Many religious people—certainly Christians—will attest that one of the immediate rewards of faith is the reassuring conviction that one is doing what God wills. This could mean anything from sandlot moral decisions we make daily (should I pay a little extra for fair-trade coffee?) to big-league questions like in which direction we should steer our lives and vocations. For the truly faithful, the feeling of being in sync with God’s will can be as comforting as the assurance we have enough material resources to thrive. It’s a sense that things are right with the world—our little corner of it, at least.
The problem is that this sense of “doing God’s will” is easy to counterfeit, even to ourselves. Every “pro-life” Christian who has terrorized an abortion clinic, every Islamic suicide bomber, and every Israeli settler who has brought physical harm and dislocation to the lives of innocent Palestinians has surely believed that they were acting, at least in part, on God’s orders. This self-deception needn’t result in violent extremism to be alarming. All of us are subject to the delusion that we’ve unearthed God’s will for us, and the sanctimony it can breed is only one of its complications. A false sense of God’s will—and a faulty method for discerning it—can lead us down paths on which a benevolent God would never send us. We must be especially careful when seeking evidence for God’s will in our lives, even if we do so with the best of intentions.
Imagine two young college students—Jack and Jill—who are discerning career paths as they begin their sophomore year. Both are weighing law school against a medical degree. They are both motivated neither by greed nor acclaim but by generosity and compassion (aspiring to be a missionary physician, a public defender, or the like). They are also both rooted in the Christian faith of their childhoods and make prayer an element in their discernment.
One day while praying, Jack believes he hears a sonorous male voice saying to him, “Jack, I want you to become a doctor.” Jack takes this as a clear sign and begins charting out the coursework required for a pre-med program. That same day, Jill experiences a series of events that strike her as significant, all of which revolve around the field of medicine. She hears a particularly moving Gospel reading from Luke at morning Mass and recalls that he was a physician (at least by the medical standards of ancient Palestine). She finds a medical-school anatomy text left behind in her favorite library carrel. That evening, a friend accidentally slices open his finger at a dinner party, and Jill ends up helping him clean and bandage the wound. Jill is struck by the co-occurrence of these events and concludes that God is calling her to pursue medicine.
It’s easy to imagine what a skeptic might say to Jack. “You were dreaming; you were under the influence of alcohol or drugs; you deluded yourself.” The skeptic’s claim is essentially that Jack didn’t really hear what he thinks he heard. But how would the skeptic respond to Jill? Note that even the most demanding observer need not doubt that Jill had each of the experiences she describes; her lucidity is not in question. Reasonable doubts would concern the meaningful connection between those experiences. For Jill, the interpretation is clear: What are the odds all these things could happen to me in one day if God weren’t trying to tell me something? For the skeptic, while the coincidences may be worth noting, they remain a matter of chance and might not even turn out to be all that unlikely. The synoptic gospels comprise a regular and predictable cycle in the lectionary; tons of medical books are left lying around in university libraries; and so forth. Nothing so out of the ordinary has happened that needs explaining. The skeptic might even diagnose Jill with apophenia, a psychological disorder where people obsessively look for (and, accordingly, find) patterns and connections where no actual causal connection exists, as do those immersed in conspiracy theories such as QAnon.
The average person is likely to find the skeptical interpretations of Jack’s experience convincing. Most of us never hear voices clear as day telling us what to do. But most of us can also relate to Jill’s experience. Though we might ultimately side with the skeptic who cautions that these are mere coincidences, we’re likely to at least entertain the notion that something “causes” them to occur together—perhaps even the divine finger of God.
SQuire Rushnell (yes, he capitalizes the first two letters of his name), a former television executive, has founded a cottage industry on the assumption that coincidences like the ones Jill experienced are indeed divine messages. He refers to these revelations of God’s will that are too improbable to be matters of chance as “Godwinks.” In his 2002 book When God Winks and a host of similar titles, Rushnell has built a brand around the term, licensing everything from prayer guides to greeting cards. Identifying these divinely engineered coincidences is just the beginning. Once you learn to read the many “winks” that God sews into the fabric of your life, you can come to realize “the grand path that has been designed especially for you.” You can “even learn to create more Godwinks—turning your wishes into winks.”
