After publishing “The Quiet Voice” for several years, I inadvertently fell into writing a series of primarily autobiographical essays which showed remarkable patterns of completion or resolution and teaching. This led to the publication of my book Under the Turning Stars, and eventually to an end of this remarkable stint of inspiration. What this period showed me was that ordinary life is filled with stunning patterns that we can see in our lives if we only look. Somehow, we are all special and are regularly treated to miraculous coincidences that speak to us of divinity. How these patterns may help us is often left to the individual, or just as often, remains evident only to God, at least for a time.
It was to the latter set of coincidences, where remarkable events happen for reasons unknown to us, to which I was treated this last weekend.
We were on our way to the Wisconsin River for a canoe and kayak trip with a group of church parishioners. My wife and I were in the front seats, and in the back was a friend who was also the organizer of the trip. Since we had church news in common, we eventually got to talking about the many parish priests who have passed through our town. It had been revealed to us not long ago by certain members of the Church hierarchy that the Catholics in our vicinity have a reputation for being particularly ornery, and that most priests are fearful of being given into our hands. Subsequently, the Fathers are relieved when they are moved from their position of martyrdom, usually within a few years, to another parish. One priest was mentioned who actually wanted to stay with us but was forced to leave. On and on the discussion went until naturally and inevitably we fell to talking about the Big Scandal that had happened some four years earlier.
It concerned poor Fr B, who, after supervising the building of the new church, was accused by a purported victim of having had sexual contact with him when he was a student in the parish-run middle school. The accuser, in his mid-twenties at the time and living in a gay community in Los Angeles, talked in excruciating detail of the sexual engagements. Because of this, Father B was dissociated from the Church, which withdrew its financial support from him during the long year and a half between the filing of the lawsuit and the trial. During this time, Father B went into debt and suffered all manner of emotional torment until he was finally and soundly vindicated via the stunningly baseless claims of the accuser. As one juror said, “This should never have gone to trail.” After going over the details of this tragedy, the conversation inevitably turned to the character of the accuser, who we had all known, since he had gone to school with our children.
What came up was a mixture of nothing and not-nice. In other words, he was weird but generally harmless, except for a few remarkable incidents. One was the time he spit in a teacher’s coffee. He had been dared to do so after the teacher had left the classroom briefly for some reason, and so he did. When the teacher returned, and just before she took a sip of the coffee, a distraught classmate warned her. Outrage fell from heaven. The principle of the school was involved, as well as the adopted parents of the perp and the very same priest who this kid was later to accuse of sexual predation. Perhaps there is a connection here, but there was another even more remarkable connection: the teacher who had suffered the insult had recently died, and in a stunningly violent way.
The rider in our car had not known of this death and of course wanted to know. My wife dug into it quickly, having read the news of it only the day before. Here’s the story according to the AP account:
Four people had been struck by lightning just outside the White House in Washington, DC. At the time of the report, two were still alive but in critical condition, while the other two had been pronounced dead. This had never happened before near the White House; really, how many people are killed by lightning in the heart of a major city? The report went on to mention that the two people who were killed were a couple celebrating their high-numbered wedding anniversary. They were from a city near the parish. My wife explained how another woman had texted her, telling her that the wife who had died had in fact been a teacher at our parochial school, and in fact had taught our son. From my perspective, it was amazing that we knew the couple who were killed in a one –in- a- billion freak accident. It was also, from my perspective, an amazing fact that she had been the one who had been the victim of the coffee spitter, who then had gone on to ruin the life of the very priest who had so severely chastised him for this misdeed. I learned the latter as my wife told the story in the car. And so I joined the passenger of the car in astonishment.
Now, for the meaning of these connections. Number one: I don’t know. I don’t know the circumstances of that teacher’s life or those of her husband or the full background of the student who spit in her coffee; I don’t know if Father B needed a kick in the butt to get out of a holy rut, or if such was needed for a reexamination of Church policy, or even if such a powerful event was intended for the needs of anyone else involved.
