We are the pattern seekers, the meaning chasers, the hunters in hot pursuit of the elusive explanation.
***
You’ve heard them, the startling stories of extraordinary events that seem to signal deep significance, if only we could figure out what it was. One in my Strong Glass memoir about waking to my father’s voice just before his death miles away still furrows my brow. A friend in Illinois—call her Claire—recently called with another.
She and her husband, Steve, had attended a joyous celebration for recipients of a scholarship she and her husband sponsor each year. All those young faces, she mused, bright with joy over the journey ahead. Suddenly, she felt an urgent need to visit an ailing friend in Florida. She flew the next day and spent several hours holding her friend’s hand, talking with her, distracting her from the pain. Claire had planned to visit again the next day, but the woman passed away in her sleep that night. She had been under an any-day-now death sentence from the doctors for months and was suffering, so a sudden death was expected, even welcomed, but it still hit Steve hard. He had turned 80 just weeks before and was already struggling with thoughts of his own mortality.
Claire was still in Florida helping with arrangements when Steve was overcome with a deep and solitary despondency. He felt that going for a take-out pizza would give him something to do. On the way there, he saw the flashing lights of police cars and paramedics announcing a traffic incident. Coming back that way, he saw only a police deputy’s car. On uncharacteristic impulse, he pulled up behind it and emerged with the steaming pizza.
“Ma’am, can I interest you in some hot pizza?”
She eyed him with suspicion. “Sir, I don’t know what your game is, but you can’t be here; you need to get back in your car.”
“I’m sorry if I startled you; I just got this pizza for myself in Hamilton, and I thought you might like a slice.” Steve’s injured look must have made the young deputy realize he simply meant to be kind. Her attitude softened. She thanked him and assured him she had just come on shift after dinner and was good. Steve wished her well and continued home.
The next morning, he saw her face again in the news. She had been killed on her way home from her shift. She was married with two small children.
Steve was shaken and heartsick, agonizing over the meaning he should draw from his involvement in events with such propinquity—his impulsive stop to offer pizza and the freak fatality. He called all his friends asking them their thoughts. Opinions varied.
Some said it was a lesson on the fragility of human life. Some opined he did a kind thing for someone who may have needed it just then and he should just let it go. One of their closest friends had the answer that rang the truest for Claire. “We may never know.”
Claire and Steve, deeply spiritual people, wanted the kind of connection they had heard so often at church, sometimes called “God-sent messages.” They sought meaning like the one reported by Terry Mattingly, a religion columnist I often read my local paper, the Chattanooga Times Free Press. Mattingly told of a journalist named Terry Anderson who was taken captive by the Shia Hezbollah in Lebanon. A Catholic who had been interrogating his faith for some time, he was imprisoned first with a Catholic priest, who heard his confession, and later with a missionary from a theological school, who enlightened him. Anderson was confident he knew the meaning of these events. “I needed a priest, and God gave me a priest … I had Bible questions, and God gave me a New Testament professor.” That explanation was logical and satisfying to him, and sometimes the answer we seek comes to us as easily as that.
But Claire and Steve wanted an explanation that yielded no clues from available information. They will probably never know the meaning behind what Steve experienced, if indeed there is one.
That doesn’t mean we stop searching.
Imponderables chaff at our sense of order and damage our unspoken belief that there is purpose in everything in the universe. Not knowing creates a struggle within us, an energy-draining existential battle for answers that make us feel still in control and not adrift in the void.
All our questions reverberate in our brains like Latin prayer-chant in a Catholic mass.
We will never know. Kyrie eleison.
We will never know. Kyrie eleison.
If a connection does occur to us, is it even really there?
Kyrie eleison.
***
Buzzfeed is a goldmine of vignettes about events that sometimes offer up a satisfying explanation and sometimes don’t. A recent popular theme is “last words of the dying,” variations on which Buzzfeed posts from time to time. One individual posted that she had finished a shift volunteering in an HIV hospice ward just as a snowstorm hit the city. She couldn’t go home and, sleepless, decided to visit the bedside of one patient who was not expected to survive the night. Just as she sat and took the man’s hand, he looked up at her and announced, “This weather we are having—I ordered it just so you would stay here with me tonight, you know.” A few minutes later, he was gone.
