the music of chance
[Good grief. It's been so long since i've written anything here that i think i've lost the ability to write altogether. Ah well. A time to break down, and a time to build up. Let this March holiday be a time for building up what i've allowed to break down over the last year.]This post has been a long time coming. The patterned unlikelihoods that i've grown accustomed to ever since they first started occurring, just after university, have finally reached epic proportions that demand articulation. i've been wondering for the longest time about what these strange coincidences might mean. Earlier on, it was easy to dismiss them - pure chance, random occurrences that the human mind cannot help but try to interpret in some kind of purposeful way. But when these coincidences start gathering force through sheer frequency and fortuitous timing, one cannot help but wonder.....
Someone asked me, after i'd told her about the more notable incidents that have happened in the past few years, if i saw these incidents as random or purposive. My answer, that they are evidence of God's manifest presence in our world, was something that has taken me a long while to formulate. For me, it's the only satisfactory answer. Being as i am, the notion of a random Darwinian universe that is purely material not only horrifies - it simply does not make sense. It fails to explain too many things. So, the alternative to that, that there is a higher power that guides the affairs of men, is something that i have always held as true. Yet, the idea that everything that happens happens for a reason also seems to fail to make sense. There are things that happen that don't appear to make much difference in the grand scheme of things, incidents like meeting a long-lost acquaintance on the street the very day after you've dreamt about her, that honestly do not seem consequential, no matter how you look at them.
So what do i make of events like the Vienna encounter with TBS, or the serendipitous discovery of Mark Doty's 'Heaven', that really have had very little impact on anything of importance in my life so far? It seems to me that they are visible manifestations of God's guiding hand in human affairs. Our Creator, i am convinced, has a sense of humour, and if all good things come from God, and if fun, properly understood, is a Good Thing, then i am certain that God also has a sense of fun - and all these gratuitous coincidences are His way of reminding me, gently and with a twinkle in His eyes, that He is there, and that there is no need to fear because He isn't planning to go away.
Of course, i may just be superstitious. And that is no doubt what many would like to think. Still, it seems to me that life does fall into patterns, that it does have its own silent music - and music, by its very nature, is never the result of pure chance.
...
...
posted by eothen @ 1:01 PM
0 comments