A palpable nostalgia punctuates Rushnell’s writing, a longing for a bygone enchanted world where God orchestrated events in our lives and sent us messages about how to live. Over-rationalized technological modernity, the story goes, suppresses our instinct to embrace “Godwinks” and dismisses them as mere superstition.
But this nostalgia gets things backward. The inclination to attribute a cause to co-occurrences by eliminating the work of random chance is a product of the Enlightenment and statistical methods based on the work of Blaise Pascal, Christiaan Huygens, and others (described with great care by philosopher Ian Hacking in his book The Emergence of Probability). The perceived need to distinguish “causal” events from “random” occurrences arrived only with that more scientific understanding of the world. We moderns tend to seek common causes behind unlikely coincidences and use the apparent unlikelihood of random chance to argue for our preferred causal account—whether that refers to mechanical laws of nature or to divine intervention.
But the ancients had little awareness of probabilities; it wouldn’t have occurred to them to assess the possibility that God might be “winking” at them by weighing events in terms of their likelihood as the result of chance alone. They had no need for evidence: the “coincidences” in their lives were immediately recognized as signs of God, not data that needed to be analyzed in order to prove God’s existence or active intervention in the world. The promoters of “Godwinks” are, in this sense, as rational as the skeptic who chides them. Rushnell, Jill, and the skeptic share the impulse to look for the cause of coincidences rather than just considering their meaning.
An enduring account of how human beings, both ancient and modern, can search for meaning in coincidental events without trying to identify a cause is found in Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity. Developed in lectures in the 1930s, synchronicity antedates Rushnell’s “Godwinks” by decades, though Jung’s contributions are conspicuously absent from When God Winks. As an apostle of the psychoanalytic tradition and the founder of analytic psychology, Jung is not interested in theological explanations, but he writes from a deep sense of spirituality, which he understands in terms of humanity’s “collective unconscious.” The striking coincidences we often observe in life do convey something, Jung acknowledges, but they are not nudges from God. They reveal our own internal motivations: we see what we choose to see based on what we desire—both consciously and subconsciously. This isn’t to say that we are solipsists fabricating our experiences of the world, merely that the resonance of those experiences comes from our own attention.
Modern popular psychology has a term for this: selective perception. A barrage of stimuli come into our perceptual field, but our experience is a matter of what we attend to and how we organize information. Without a framework for interpreting stimuli and the motivation to glean the important information from x while ignoring some insignificant y, sense perception would be a baffling, crippling mess.
Let’s return to Jill and her coincidence-filled day. Suppose that, in addition to the events we’ve already considered, she also: (1) learns that she achieved the highest score on her Intro to Psychology term paper, (2) finds a copy of Psychology Today underneath the abandoned anatomy textbook, and (3) consoles a bereaved classmate who recently lost an older sibling to cancer. Jill notes each of these experiences, yet she sees no particular connection among them.
Are these facts really coincidences if Jill doesn’t connect them the way she did her “medical” experiences that same day? Should an outside observer point them out and affirm their connection as a potential “Godwink” for Jill? The instinct to ask her, “Look—don’t you see these things are connected as well? Shouldn’t they be telling you something?” is in fact telling us something. It suggests that we don’t discern God’s presence in our lives—and certainly God’s will for what we might be doing with those lives—from some Archimedean point of neutrality outside of ourselves. What we notice about our experiences and the connections among them is a matter of the meaning we attach to them. We aren’t scientists searching for a cause among competing candidates; we’re human beings invested in our experiences. We don’t just objectively extract information from them; we make meaning out of them.