The next morning, she was able to leave for home, only to find police tape surrounding her apartment building. One of her neighbors had broken into several apartments, including hers, shooting everyone he could find before killing himself. Had it not been for the storm, she would have been home that night and become a likely victim of the shooting spree. She believed that something big was at work here, though she couldn’t figure out what. Her Buzzfeed post seemed a plea for ideas on what it might mean. Hers was a classic imponderable.
***
Thornton Wilder literally wrote the book on imponderables. Brother Juniper, narrator in Wilder’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, sought meaning in the sudden collapse of a Peruvian rope bridge woven by the Inca a century earlier in which five people perished. “Why those five people?” is the question that haunts the monk. “What did they do in life to merit this death?” After years of research, the spiritual explanation he wants eludes him, but an observation by another religious, the Abbess Madre María del Maria, embodies Wilder’s take on imponderables. “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” For Wilder, love answered the most vexing imponderables.
Other artists similarly emboldened to take on such “Big Issues” often agree with Wilder. H. G. Wells wrote again and again about his belief that absent social equality—a kind of love for humanity—technology will evolve a dystopian world rather than the utopia many of his contemporaries predicted. In the movie The Time Machine based on the H. G. Wells novel of the same name, the protagonist (Wells) concludes that “Every age is the same. Only love makes any of them bearable.” Wells couldn’t have written it better himself.
In my favorite film, the 1947 Stairway to Heaven, love is on trial when a young British airman, hovering between life and death, must plead his case in heaven’s court to be allowed to return to life and the woman he loves. The verdict in favor of the defendant comes after a line delivered by his attorney. “Nothing is stronger than the law in the universe, but on earth nothing is stronger than love.” Personally, I would have switched them.
***
Our world is a garden with varieties of imponderables, most of them nourished by propinquity like the twinned events Claire’s husband Steve experienced. Some are serendipitous—the priest and theologian sent to Terry’s cell as he mulled over his faith, or the one Harriet Tubman reported to an early biographer.[i] Fearing that her owner intended to separate her family, she prayed, “If you ain’t never going to change that man’s heart … kill him, Lord, and take him out of the way.” Her owner died that week, solidifying Tubman’s faith in her destiny and setting her mind on freedom. Like Terry, she viewed the man’s death as a prayer answered, but it was really an imponderable. Dr. King would have scoffed, “That’s coincidence, not evidence.”
Fateful imponderables abound, those that mirror the story of the five who died in Wilder’s novel, when chance seems to select us for life-shattering disaster. Our vehicle crosses an intersection at the same moment as a drunk driver. Ours is the only home in the neighborhood the tornado ploughs through. Others are mysteries like the BuzzFeed story or Steve’s encounter.
Cosmic imponderables—Why are we here? Why was I born? Why do young lives end unfulfilled while the old who long for death linger?—most of us push away, too large a prey for our net. The smaller ones that appear like personal messages from the cosmos captivate us. What made me stop with the pizza? Was a snowstorm really sent to keep me from harm? Did my father really cry out to me before he died, and if so, why?
Another Dr. King—the one who believed in dreams and the better angels of our nature—might say that imponderables are prods for us to have faith, challenging us to approach the inexplicable with trust in the divine love that answers all. Our world preys on us with randomness, much of which our society either creates or allows by refusing to address the causes. But love is a constant, a bridge between our helpless intellects and the fate that awaits us. How fortunate are those of us who, like Wilder, sense the presence of the current that surrounds and buoys us unseen, like angel wings lifting our arms as we fall, urging us to keep swimming against a tide of uncertainty and chance. I join those who use the evidence of things unseen[ii] to find that divine love always has a purpose.
***
We are the pattern seekers in randomness, the meaning chasers when answers cannot be found, the hunters whose prey eludes us. We will never stop searching—until we cross over and find love waiting at the end.
Kyrie eleison.
[i] New Yorker, July 1, 2024, p. 62
[ii] Hebrews 1:11