What is the point of Life?

In 1936 a young American student had an experience which changed his life. Though nominally a Christian, the young no longer believed that the cosmos had been brought into being by an intelligent and purposive Creator or that the human soul had any destiny to look forward to except that of oblivion or that there was any real moral meaning to life except one based on the pleasures and preferences of this or that individual or group.

“However, like many other seminal shapers of Christian thought, including Justin Martyr, St. Augustine, and C. S. Lewis, Dulles was led through the study of philosophy to question the certitude of his doubts and denials. Aristotle taught him to appreciate the dignity of reason and to see the design at the heart of the created world. Through Plato he came to see that moral value—things true and beautiful and good—were more than mere whims of preference; they had an objective basis in that which was ultimately real. All of this came together for him one gray rainy February afternoon when he left his carrel in Widener Library (where he had been reading a chapter from St. Augustine's City of God that he had been assigned in a course on medieval history) and began to trudge through the melting snow and mud along the banks of the Charles River:

As I wandered aimlessly, something impelled me to look contemplatively at a young tree. On its frail, supple branches were young buds attending eagerly the spring which was at hand. While my eye rested on them the thought came to me suddenly, with all the strength and novelty of a revelation, that these little buds in their innocence and meekness followed a rule, a law of which I as yet knew nothing. How could it be, I asked, that this delicate tree sprang up and developed and that all the enormous complexity of its cellular operations combined together to make it grow erectly and bring forth leaves and blossoms? The answer, the trite answer of the schools, was new to me: that its actions were ordered to an end by the only power capable of adapting means to ends–intelligence–and that the very fact that this intelligence worked toward an end implied purposiveness–in other words, a will. It was useless, then, to dismiss these phenomena by obscurantist talk about a mysterious force of "Nature." The "nature" which was responsible for these events was distinguished by the possession of intellect and will, and intellect plus will makes personality. Mind, then, not matter, was as the origin of all things. Or rather not so much the "mind" of Anaxagoras as a Person of Whom I had had no previous intuition.

This epiphany was for Dulles not so much a moment of mystical illumination as an insight or recognition of the then-and-thereness of the created order and of the reality that sustains and governs it by a beneficent providence, the same reality Dante referred to as "the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars". In time, through personal friendships, through the study of the Holy Scriptures, through the witness of a believing community, Avery Dulles would learn the name of that Love: Jesus Christ, the Son of Man of the four canonical Gospels, the eternal Son of the heavenly Father, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, the Savior of the world, the Lord of the Church, the coming King and judge of all. “

This young man was the future Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ, (died 2008)a prominent post-Vatican II American Catholic theologian.

…
Every thinking person wonders within themselves about the meaning and purpose of human life. They all ask themselves the same questions:

“Who am I? Where did I come from and where am I going? What is the meaning of my life, and of life itself? How should I live in this present world? Is there life beyond the grave and where will I be thirty seconds after I am dead? Such questions, of course, are not unique to Christians. Indeed, they are the property of all persons everywhere. But the Christian faith does not shrink from the task of considering such questions in the light of our common human strivings and with the aid of reason. illumined by faith.

In the opening lines of his encyclical letter Fides et Ratio, Pope John Paul II put it this way:

Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth-in a word, to know himself-so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fulness of truth about themselves.”

…... “ As he later reflected on that initial step of faith and all that has followed since, Cardinal Dulles, in words that echo St. Augustine's Confessions, celebrates the grace of God in the life of the mind and invites others to taste and see that the Lord is good and faithful and true:

That I did eventually make this act of faith is attributable solely to the grace of God. I could never have done so by my own power. The grace which I received was a tremendous and unmerited privilege, but I sincerely believe that it is one which God, in His faithfulness, will deny to none who earnestly seek Him in prayer. I found Him to be exactly as Our Lord had described Him–a Father Who would not give a stone in place of bread, or anything but the Holy Ghost to those who asked for it. "Knock, and it shall be open unto you."

This is from a review of Cardinal Dulles' book - A History of Apologetics
on the 'Ignatius Insight' website The full article may be read on their website at:
http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2005/tgeorge_forewd_dulles.asp