Hot Book Club Discussion: Serendipity or Divine Intervention?

I have a love-hate relationship with my book club down at the senior hall. I like that I get a monthly opportunity to read and discuss books I otherwise would not pick for myself to read. It’s like taking a college class without having to pay tuition. We need to challenge our thinking from time to time---if for no other reason than to confirm that our biases are based on something other than our imaginations. A book discussion can open up our minds to new ways of thinking about any given topic but the problem with my twelve member book club is I’m often the only odd man out, so I have to decide if I want to defend my point of view or put a zipper on my mouth. It’s an adrenaline rush either way.

At our June meeting we discussed My Mrs. Brown. (I wrote about a passage in the book in an earlier blog, about how the main character takes a framed photo out of her bedside table drawer every night and displays it, then every morning she puts it back in the drawer.) As the club facilitator went around the room asking everyone how we liked the book, ladies said things like, “it was a sweet book” or “it was a feel good book” but when it was my turn I said I thought it was mostly a boring book to which someone commented, “We can always count on Jean to have a different opinion.” When the laughter ended and it was time for the next woman to give her opinion she gushed about how the book was full of divine interventions. “It was so inspirational!” Say what? I couldn’t help it, I had to ask for an example of a divine intervention in the book. She said it was a divine intervention that the main character took a job helping to pack up the house of a wealthy woman who died. Finding a dress in the closet that Mrs. Brown loved was a “divine intervention.” Someone giving Mrs. Brown a book to read about fashion was a “divine intervention.” I had to say what I was thinking: “I’d call all those things serendipity. How do you define a divine intervention?” I asked.

She was a little---okay, a lot---defensive and miffed when she replied, “I don’t believe in serendipity, everything is divine intervention!” I took that to mean only non-believers use the word ‘serendipity’ and since it’s one of my favorite words and I call myself an agnostic I would have let it drop before the whole thing turned into a discussion of religion. But it happened anyway when someone else asked me if I thought serendipity was always happy little events. She threw me a life-line and I took it. “Yes,” I answered, “I just don’t think God has time to intervene to help someone find a dress when there are more important things in the world to attend to.” “So you’re saying that divine interventions are more like miracles,” the woman holding the life-line said, clarifying my words. Bingo.

When you use the word ‘God’ in that group we can count on one member to get into sermon mode. And so she went on and on about how there’s no difference between divine intervention, coincidence and serendipity or between wishes and prayers. Ya, I know, you’re thinking that I challenged that ‘wishes and prayers’ idea, too. Trust me, I wanted to say that wishing I had a bowl of ice cream isn’t the same as praying for world peace but I zipped up my lips. She’s got a Doctor of Divinity degree so I know better than to question her. But when she came up for air, words slipped out of my mouth with no forethought. Oops. “And with that sermon,” I said, “we don’t have to go to church next Sunday.” Everyone laughed including the divinity school grad. I’m just glad the parting of the Red Sea didn’t come up in her sermon because I probably would have suggested---for the sake of argument---that some would call it serendipity that a temporary land bridge from an underwater earthquake made it possible for Moses to cross the Red Sea. It wouldn’t have been much of a debate, though, because if I believed in divine intervention this easily-explained-by-science thing happening just when Moses and the Israelites needed it would qualify as a miracle---or serendipity on steroids if the word ‘miracle’ isn’t part of your vocabulary. When you go looking for reasons to believe or to not believe in a Supreme Being, you will find exactly what you want to find. 

