As a society what are we trying to achieve or create here on earth? Is economic prosperity the goal?
What exactly are we doing here?
To accept the death of children who die tragically as a good event requires constructing a definition of the good life—a life well lived—as one which is independent of reaching old age. The definition of the good life must, then, exclude all the goods normally realized after maturity: wealth, power, status, marriage, ordination, children, intimate friendships, accomplishments, experience, wisdom and the like. If not these personal possessions and perfections, then what are the real goods, the goods necessary to a life well lived? What is the purpose of our physical life?
Wealth, power, and all other goods of chance are beyond many of us. These objects are not ours for the choosing. It seems that the good life must reside only in what we choose to pursue and not in what chance may provide. The standard of the life well lived consists, then, in choosing correctly. To think otherwise, that an all-just God would permit a reality that rendered the good life to events of chance and not events of choice, seems absurd.
So what are the real goods of life? The simplicity of the catechetical response to the purpose of human life had allowed the profoundness of its meaning to escape me for many years: “We are here to know, love and serve God” who is goodness personified. We exist to come to know goodness; to love, that is to willfully and productively pursue goodness; and to serve, that is to make all other pursuits, the chasing of apparent goods, secondary to our pursuit of the real good. The real good of this life, I believe, is the pursuit of interiority, the self-appropriation of God through knowledge, love and service to others.
