It was Friday January 1, 2021. New Year’s Day. I thought I should start the new year by tackling some old business.
For the last 20 years, Joan stored her growing collection of murder mysteries in our spare bedroom. They started in boxes. I put up shelves. They overflowed the shelves. We assembled Ikea cabinets. The collections kept increasing.
On New Year’s morning I listed 18 authors, ranging from Ngaio Marsh to Ellis Peters to Gail Bowen and L.R. Wright. Laurie R. King had the smallest collection, with only six books; Anne Perry had the most, at 40.
Plus 34 books by Alexander McCall Smith. Not classifiable as murder mysteries. Humour? Human interest? Social analysis?
The first page
One set of books caught my eye – by P.D. James, the undisputed queen of British murder mystery writers. A publisher’s promo calls her the author of 11 books, but I counted 20.
Including her one foray into science fiction, The Children of Men, published in 1992.
I had never read it before. I opened the book. On Friday the first of January, 2021, the opening words were, “Friday 1 January 2021.”
I felt a shiver go up my spine.
What were the odds, I wondered, that Ms James would have chosen to start a book published 28 years ago with the very date on which I would open that book?
Astronomical, I suspect.
More pages
As I read the opening chapter, the coincidence stretched even farther towards impossibility.
The story takes place in England, of course. At a time when a medical crisis has afflicted the entire world. No one knows how it where it came from, nor how to cure it. But increasingly people expect all-powerful authority figures to run their lives and their countries.
Sound at all familiar?
No, the novel is not about a corona virus pandemic. James imagines a world where humans have stopped having babies. The men are sterile, the women infertile. Everywhere on earth. The last human baby had been born 25 years before, in Buenos Aires.
Given that context, the less-immediate threat of global warming, climate change, and environmental degradation provides a more fitting parallel for James’s gloomy future than the coronavirus .
The more pessimistic scientists say that if average global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius, coastal plains will flood. If temperatures rise 4 degrees, everything between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn will become lethal heat-stroke territory -- except for those who can afford air-conditioned bubbles.
Life as we know it will end.
Unlike P.D. James’s scenario, though, we will take countless species with us.
Infinite pages
I won’t spoil her plot by saying any more. And our plot remains unresolved, as yet.
But the probability of my opening that book, on that subject, on that day, boggles my mind.
In another bestseller from the same period, The Celestine Prophecy, author James Redfield claimed that there are no coincidences. Period. Everything that happens, happens for a purpose.
He presumed a supreme intelligence, setting up those coincidences. Our job, he argued, is to recognize those coincidences as part of a plan, and act on them.
I don’t buy his argument.
Since then, quantum physics has taught us that even the electrons and protons within atoms are best described as probabilities, not physical particles. The chair I’m sitting on consists of probabilities. So does the universe.
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, deep beneath the Swiss Alps, fires probabilities at other probabilities to see if any new probabilities emerge from the collision. It’s hard to see those as part of a pre-ordained plan.
The probability that any Supreme Intelligence could program all the probabilities inherent in everything, everywhere, strikes me as, well, improbable.
And even if it were possible, why would such an intelligence bother manipulating all the probabilities of the universe to set up a coincidence so that I open a book on the day mentioned in the first line of its text? It makes black holes seem like child’s play.
Beyond the end
And yet it happened.
But maybe I don’t have to look for a reason. Maybe it was chance; maybe inscrutable fate; maybe God.
The question is not how or why, but what shall I do about it?
I shall read the rest of the book, certainly.
I shall also pay more attention to other coincidences.
I don’t believe that God – however you choose to describe Her – runs the universe like Microsoft software. But I do think that somehow She offers us opportunities. It’s up to us to decide what to do about them.
