Thursday, December 17, 2009

THINK SERENDIPITY

Think about it. If Dad hadn't moved from Rockford to Chicago...if Mom hadn't met him at that Chicago afternoon party...if they together hadn't moved into the west-side parish of St Angela...if a Rosary College theatre graduate hadn't been mounting a parish variety show that Christmas....well, I wouldn't have been there to play the piano for this auburn-haired singer who would someday become the wife of my dreams and my children. Now that's serendipity...! And that's been happening to you too, all your life...!

Thornton Wilder's novel "The Bridge of St Luis Rey" is but one classic dramatizing how all the littlest What-Ifs in our life bring us together... tear us apart...keep us off that doomed plane....put our immune system in harm's way... place us at the dawn of a new idea...transform a failure into a success... bring us to that particular mountain where was heard the whisper of destiny.

Well, you get the idea.

Every life is an unrepeatable act, each life is an exception, and all lives are somehow bound up in all other lives. And yet for all of that, there isn't a one of us on this spinning blue planet who hasn't been largely shaped by wondrous serendipity. So while the most rational and empirical among us plan and plot, anyone with any scrap of life experience comes to the ineluctable conclusion that this gift of life is always wrapped inside layer upon layer of astonishing surprises.

And so it is that each of us spending this gift must decide how best to do so. Cautiously guarded in expectation of legions of little and large terrors....or passionately open to battalions of little and large joys. I once met a wheel-chaired man in a nursing home who no matter what, always smiled. When I asked him one morning why, he gave me the right answer: "Because I haven't lived this day before!"

I keep trying to remember him. I think his name was Charlie...

2 comments:

  1. It is amazing to think of all the "what ifs" in life...it's almost too awesome to imagine life without them.

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  2. Awesome is the word. Which is one more reason I suspect there's a God...

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