Divine intervention

Lent 2020 - Day 32

"Divine intervention/Always my intention/So I take my time" - Mother of Pearl, Roxy Music, from their third album, Stranded. Bryan Ferry justifies his inactivity, passivity, see-what-happens, rather than making his feelings known to a woman he admires. Fate, destiny, coincidence - or just random happenings - are balanced against driven human volition. Triumph of the individual will? Or does God step in to intervene?

Let's take two points of view:

•  "I shape the course of events. The decisions I take determine the path that my life will follow. Belief in fate is fatalism; it is the ideology of losers."


• "Our lives are predetermined. Everything that happens to us has been preordained from above; there's nothing we can do to influence the final outcome."

Which point of view is nearer to yours? If you accept determinism - then what's the point of striving for anything in life? If you believe in your powers to shape the way your life turns out, have your plans taken into consideration the possibility of external random events interfering? At this critical time for civilisation, many of us with plans are having to put them to one side, to wait out the pandemic, before returning to our chosen course. Is this a moment for determinists to point out the futility of trying to shape one's destiny? Does God step in to intervene in our affairs?

The debate between free will and determinism has been present in mankind's discourse since the dawning of philosophy. It would be worth reading both Wikipedia articles linked above as well as some of the philosophical concepts related to the two, such as fatalism and indeterminism.

Accepting the existence of these two contradictory world views, it seems to me that both extremes are clearly wrong - fatalism leads to inaction while stubborn belief in the strength of one's will engenders a harmful arrogance (as witnessed in the current occupant of the White House).

We are always teetering on the edge of chaos (now more so than at any previous time in my life since the end of the Cold War. Is it better to make plans in the anticipation that no unforeseen circumstance (the outbreak of war, accident or illness) will render them invalid? I am minded of stories of Polish farmers in the 1960s who held back from working too hard on their land lest WW3 broke out.

To what extent can we will ourselves good luck? To what extent are our prayers answered? How aligned are we to the forces shaping the way the Universe unfolds?

The sun also rises

There is in the Jewish mystical tradition the concept of the Lamed Vavniks - the 36 righteous people on earth, in each generation, that protect the world. They justify the purpose of mankind to God. Guardians, if you like, of us all. The fact that mankind has not as yet been wiped out in a mass extinction event could be put down to their intervention on our behalf. But each generation has its burden. My visit to the Auschwitz museum when I was 18, had a profound impact on my faith - how could an omnipotent God allow such bestial horrors to happen on such a scale? In Europe? How could millions of utterly innocent humans - so many of them children - be murdered in such a cold-blooded, organised way? What was their place in God's eternal plan? Does God have a plan?

I gave up on God as omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent. But I did not give up on God. There is no plan, no roadmap, but there is an Unfolding. There is a purpose to the Universe, a common destination for all matter, for all consciousness. We are too lowly in our intellectual ability and our spiritual evolution to grasp more than just fragments, rays, intimations. We must be open to them, not shut them out because of the rationalist materialism that blinds us to wonder.

God steps in when we are open to God, when we are filled with gratitude for our sentient life, when we are aware of our consciousness and its place in the Universe. If you believe that it's more than one life, and with each one, awareness grows, and that eternal thread grows stronger, more tangible.


This time last year:
Oblique views of Warsaw from the air

This time six years ago
On Calton Hill, Edinburgh

This time seven years ago:
Doomsday - the Last Judgment

This time eight years ago:
Sunny Scotland at 23.9C 

This time ten years ago:

My road bike, ready for action