There is a parable in John (Ch. 9, 2-3) where Jesus and the disciples come across a man known to have been blind from birth. The conversation goes like this: “Rabi, who sinned, the man or his parents that he was born blind?” Answer: “Neither this man or his parents sinned” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him…”
In other words, the man was born blind to increase the faith of those around him years later, to the time when Jesus approached him with his disciples, discussed him, and then cured him. Who could have known but God Himself?
A tougher example is found in the Book of Job, where this poor guy’s life is destroyed just to settle an argument between God and Satan. Of course, God wins and Job is restored in all his wealth and family (apparently, new family), but during the trials, all Job’s friends believe he deserves his fate because of some hidden sin. Both these stories warn us that we cannot know the mind of God until He sees fit to reveal His intentions.
But still, events make things happen in us. This freak accident with a woman who had once been the teacher of my son, and who had also been at the center of a possible whirlwind of ego and revenge, raises a sense of astonishment in me, along with an awareness that something greater often touches us in ways we could never imagine. Any of us at any time could unwittingly be at that center of revenge, or could be struck down by lightning near a national monument. Or we could be born blind so that years later, our unfortunate fate might elevate others to eternal life. We might not know what special events mean, but we are often made aware of special events in our lives that occur for purposes which may or may not be revealed to us or to others in our lifetime. By these, we learn that we are not mere grains of sand on an infinite beach - that we are not only brief illuminations of life that are pointless in the vastness of space and time. Rather, we are made to understand that we are so important that infinity chooses to stoop down to our tiny presence and work through us for purposes that are often beyond our reasoning, but that are there none-the-less. So it is made clear by the creator of galaxies and supernovas that we ‘little nothings’ are also at the center of the universe just as we are and where we are.
The misfortunes of this woman have also enhanced in me what the Bible calls the “fear of the Lord,” for, although I may understand that everything works eventually towards the good, I also understand that in my brief span of mortal life I might be visited by anything or any event, for better (in my estimate) or for worse. We do not sit aside and view the cosmic struggle in an audience, but are intimately involved as actors directed by an unheard voice. We stand at the edge of supernovas into which we might be plunged at a moment’s notice. Such is our importance, and such are our lives. Be alert, be amazed, but never be bored.
After publishing “The Quiet Voice” for several years, I inadvertently fell into writing a series of primarily autobiographical essays which showed remarkable patterns of completion or resolution and teaching. This led to the publication of my book Under the Turning Stars, and eventually to an end of this remarkable stint of inspiration. What this period showed me was that ordinary life is filled with stunning patterns that we can see in our lives if we only look. Somehow, we are all special and are regularly treated to miraculous coincidences that speak to us of divinity. How these patterns may help us is often left to the individual, or just as often, remains evident only to God, at least for a time.
It was to the latter set of coincidences, where remarkable events happen for reasons unknown to us, to which I was treated this last weekend.
We were on our way to the Wisconsin River for a canoe and kayak trip with a group of church parishioners. My wife and I were in the front seats, and in the back was a friend who was also the organizer of the trip. Since we had church news in common, we eventually got to talking about the many parish priests who have passed through our town. It had been revealed to us not long ago by certain members of the Church hierarchy that the Catholics in our vicinity have a reputation for being particularly ornery, and that most priests are fearful of being given into our hands. Subsequently, the Fathers are relieved when they are moved from their position of martyrdom, usually within a few years, to another parish. One priest was mentioned who actually wanted to stay with us but was forced to leave. On and on the discussion went until naturally and inevitably we fell to talking about the Big Scandal that had happened some four years earlier.
It concerned poor Fr B, who, after supervising the building of the new church, was accused by a purported victim of having had sexual contact with him when he was a student in the parish-run middle school. The accuser, in his mid-twenties at the time and living in a gay community in Los Angeles, talked in excruciating detail of the sexual engagements. Because of this, Father B was dissociated from the Church, which withdrew its financial support from him during the long year and a half between the filing of the lawsuit and the trial. During this time, Father B went into debt and suffered all manner of emotional torment until he was finally and soundly vindicated via the stunningly baseless claims of the accuser. As one juror said, “This should never have gone to trail.” After going over the details of this tragedy, the conversation inevitably turned to the character of the accuser, who we had all known, since he had gone to school with our children.
