that the Roman Catholic Church is top-heavy". Caveat emptor.

I would say though that the book has many interesting sections including a very nice primer on Eastern religions and good section on prayer.

I'll leave you with a couple lines from the book (but not enough to get the publisher mad at me):

"God...is not anthropomorphic, but we human beings are theomorphic." (How true.)

"...'All right, we've seen the goddamn Venus de Milo. Where's the goddamn Mona Lisa?'" (Check out the scene that inspired this comment.)

"If this man [Jesus] is boring, I don't know who on God's earth could be called interesting."

This book is interesting too.