What could be

It is never crazy to hope that love will come roaring back.

It’s been a year and change since I last wrote this column, emphasis on “change.” Time to sharpen the pencil and get the lead out, as the times, they are a’ … well, let’s just say, who woulda thunk?

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Dear reader: One night this past June, after a year away, I decided to try to resurrect this blog. The result was the first part of the column below, which I have put in italics. At the time, I decided I wasn’t ready to commit to regularly writing “Now You See It” again, and tabled the draft. Last night, and for some reason unbeknownst to me, I pulled up that draft and began reading. I was stunned — and humbled — that what I had posed in theory in fact came to pass.

I had written those italicized words with some kind of hope, never imagining in my wildest dreams that President Biden would step aside, that his vice president would quickly bring together a wide range of constituencies and turn a dark national mood on its head with joy and sanity and smarts, and that a little-known governor from Minnesota and his beautiful family would capture our hearts.

It is easy these days to fear that our world is hurtling toward its sure and total demise. Ukraine and Gaza have become graveyards, the only sure result of war, while authoritarianism and its cronies, racism and fascism, have been showing a resurgence. Climate scientists continue to warn that our planet is in peril, yet the monied interests whose profits depend on destroying the planet continue to hold sway. Closer to home, civility in public discourse is becoming the exception to the rule as long as X marks the spot.

It is hard to see any of our current crises resolving peacefully, including the hardening divide between the left and the right in the United States. Here's the thing, though: Anything can happen.

I find a strange hope in the fact that life is so unpredictable. Despite the grim statistics we read about every day, they document what was, what is, and what might be, but not what will be. No one can say with certainty what the future holds.

Even a single event can have repercussions for many years to come — and I don’t mean the election of a president or a Supreme Court decision. It can be a single event happening to a single life, a happenstance that doesn’t make the headlines, a blip that barely registers in the historical record. But from it, everything changes.

One of my favorite examples of this concerns one John Howland. Chances are, you’ve never heard of him, but a single event that happened to him has affected your life, and in multiple ways, whether you knew it or not.

Howland was born in England around 1598 and came to America on the Mayflower. While crossing the Atlantic in 1620, the Mayflower got caught up in a storm. I’ll let William Bradford, a governor of Plymouth Colony, tell what happened next:

“… in a mighty storm, a lusty young man called John Howland… [was] thrown into sea; but it pleased God that he caught hold of the topsail halyards which hung overboard…till he was hauled up…and then with a boat hook…his life saved. And though he was something ill with it, yet he lived many years after and became a profitable member both in church and commonwealth.” (Source: The Mayflower Society)

Howland married Elizabeth Tilley, another Mayflower passenger, in 1623 in the New World. They had 10 children and 86 grandchildren. Had that lusty young man drowned in that storm, none of the following people would have existed:

·       Franklin Roosevelt

·       George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush

·       Ralph Waldo Emerson

·       Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

·       Joseph Smith and Brigham Young

·       Humphrey Bogart

·       Benjamin Spock

·       Chevy Chase

·       Christopher Lloyd

·       Alec Baldwin

You can see by the list how different your life might have been had that rope not been dangling over the side of The Mayflower that day. Surely our country would be different. Given FDR’s role in World War II, the whole world might be a very different place as well.

As a magician, I tend to live outside the mainstream. As a minister, I feel called to help people navigate its rocky shoals deep within. (The nagging feeling I often have, admittedly not healthy from a self-care perspective, is what good am I if I don’t?) As someone who entertains people with mystery in one role and helps people try to make peace with the mystery of life in the other — to live with uncertainty and the fact that no one truly knows what happens after we die, or whether there is a God and what she/he/they are really like — I have learned that mystery and uncertainty may be the very best friends we have.

I mean, who knows?

If anything can happen, then there may be a dangling rope in our own lives we can grab that saves us and changes everything. There could be a storm of events that threaten to do us in, but we have friends who haul us aboard to make it through. The new world we seek seems an impossible dream with many obstacles, and far, far away, but the winds could calm and the tide turn, and much to our surprise, we could arrive safely to its shores. Along the way, even the little things we do could have a profound effect on the fate of our planet.

You never know. Until you do.

Postscript: I wrote the words above not knowing what that dangling rope would look like, but even then, a month before Biden dropped out, I found myself strangely hopeful that a rope — a halyard — would present itself. The media has been rife with commentary about the “whirlwind” events of the past six weeks. To those of us whose faith resides in the unpredictability of love-power, its generosity-seeking, its abundance mentality — its unpredictability but also its reliability, its faithfulness — well, we are pleased and we may be surprised at the timing. But that whirlwind? What’s that about? That is just love come roaring back, as it always has and always will. Love is full of surprises. Next question, please.