What Would God Want to Talk with You About?

Robert Olen Butler has written a brilliant book, Late City. In it, a 115 year old man is having a conversation with God on his death bed.

What does God want to talk about? If you want to know what really matters in life, God’s probably the guy to ask.

Sam Cunningham is the 115 year old man, living his last day, and he is talking with God. Telling God the story of his life, reliving particular moments, not so much of his own choosing.

God doesn’t want to know if Sam has lived a successful life, if he has created a business, climbed the ladder, amassed wealth, lived the “American Dream,” built “shareholder value”. . . None of that. He’s God after all. He wants to know the life of Sam’s conscience.

He particularly wants Sam to recount and relive poignant experiences and tensions in his life, what those experiences and tensions mean to him, and how he resolves or fails to resolve them.

Sam was born in 1901, and he is dying in 2016, as Donald Trump is elected president. He has grown up in the Jim Crow south, with a rigid and dominating father. He has lived through World War I, as a (technically too) young solider, a sharp-shooter who by his own telling has killed more than a hundred men. He has been a newspaperman, covering and at least to some extent doing the bidding of Al Capone. He has been a husband and a father. He has seen his own son go off to fight in World War II. He has outlived his wife and his son, and now he lies in a nursing home with 115 years behind him.

Manhood and true masculinity are heavy themes throughout Sam’s life. As a boy growing into a man, Sam is under his father’s thumb. The lesson his father teaches him is the circle his father draws in the dirt around the two of them. The circle contains who matters, who he can rely on, in some strong sense, his ethical boundary. Those outside the boundary are the others, who matter less and who can be relied on for less. The ones who are not us.

Even when Sam announces to his father that he’s going to join the army to fight in the war, his father claims ownership. It’s Sam’s decision, through and through, but his father takes him to the recruitment center and orchestrates and owns his signing up. In a critical sense this is to be Sam’s moment, taking on moral importance and identity in the world, but his father tries to own that moment.

During the war, Sam faces more than just the test of battle — he faces the test of caring for his fellow soldiers in ways that conflict with the version of manhood his father has given him. It’s a test that Sam will re-take again and again, right to his last days.

That test is a test of caring, of being enough of a man to care beyond the circle his father drew in the dirt around the two of them.

That is what matters when Sam talks with God. How Sam has resolved the problem of the circle his father drew.

If you don’t believe in the God that Sam talks with, I don’t think it matters. And it doesn’t matter whether your test has to do with masculinity, femininity, or anything else that defines the quality and boundaries of your life and how you’ve cared about the others in it. The question is about the quality of your life, your conduct as a person of conscience, or not.

That’s where the book hits its target. You are its target after all, and what you make of your own life. What would you be talking with God about?

What are the moments that, as Sam says, are “a moment I am meant to reckon with.” A moment that lasts, as the moment in which you will have to make a choice that determines the quality of the life you live. And you may, as Sam sometimes does, make a choice that you will need to “reckon with” sooner or later. That’s what God is interested in here — it’s not the choices, but the reckoning with them that Sam now must do at the end of his life, and that we have a chance to do during our lives.