TAKING A SECOND LOOK, ON SEPTEMBER 19

THERE ARE NO COINCIDENCES

A friend of mine ends all her letters with the challenge of this thought: "There are no coincidences...."

In the flotsam and jetsam of our everyday lives, it's easy to suspect everything as a will o' the wisp event with no meaning, no connection, no reason. And yet it usually takes only a serious pause to excavate each of these small treasures from each of those events.

Aren't we all our own prime-mover each new day? When we get up...how we eat and dress...where we go...who we choose to speak to and how we choose to do it? All these flow into those six-degrees-of- separation and those serendipitous rhythms we all initiate in our lives. And if you want to take the matter to a higher level, think God as the ultimate prime-mover. Not only in ours but every other life around us.

Now there are those who will argue the universe is random. That the only meanings, connections and rhythms here are those exquisitely fashioned by a blind evolution. We exist, we function, we succeednd we fail only by and because of the inexorable laws of evolution. And these laws exist only because of themselves, for evolution is the one self-generating, self-fulfilling prime-mover in the universe.

That's a fashionable way to see and say it in scholarly circles these days. For these circles have proudly untangled themselves from the primitivism of our ancient past where people got up every morning believing there were meanings, connections and reasons to everything they did. When I listen to these scholars then listen to the rhythms of my own life, I can't help feeling a little primitive myself.

Speaking for myself, then, I have to agree with my friend. There are no coincidences! I especially agreed at her funeral. When and how she died was one more reason for me to understand: There are no coincidences.

COURAGE IS NOT CHEAP; BUT IT'S WORTH THE PRICE

Mark Twain is always a fresh spring of pithy quotations. One of his elderly wisdoms was: "Courage is resistance to and mastery over fear -- not absence of fear." We have a young president who has an historic opportunity to test this wisdom....

Every leader is so tested, because by their very nature, every leader insists on leading. This stirs some to resent and to resist. Examples flourish even in other societies. Compare the chanting Turkish mobs in France, the silent protesters in Tehran and the Glenn Beck ragers in Washington. The anger in their faces isn't all that different. (Incidentally, while the overseas resisters were gassed, here 57 advertisers simply withdrew their budgets from Beck).

Inevitably, this tug and pull between leaders and followers shapes the times. But those who only understand their times from within the times themselves rarely see them with the advantage of perspective. Resentment and resistance are inevitable parts of the human landscape. What distinguishes all this are the causes over which there is this turmoil. Good causes make it worth the fight; bad causes do not.

How the final draft of history is written eventually depends upon how the participants eventually learn to distinguish one from the other. In the meantime, there's the encouraging wisdom of another prodigious thinker. In similar times of test, Winston Churchill wrote this: "You have enemies? Good! That means you've stood up for something."

AND THIS AFTERTHOUGHT

There are times when quoting gifted people is no gift...!

Here I'm thinking the novelist Iris Murdoch who said: "We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality." Maybe. But then, if we live without the drama of our fantasies and the grandeur of our illusions, what enormous power is out there to keep beckoning us to achieve something finer than the reality we are stuck in....?