What came up was a mixture of nothing and not-nice. In other words, he was weird but generally harmless, except for a few remarkable incidents. One was the time he spit in a teacher’s coffee. He had been dared to do so after the teacher had left the classroom briefly for some reason, and so he did. When the teacher returned, and just before she took a sip of the coffee, a distraught classmate warned her. Outrage fell from heaven. The principle of the school was involved, as well as the adopted parents of the perp and the very same priest who this kid was later to accuse of sexual predation. Perhaps there is a connection here, but there was another even more remarkable connection: the teacher who had suffered the insult had recently died, and in a stunningly violent way.
The rider in our car had not known of this death and of course wanted to know. My wife dug into it quickly, having read the news of it only the day before. Here’s the story according to the AP account:
Four people had been struck by lightning just outside the White House in Washington, DC. At the time of the report, two were still alive but in critical condition, while the other two had been pronounced dead. This had never happened before near the White House; really, how many people are killed by lightning in the heart of a major city? The report went on to mention that the two people who were killed were a couple celebrating their high-numbered wedding anniversary. They were from a city near the parish. My wife explained how another woman had texted her, telling her that the wife who had died had in fact been a teacher at our parochial school, and in fact had taught our son. From my perspective, it was amazing that we knew the couple who were killed in a one –in- a- billion freak accident. It was also, from my perspective, an amazing fact that she had been the one who had been the victim of the coffee spitter, who then had gone on to ruin the life of the very priest who had so severely chastised him for this misdeed. I learned the latter as my wife told the story in the car. And so I joined the passenger of the car in astonishment.
Now, for the meaning of these connections. Number one: I don’t know. I don’t know the circumstances of that teacher’s life or those of her husband or the full background of the student who spit in her coffee; I don’t know if Father B needed a kick in the butt to get out of a holy rut, or if such was needed for a reexamination of Church policy, or even if such a powerful event was intended for the needs of anyone else involved.
There is a parable in John (Ch. 9, 2-3) where Jesus and the disciples come across a man known to have been blind from birth. The conversation goes like this: “Rabi, who sinned, the man or his parents that he was born blind?” Answer: “Neither this man or his parents sinned” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him…”
In other words, the man was born blind to increase the faith of those around him years later, to the time when Jesus approached him with his disciples, discussed him, and then cured him. Who could have known but God Himself?
A tougher example is found in the Book of Job, where this poor guy’s life is destroyed just to settle an argument between God and Satan. Of course, God wins and Job is restored in all his wealth and family (apparently, new family), but during the trials, all Job’s friends believe he deserves his fate because of some hidden sin. Both these stories warn us that we cannot know the mind of God until He sees fit to reveal His intentions.
But still, events make things happen in us. This freak accident with a woman who had once been the teacher of my son, and who had also been at the center of a possible whirlwind of ego and revenge, raises a sense of astonishment in me, along with an awareness that something greater often touches us in ways we could never imagine. Any of us at any time could unwittingly be at that center of revenge, or could be struck down by lightning near a national monument. Or we could be born blind so that years later, our unfortunate fate might elevate others to eternal life. We might not know what special events mean, but we are often made aware of special events in our lives that occur for purposes which may or may not be revealed to us or to others in our lifetime. By these, we learn that we are not mere grains of sand on an infinite beach - that we are not only brief illuminations of life that are pointless in the vastness of space and time. Rather, we are made to understand that we are so important that infinity chooses to stoop down to our tiny presence and work through us for purposes that are often beyond our reasoning, but that are there none-the-less. So it is made clear by the creator of galaxies and supernovas that we ‘little nothings’ are also at the center of the universe just as we are and where we are.
The misfortunes of this woman have also enhanced in me what the Bible calls the “fear of the Lord,” for, although I may understand that everything works eventually towards the good, I also understand that in my brief span of mortal life I might be visited by anything or any event, for better (in my estimate) or for worse. We do not sit aside and view the cosmic struggle in an audience, but are intimately involved as actors directed by an unheard voice. We stand at the edge of supernovas into which we might be plunged at a moment’s notice. Such is our importance, and such are our lives. Be alert, be amazed, but never be bored.
RSS Feed