Since it’s exam period, OCF activities are pretty low-key for this month. We watched a couple of videos tonight – “Indescribable” and “How Great Is Our God”, both given by Louie Giglio. Indescribable, in a nutshell, was about the glory of God reflected in the amazing universe, and the fact that we are really nothing but a “mote of dust” in the grand scheme of the universe. How Great Is Our God was something like that, except that it went the other way, into the human body.
I’ve heard both sermons before – Indescribable at the Hillsong Conference in Sydney last year, and my housemate Lydia borrowed How Great Is Our God from Steven a few months ago. It was nice to hear both sermons again, and a good reminder of God’s glory and grace, but it was the bit where Louie was telling the congregation about how the fact that we were all miracles, each of us sitting there. I was reminded of this particular passage I had read in – of all books, The Solitaire Mystery, by Jostein Gaarder. He’s the author of the famous Sophie’s World, and is known for exploring philosophical themes and ideas in his books.
So anyway, if memory serves me well (I read Solitaire Mystery almost three years ago), Solitaire Mystery is about a young boy named Hans Thomas and his dad who are going on a trip to look for his mother. Basically, the book is a “story within a story” plot, but the gist of it is just the conversations and exchange of banter between father and son as they discuss about everything under the sun.
I think the passage speaks for itself. This is nearing the end of the book, and the conversation between Hans and his dad here is basically about the nature of existence.
We had just passed Ravenna when I asked, ‘Do you believe in coincidences, Dad?’
He looked at me in the mirror. ‘Do I believe in coincidences?’
‘Yeah!’
‘But a coincidence is something which happens totally coincidentally. When I won ten thousand crowns in the lottery, my ticket was pulled out of thousands of other tickets. Of course I was happy with the result, but it was sheer luck that I won.’
‘Are you sure about that? Have you forgotten we found a four-leaf clover that morning? And if you hadn’t won the money, we might not have been able to afford the trip to Athens.’
He just grunted, but I continued. ‘Was it just as coincidental that your aunt travelled to Crete and suddenly discovered Mama in the fashion magazine? Or was that intended?’
‘You’re asking me whether I believe in fate,’ he said. I think he was pleased his son was interested in philosophical questions. ‘The answer is no.’
I thought about the girl glassblowers – and the fact that I had visited a glass workshop just before I read about the glass workshop in the sticky-bun book. Moreover, I thought about the dwarf who’d given me a magnifying glass just before I got a book with tiny writing, and about what happened when Grandma’s bike got a flat tyre at Froland – and everything that followed.
‘I don’t think you can call it a coincidence that I was born,’ I said.
‘Cigarette stop!’ Dad announced. I must have said something which made one of his mini-lectures shoot out from the filing cabinet.
He parked on a hill with a splendid view over the Adriatic.
‘Sit down!’ he ordered when we were out of the car, and pointed to a large stone.
‘Thirteen forty-nine,’ was the first thing he said.
‘The Black Death,’ I replied. I had a pretty good knowledge of history, but I had no idea what the Black Death had to do with coincidences.
‘Okay,’ he said, and off he went. ‘You probably know that half Norway’s population was wiped out during the great plague. But there’s a connection here I haven’t told you about.’
When he began like this, I knew it was going to be a long lecture.
‘Did you know that you had thousands of ancestors at that time?’ he continued.
I shook my head in despair. How could that possibly be?
‘You have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents – and so on. If you work it out, right back to 1349, there are quite a lot.’
I nodded.
‘Then came the bubonic plague. Death spread from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, and the children were hit worst. Whole families died, sometimes one or two family members survived. A lot of your ancestors were children at this time, Hans Thomas. But none of them kicked the bucket.’
‘How can you be so sure about that?’ I asked in amazement.
He took a drag on his cigarette and said, ‘Because you’re sitting here looking out over the Adriatic.’
Once again he had made such an astounding point I didn’t really know how to respond. But I knew he was right, because if just one of my ancestors had died as a child, then he wouldn’t have been my ancestor.
‘The chances of one single ancestor of yours not dying while growing up is one in several billion,’ he went on, and now the words flowed out of him like a waterfall. ‘Because it isn’t just about the Black Death, you know. Actually all your ancestors have grown up and had children – even during the worst natural disasters, even when the child mortality rate was enormous. Of course, a lot of them have suffered from illness, but they’re always pulled through. In a way, you have been a millimetre from death billions of times, Hans Thomas. Your life on this planet has been threatened by insects, wild animals, meteorites, lightning, sickness, war, floods, fires, poisoning, and attempted murders. In the battle of Stiklestad alone you were injured hundreds of times. Because you must have had ancestors on both sides – yes, really you were fighting against yourself and your chances of being born a thousand years later. You know the same goes for the last world war. If Grandpa had been shot by good Norwegians during the occupation, then neither you nor I would have been born. The point is, this has happened billions of times through history. Each time an arrow has rained through the air, your chances of being born have been reduced to the minimum. But here you are, sitting talking to me, Hans Thomas! Do you see?’
‘I think so,’ I said. At least I think I understood how important it was that Grandma got a flat tyre at Froland.
‘I am talking about one long chain of coincidences,’ Dad continued. ‘In fact, that chain goes right back to the first living cell, which divided in two, and form there gave birth to everything growing and sprouting on this planet today. The chance of my chain not being broken at one time or another during three or four billions years is so little it is almost inconceivable. But I have pulled through, you know. Damn right, I have. In return, I appreciate how fantastically lucky I am to be able to experience this planet together with you. I realise how lucky every single little crawling insect on this planet is.’
‘What about the unlucky ones?’ I asked at this point.
‘They don’t exist!’ he almost roared. ‘They were never born. Life is one huge lottery where only the winning tickets are visible.’
When I read that three years ago, I was blown away at the end of the chapter and had to put down the book and just thought about what I read. In fact, there were many points throughout the book that did that to me.
When you think about it, it IS really quite amazing how you (yes, YOU) got here, this moment in time, right now, as you are sitting there reading this. God knows how many family lines have ended, but yours happened to have survived; your ancestor may have survived by just this little bit, and the fact that you are here is a miracle.
I love that bit in the passage above when Hans’ father talks about how we have really been fighting our whole lives to get to where we are now – so many things threatened to kill us – the turmoils of wars, natural disasters, diseases, etc. And if even one ancestor had “kicked the bucket”, we wouldn’t be here right now.
And when you think about it, that little bit of perspective can really just help to put everything back in its place, especially when we start feeling down and wallow in that selfish dark hole of self-pity and self-induced misery. We will realize that life isn’t worth brooding away, especially when we have so much to live for. And then when we see how small we really are in the grand scheme of life, we will realize that, suddenly, it’s not about “me” anymore.
It never was.