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Copyright © 2021 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
To send comments, to subscribe, or to unsubscribe, write jimt@quixotic.ca
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YOUR TURN
Responses to last week’s column fell into several categories. Some of youwanted to share your own experiences:
Anne Falkenberg wrote, “Like you, I lost my spouse this year, in April. As if COVID wasn’t enough to deal with! I think we are feeling double the loneliness and isolation that other people are going through. And I agree with you, the last three years were a blessing, even though they were bittersweet. I have also found friendships where I least expected them. I however, have not figured out what it is that I like to do yet. Hopefully, that will come soon.”
Also Joyce,who didn’t give her last name: “I am sorry for the loss of your wife. We are in our late 80s and expect that is going to be the case for one of us ,too. I also lost a brother this year. The little dog is going to become your best friend.”
Rob Brown: “Having a dog is a ‘good thing’."
Tom Watson liked the insights into good and bad: “Your column reminds me of the story about the five-year-old girl who looked at a jigsaw puzzle her family was working on. She thought the small dark pieces looked like spiders so she hid them in the back of the chesterfield. When the rest finished the puzzle they wondered why pieces were missing. The little girl confessed and said why she did it. Turns out it took the dark pieces to complete the puzzle. It's the same in life -- it takes both the dark and light, the good and the bad, to make a complete picture.”
I’m not the first to feel that good and bad are not objective facts. Beth Orling noted that “Rumi's poem ‘A Great Wagon,’ has these lines:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
Maybe also beyond good and bad....
“2020 was a sad sad year. 2021 so far not any better. So sorry about your wife and grateful for your writing.”
Micah Schlobohm echoed Beth’s comment: “I'm normally an appreciative lurker, but I so enjoyed seeing the both/and of 2020. Thanks.”
Isabel Gibson agreed “that good/bad don't exist out there in the world -- they're judgements we make.
“In the midst of a painful event, if we look for the good or try to make something good come out of it, it doesn't mean we're negating the pain of that event. But it's a reflection best reserved for our own experiences, I suspect. Trying to find the good in someone else's pain is not likely to be well received.
Bob Rollwagen offered some examples of the good/bad mix: “The Chaplain of the US Congress this week stated that out of every bad event, such as the Trump riot, something good arises, such as some unification in the desire to fix the problem. Bad is still happening in media and network pockets that gain by exploiting the lies supported by Republican leaders, but the discussion about Ethics is on the podium. Good and Bad.
“[Similarly] the pandemic is not good but it has exposed the weaknesses in our understanding of community and equality. It will be good if we see actions that correct much of this; bad if we all get is a vaccine and few changes. It will be bad if some experience great human loss while others feel they deserve resulting gains, and good if at the end of the pandemic, we truly feel that we were all in this together.”
Steve Roney challenged my basic premise: “You can’t have it both ways, Jim. If good and bad are subjective, you have no grounds for objecting to anything Trump has done—or Hitler, for that matter. Or Ted Bundy, or Charlie Manson. You cannot call him ‘just plain wrong’.”
And Linda Reed challenged another of my premises: “You assert that [the rioters] were not organized, but then how did so many from so many different places all arrive for the ‘big event’ that the president announced would take place on Jan. 6? How did folks who claim to be so poor as to not have money to put food on their tables afford airline flights from far away? Was it not organization that enabled people who would not otherwise have any knowledge of the interior of the Capitol Complex to find their way through a myriad of hallways?
A coup d'etat is defined as the ‘removal of an existing government from power, usually through violent means.’ This definition does not demand that there be a plan in place for the new government. What those folks who were breaking down the doors and windows wanted -- according to their own voices on the videos -- was the removal of the Democrats from the Congress. That was enough of a plan for them.”
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. (This is to circumvent filters that think some of these links are spam.)
Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” is an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca. He set up my webpage, and he doesn’t charge enough.
I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also runs beautiful pictures. Her Thanksgiving presentation on the old hymn, For the Beauty of the Earth, Is, well, beautiful -- https://www.traditionaliconoclast.com/2019/10/13/for/
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)
ALVA WOOD ARCHIVE
The late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures now have an archive (don’t ask how this happened) on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. Feel free to browse all 550 columns.