Coincidence?

An acquaintance the other day said "I don't believe in any coincidence". The implication was that every chance was directed/managed by God for a purpose. This is quite a faith perspective and I, thinking about my own belief, wondered about the statement "I only believe in coincidence". My implication would be that every chance is just that... chance. There is no actual direction/management by God. Clearly these are two extreme positions (all or none), but does one suggest a stronger faith? Is one a better or more faithful expression of the gospel? I am sure (and by "I am sure" I mean that "they exist", not that "surely there must be, but it's not my area", which is often the implication when we say "I am sure") that there are theological and philosophical treatises on each of these positions. Free will comes in to play, God's ability and/or willingness to act on earth, the entire existence and purpose of the Holy Spirit, etc.

But as the untrained (in theology or philosophy), let me think about what my world of coincidence means about faith. In my world, there is no higher power directing my decisions, massaging my daily routine to orchestrate a chance encounter, providing the extra second of green light or quick red to insure I am in the right place at the right time. Instead, I make decisions, based on response to stimuli. And with the vast multitude of variables in the universe, there are bound to be convergences of events that my pattern-recognition-seeking-brain sees as improbable, but fortuitous. So if I live my life this way, every event rational cause and effect (no matter how complex), where does that leave God or faith. Did I just place God in a glass jar, unable to interact with the world? Did I relegate miracle to the mundane? Maybe. But I don't think it is my role to relegate God. I choose to believe in a God who is big enough to get out of any jar I put her in. The fact that I believe, that my decision process is based on a commitment to live a particular kind of life, in itself changes the direction/management of my life. Instead of God managing the externalities of life, setting up coincidences that I respond to, God infuses the internalities of life, affecting my identity, which manifests itself through my actions and responses.

I don't want to say one point of view is "better". But coincidence makes more sense to my hyper-rational world view. Even so, I am a little bit nervous about this thought train as it seems to leave me at the platform of the "rugged individualist", which is really inconsistent with my thoughts on communal contributions to faith. But I will let it sit for awhile and see where it goes.

Identity

A strange conglomeration of reading this summer, but some thread of identity flows through it. A little bit of Cultural Revolution (The Vagrants) and Mexican Revolution (The Underdogs), a little bit of gender exploration (Middlesex) and coming of age(Boy's Life, The Dust of 100 Dogs). A bit of career and personal insecurity (Crossing to Safety, The Man with the Compound Eyes, Station Eleven, All the Light we Cannot See). Perhaps what I am thinking about is less about "Who am I" and more about the effect of external stimuli affecting identity. This external stimuli could be environmental/situational or it could be communal, and we have varying degrees of control over these factors. After a pandemic flu, you have no control over your situation and you are basically in react mode. But how you react and who you choose to be even in survival (especially in survival?) is when true identity is revealed. When put into the stressful situation, when the intellectual action filters are not working, who will you be? Very rarely in literature do we see this part of life. The pre-stress life where identity is forged. How a character chooses to act and think as an individual in the privacy of their mind, how they choose to act and interact in community when surrounded by "like-minded". These are the essential practice grounds for identity. These thoughts, interactions, actions, while seemingly innocuous in the daily grind, become our foundation for action under stress, in the dystopian future, so to speak. It is this daily grind if identity formation that is rarely explicit in our story telling. After all, it is boring. But somehow, the combination of books I read this summer started to give me a glimpse.

For myself, the clearest example of this boring identity formation is my life decision to be pacifist. Will I ever truly be in a position in my life where I have to test this decision? I sincerly hope not. So how do I know I am pacifist? It is easy to claim if you never encounter violence. So I need to form my identity in the small arena. To make daily choices in personal interactions that move away from violence. This must include verbal violence in conversation (which is often more subtle than I am even aware). This includes violence of invisibility, for example, with homelessness and poverty and all the unpopular. If I choose to see each person I encounter as truly and fully human, my hope is that even in a stressful, dystopian future event I will be unable to view anyone as anything less than fully human. That I will be unable to participate in violence. I suppose that is how you know it is identity.