A Mythic Reality

I've known for some time that my paradigm needs shifting.  Somehow my operating system got too existentialist-deist: the mountain of the urgency of the moment has combined with God as the audience of one that we perform for to sufficiently impact how I see activity on the world stage.  Meanwhile, Don Delillo, in Point Omega, suggests that our attempts at self-consciousness regarding our worldviews may be all for naught, that we're tiring collectively of the analysis--especially self-analysis--that the western worldview has awakened us to.  For my part, at least half the time, I agree. 

Two things made me consider again how it is I look at the world.  The first was an accident, a head on collision between two men from town just outside another town.  The odds that these two men would hit each other traveling too and from a community 20-plus miles distant is not huge, but okay. 

However, it was more the manner of the accident--and the response of the lone survivor--that again shocked my worldview. 

The accident, as I said, was head on.  One of the drivers, the survivor, drifted for an unknown reason into the other driver's lane.  Perhaps he fell asleep, since he doesn't remember a thing about it.  In any case, the other car must have popped over a hill and that was it.  No breaks, no swerving, just the impact of 55 mile-per hour metal projectiles impacting each other; one man dead, the other with a smashed face and arm who was back in church three weeks later.

What does one do philosophically about car accidents like this?  Or, worse still, about the young father who was killed by a Sturgis motorcyclist who, leaving the interstate at a random exit ramp, ran a stopsign and hurtled into the family's minivan?  Word has it that the survivor of the former accident chalks it up to God's will--that it was the other driver's time to go and so God used the survivor as the angel of death with the only expense to himself of about 12 broken bones. 

I find this problematic for a number of reason.  First, accidents like this are the necessary outcome of 55-mile per hour projectiles driven by finite, contingent creatures on two lane roads.  The same, I suppose, can be said of any mode of transportation.  Even regressing to horses, a certain amount of injuries and deaths can be expected in the equation.  This means that the cause of these accidents is a bit deeper, built into the fabric of the world itself.  Death will happen as these forces intersect each other; however, in our culture we're willing to live with the possibility of death at every meeting of vehicles.

This realization reminds of part of the philosophy of J.R.R. Tolkien, who built into his larger vision of Middle-Earth the idea that death was a gift to the world of men.  Rather than to live on and on in "endless serial living" as the elves did, humans got to escape that circle to the "straight road" of something beyond.  It's a helpful vision for me, one that suggests a possibility for death tied to the garden of Eden, where God ensured that humans wouldn't eat of the tree of life and live forever in a miserable world.  Death is an out into something beyond. 

Still, this doesn't account for the pain of death too soon.  One of my professors along the way recounted the story of a wise Chinese sage, who, when asked for a profound teaching by one of his disciples, said, "Grandfather dies, father dies, son dies."  That is, when the progression of life and death goes as it should, it's a beautiful thing--perhaps as good as can be hoped for on this side of the veil. 

What do we do with do with the trauma of Job, though, with the disruption of that line of orderly succession by horrific tragedy?  It's hard for me to say that the Angel of Death was there at the accident, soothing the survivor to sleep and coaxing him into the lane of oncoming traffic, or propelling the motorcyclist full bore through the stop sign.

But perhaps my faith is simply weak.  I heard the survivor's philosophy second hand in a conversation at church.  Another man in that conversation, whose younger brother died at a crash at an intersection, talked about the odds of that accident ever occurring, how just a second or two difference would have meant the collision never would've happened.  It smacks of destiny, and therefore, to Christians, of pre-destiny. 

It's only recently that I've come to appreciate the Calvinist bent toward God's sovereignty.  At the end of the day, to confess--despite the horrors of the world--that God is in control is an amazing statement of faith, and it's no doubt all one may have left.  However, it seems to me that many in the Calvinist tradition are so bent toward God's sovereignty that they ignore the malignant forces that, by nature of the freedom built into the universe we live in, play an authentic and not simply benign role in the world. 

This is the second reason I find the survivor's explanation of the event problematic: it fails to consider that there may be forces that are simply trying to destroy something, to ruin his life and the lives of others.  To acknowledge God's sovereignty may be to circumvent the lack of faith that evil forces may be trying to engender--or it may simply tell the wrong story altogether, attributing good and evil to a God who is only the source of good.

As I said, this was one of the recent events to challenge my vision of reality.  God was there at that crossroads, at the spot where car meets car.  But so, I would say, was another force.  And this, then, adds up to my revision of reality: the world we live in is much more mythical than we tend to think, much more the place of conflict between supernatural beings that result in conflicts that can only be told in mythic stories--stories like that of Job where ideas, forces, and beings seen and unseen come into conflict in a way that only stories can capture.

My gut tells me that Don Delillo is also right:  self-consciousness about our worldview is no longer enough.  It doesn't work for those people who are not by nature self-conscious or analytical, who don't want to reflect on how they reflect.  Rather, we must return to stories that move people, that allow them to understand how they are actors in a world where forces bigger than themselves are at work. 

And so this entry is call for storytellers and mythmakers.  There are a thousand ways that the Story can get taken captive: by the mountain of the present and scientific reality and dualism and Manicheanism and reductionism and even by a God who's controlling in a way that he may not be.  But to understand the Story of scripture as an over-arching story that continues into our world is a place to start.  And to tell that story in a way that makes sense of our actions--both the daily repetitions and life-changing traumatic events--is a way to makes sense of life in a world that continues to be a mysterious intersection of good and evil, of the physical and the spiritual, of the human and divine.