On the way home I thought about how the book club discussion clarified that I don’t believe in divine intervention any more than my nemesis believes in serendipity. God controls everything, according to people in her camp of belief, like a puppet master, where I don’t see the world that way. We were pecking around the very foundations of world religions. Once I came to that conclusion it was easier to understand why she got her hackles up over the word, ‘serendipity.’ Her fatalistic view of a Supreme Being controlling our lives is polar opposite of my world view where I define God as the combined goodness of mankind aka when we come together in love and good intentions, we ARE God. Literally. But there are places where I do not dare speak those words of “heresy” out loud. ©

 

A Widow’s Photographs and Dreams

I don’t have a lot of photos of my husband on display (or anywhere for that matter). Just three framed snapshots---one sits in the library, one on a chest of drawers in the hall and one is high on top of an antique medicine cabinet in my bedroom. Don loved photography and at social gatherings and on vacations he was always the person with a foot-long camera hanging around his neck thus he rarely appeared in the photos we had. Before we met I was into photography big time, took lots of classes and even knew how to develop my own film. (Boy, does that date me!) I loved taking photos of children and people who were unaware they were being photographed. Try doing that in this century and I’d get reported to the police for being creepy. And the few times in recent years when I’ve tried taking pictures of my toddler-age great-nieces and nephews they are so programed to taking selfies with their parents that the minute a camera appears they are posing with their tiny, fake smiles in place. I fear no one will ever take an arty-farty photo of a child again!

Don was a work-alcoholic with no other hobbies so he evolved into the chief photo documentarian of our travels through life. I had other hobbies, I collected them like some people collect stamps which, by the way, was one of my hobbies back in the day. Unfortunately, his pictures were all taken with a slide camera and you probably know what that means. Yup, they sit in boxes, unseen. Several years before he died I spent days sorting through the slides, picking out the best of the best intending to have them converted to a memory card to use in a photo-frame slide show. I set aside 200 slides and was planning to throw the rest out. However, my husband strongly nixed that idea. Mind you, no one had looked at those slides in decades but a wise woman knows where to pick her battles. So back down the basement the boxes went. Except for the best of the best that are still sitting in my closet with my good intentions to turn them into a viewable format all but forgotten. 

While sorting through the hundreds of slides it became apparent---as if I didn’t know already---that my husband also had favorite subjects in his view finder: landscapes, sunsets, flowers, wildlife and the dog. Rarely did he snap pictures of people. You can only look at so many photos of lovely landscapes, colorful sunsets and flowers, deer in fields and birds in the trees before they all start looking the same. And let me tell you about the many slides he took of our male dogs peeing! To me, if you’ve seen one dog peeing you’ve seen them all but Don was always looking for a humorous angle to the theme and sometimes, I have to admit, he found it. 

I’m reading My Mrs. Brown for book club and a passage had me reading it twice. It describes how Mrs. Brown takes a framed photo out of her bedside table drawer every night and displays it, then every morning she puts it back in the drawer. At first I thought, boy, is that ever weird! But then the author, William Norwich, went on to explain and I changed my mind. Mrs. Brown, he wrote, “was protecting her treasured photograph from time’s most corrosive element: forgetting.” He went on to describe how in a room full of furniture and knickknacks we get so used to seeing photographs among the other clutter that most of the time we don’t even see them anymore. “Her ritual of in and out from the drawer, morning and night, helps Mrs. Brown keep her greatest treasure alive...” I sure recognize the truth in that logic…not so much as a widow who has a few photos of Don on display but because the passage brought echoes back around of something Don often said about fixing broken things around a house. “If you let something go for more than two weeks,” he’d say, “you don’t see it anymore and it doesn’t get fixed until you’re getting ready to have a party or move.”

That book passage had me thinking that maybe I should adopt that in and out of the drawer each morning and night routine with a photo of Don. It’s a sweet tradition, isn’t it. But then I discarded the idea because Don comes to me in my dreams so often I couldn’t forget him if I tried. Last night he and I got separated at a huge flea market and I couldn’t find his cell phone number in my phone. He and I have been getting lost or separated in my dreams so damned often lately and I wake up with a jolt and sometimes I can't fall back to sleep. I’m amazed at how many different ways during REM sleep my bran finds to keep us separated. But that begs the question, which is the real me? My nighttime self who apparently still suffers from separation anxiety or my daytime self who likes to believe she's a well-adjusted woman? ©

The photo above, was taken by Don. That poodle could always find 'creative places' to pee.

P.S. If you read my last blog entry you might like to know that I finally got two hummingbirds to come out of the pines and down to my feeder!