We do (and should) try to find meaning in coincidences. But to simply say that God “caused them to happen” to send us a specific, unambiguous message is an untestable scientific claim, not religious faith. Counting “Godwinks” is akin to astrology: it leaves us passive observers of the world looking for cosmic “messages” rather than active participants in God’s will. Discerning God’s presence in our lives involves noticing and asking why we notice. Why does this event resonate more than others? What desires and yearnings might this attention be pointing to?
St. Ignatius of Loyola’s approach to prayer—especially in the Examen of Consciousness that Jesuits and others pray regularly—offers us a more subtle method for decision-making. The “discernment of spirits,” as Ignatius described it, is not a clinical, detached process of looking for “winks” or statistically improbable coincidences. It involves assessing our own recent emotional states regarding our decisions, personal encounters, and other experiences. Why were my passions stirred—perhaps unexpectedly—by this experience? Why did other experiences not carry the same weight? Where is God in all of this? The coincidences we come across have something to do with our hopes and desires, as well as with what we are filtering out because it doesn’t move us. But that doesn’t make them less meaningful. Ignatian discernment suggests that this is precisely how God accompanies us and works through us.
Imagine that you have a computer and video screen with a virtual grid of 1000 by 1000 pixels or more. Now imagine that each pixel can be assigned a shade of white, grey, or black. You instruct the computer to assign one of those shades randomly to each pixel and inspect the results. Might the resulting grid look like anything recognizable? Maybe, maybe not. But then you do the same thing millions of times, retaining each resulting distribution for visual inspection by millions of people. Now, are any identifiable images likely to be found among those millions? There would certainly be a lot of abstract icons suitable perhaps for a Rorschach test or a QR code, but there might also be images that invoke real things like Big Ben or Cyndi Lauper or a Toyota Corolla. And, in the mix, there might be one or two that look kind of like Jesus or the Virgin Mary.
This “experiment” is in fact carried out every day—we call it toast. Millions of slices of bread are toasted, and millions of potential images are generated randomly by the different shades of darkness arrayed on each side of each slice’s surface. Each year it’s conceivable that, worldwide, dozens of toasted images of Paul Giamatti or a Budweiser Clydesdale are buttered and consumed without fanfare—few people are looking for these images in their breakfast. What does tend to be noticed, however—by religious people, at least—is toast that appears to have an image of a bearded, slender young male; a shrouded, innocent young woman; or just a simple cross. These then are taken as “miracles”—evidence of God’s presence in the world. The person who put the bread in the toaster, it is inferred, is receiving some divine message.
Of course, there is a skeptical point to be made here: the appearance of these divine images is not statistically anomalous. It is unscientific to select the toast that looks like Jesus or Mary and present it as evidence that God has a specific message for us. Surely, there are pieces of Seth Rogen or Margaret Thatcher toast we’re eating on a regular basis. We don’t notice these anomalies, and if we do, we don’t take them as signs pointing to the merits of Knocked Up or neoliberalism.
But it’s only from a statistical perspective that it’s a problem to find Jesus because we’re looking for him. We find the face of Jesus on our morning toast or the Blessed Virgin in a water stain under the local viaduct because many of us are seeking Christ’s love and redemption or Mary’s comforting presence in our lives. It’s no crime to find them staring back at us. And it’s also not merely “naïve” or “superstitious.” The same goes for “Godwinks.” They result from genuine yearning and a search for meaning to help organize and emotionally subdue the turmoil of the world we inhabit. Seeing God’s work in the patterns of the natural world can be a beautiful thing, provided we avoid making a scientific, causal hypothesis out of our experiences.
The Christ—God’s presence in the world made incarnate—is better thought of as the ship that keeps us afloat than a distant lighthouse beckoning us in a particular direction. When we embrace God as an eternal, meaningful presence in our lives rather than an occasional messenger, the world becomes, despite its flaws, a genuinely wondrous place.
No comments:
Post a Comment