The Universe Conspires?

I have always been drawn to points of intersection. Collision points. Turning points. Watershed moments. Forks in the road. Moments of union.  For me these are moments of awe because I find myself stepping back from the depth of the single moment I am in, in order to see time and the universe in its awesome entirety.

For example, I recently learned that in less than 12 months between May, 1966 and April, 1967 Buddhist teacher, writer and activist Thich Nhat Hanh met with both Catholic writer and monk Thomas Merton and Civil Rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  These meetings had a significant impact on both men, who have left legacies far beyond the scope of this blog, that in part influenced spiritually-based activism and interreligious dialogue for decades to come. 

For me, thinking about all the near-misses, twists and turns that had to happen for the possibility of a Vietnamese monk in  exile  to make  contact with the lives of a French immigrant living in a Trappist monastery in Kentucky and an African American Civil Rights leader within the same year makes me shake my head in wonder.

This amazement toward the experience of witnessing layers of time and reality unfold began at an early age for me, but grew ten-fold when I was an undergraduate in college. 

I was majoring in Sociology and Spanish at the time, and in my freshman year I learned about a concept called The Sociological Imagination. Now this was about 20 years ago, and I still remember how powerful it was to have a new language to describe these intersections of time.  Here I won't bore you with the details, but in brief, I understood the sociological imagination to be a way of looking at reality from more than one dimension to see how our private lives intersect  with larger historical moments. 

I remember I had to  write a paper to illustrate this very concept and I discovered how my mother's parents' lives intersected with the events of post-World War II American life. The paper itself was not all that interesting to me, but the concept was because I began to see how our lives are orchestrated by cause and effect.  I no longer saw events in my life or those around me as random or even mysterious, but rather as a part of a larger whole, and this left me wide-eyed.

I realized these could be really simple moments too.  Like on Friday when I was driving to work I saw a man running for the city bus.  He was waving his arms and yelling to the bus driver to stop, but the bus kept going.  I was at a stoplight at that moment, and he was close enough for me to see his shoulders drop with a long exhale suggesting something like "damn, now I'm going to be late for work" might have been going through his mind.

Watching this very ordinary moment caused me to remember the 1998 Gwenyth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors, do you remember it? In the movie Gwenyth played an English woman named Helen, and the movie takes the audience through 2 parallel plots.  In one plot Helen makes the train after leaving work, I mean the tube. And in the second plot, Helen misses the train by seconds.  The audience then gets taken on these two different paths that ensue from that one moment in time of making or not making the train.

If you haven't seen it, I won't ruin the ending for you, but suffice it to say, the film leaves the audience asking itself: when we get exactly what we want in the timeframe we want it, is the universe conspiring to help us? Or, is the universe supporting us human beings when we are taken on a mysterious path full of twists, turns, dead ends and missteps to ultimately get us where the universe would like us to go in order to be the fullest expression of ourselves, our soul?

There have been several different versions of this perspective about the universe conspiring over the centuries.  One came from a 19th century New England favorite of mine, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen." Even earlier in the 18th century, across the pond in Germany, Mr. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe had a similar thought: "At the moment of commitment the entire universe conspires to assist you."  And then fast forward the the last twenty years, and we have South American novelist Mr. Paulo Coelho writing in his famous book The Alchemist: "And, when you want something, all the universe conspires to helping you achieve it."

Now, I must confess, I love this idea. It is deeply comforting to me like a balm on a wound that has never healed.  But there is another skeptical part of me that questions: the universe conspires to help us? Tell that to the guy who just missed the bus and is now going to get yelled at for being late to work!  In fact, my own skeptical side spoke up just yesterday.

I was planning to go to my second full day meditation retreat.  I had had it scheduled on the calendar for months, and I was really looking forward to it after a challenging week of balancing the duties of being a psychotherapist, mom, and wife.  But when I woke up on the morning of the retreat it was snowing.  One week into spring, and it was snowing! Now, if you are reading my blog for the first time, you wouldn't know that my husband plows snow for work and we have 2 small children which means he is always on-call to work when it snows, and I would have to scramble for childcare if I was still going to be able to go to my retreat.  The good news was, it was still early enough in the morning, and I was able to make arrangements for childcare. Great. Sigh of relief. So I keep getting ready to go as I planned.

However, at the moment of leaving the house at 8:15, my 16 month old baby starts crying, sobbing.  We see she has had explosive diarrhea, so my husband starts to change her (he had not been called out for work yet) so I can still leave. But as I get my hand on the door knob, our 80 pound yellow lab jumps up with both paws onto the table and knocks over my 6 year-old to try to steal his scrambled eggs. Now, my 6 year-old is crying in unison with the baby, and my husband is beginning to have his own meltdown as he is simultaneously changing a disgusting diaper and yelling at the dog to get down from the table.  So I turn around and help diffuse the mayhem of a Saturday morning.

But then I finally do get out the door and think, "okay, I'll be late, but not too bad." Nope.  Half-way to the monastery where the retreat was to be held I look in my rearview mirror and see I have mistakenly taken the car seat with me, and if my husband is to bring the kids to childcare so he could go to work in the snow, he'd need both car seats.

So this was the moment. It was this moment, as I was turning around to drive back to my house in the opposite direction of the meditation retreat, that  I said to myself in deep frustration: "the universe conspires? Yeah right!"

Of course you know how this story ends though.  Everything worked out.  Everything...worked... out...And by saying this I don't mean everyone got exactly what they wanted, when they wanted it.  What I mean is, the moment resolved and passed in order for a new moment to manifest.

In Unitarian Universalist minister and Maine Warden Service Chaplain Kate Braestrup's book Here if you need me, she shares her thoughts on the concept of what is a miracle.  She tells the story of a case she took part in which a young woman was brutally raped and murdered.  She makes the point that a whole chain of unlikely events had to occur for this crime to happen, which led the public to call this a tragedy.  But when another chain of unlikely events occurs and it leads to what the public admires or values or desires, it is called a miracle. But is it not the same? And then how can we decide or know when the universe is conspiring for us or against us? Does it even work that way?

And what about the examples in which  miracle and tragedy seem to  co-exist? Like the story of Kevin Hines who attempted suicide by jumping off of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge at the age of 19.  In my understanding, on the day of the suicide attempt, Mr. Hines said there were multiple moments of intersection in which there were several missed opportunities for other human beings to simply ask him if he was all right, given his obviously distressed state.  Some were  missed and others just blatantly ignored- like the person who asked this sobbing young man standing on a bridge to take their picture, and so he threw himself off of the bridge. 

But wait! Just as  he was jumping, a driver crossing the bridge at the exact same time spotted Mr. Hines and recognize him as someone they knew, and that person called 911 who contacted the Coast Guard.  Then, just after leaping over the rail, Mr. Hines realized he did not in fact want to die, and he forced his feet into a downward position in order to protect his head upon contact with the water. Then, once in the water and still alive but severely injured, a sea lion swam underneath Mr. Hines which ultimately kept him from drowning. 

In keeping with the writer Kate Braestrup's point, in this example of Mr. Hines, how would we characterize this story? A tragedy? A miracle? The universe conspired to help him? Or not?  What do you think?

When I was at the meditation retreat yesterday (yes, I made it eventually) the teacher, Lynn, suggested to the group of participants that we need not respond to the intersections of life's moments with the words "it is what it is" because the undertone of these words is that of enduring and suffering.  Instead, she offered the words "it is like this for now."

It is like this for now. A very different tone. One that has a sense of surrender and acceptance, but holds the truth of impermanence to well remember that this moment is not the end-all.  Time will continue to unfold. I don't know how this will end.  And by "this," I mean this very moment. And as it does, though I may remain an agnostic as to whether or not the universe is conspiring to support me or not, I will continue to marvel at those moments of intersection when I get to witness multiple dimensions of reality including, but not limited to, my own personal experience coming together at the center like spokes on a wheel.

Perhaps this week, you can to.  And if you do, let me know about your experience. I'd love to hear from you.