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Opossums are unattractive creatures, except perhaps, to other opossums. With long pointed faces and hairless scaly tails, they are like overgrown rats. Large ones may be twenty inches long, head and body, and have a twenty-inch tail in addendum. They lumber along, feeding on most anything including carrion -- rotting meat. Mother Nature was not into esthetics when she created the opossum. However, she was into peculiar. “Opossum” is an Algonquin word; it means, “white dog”. The opossum sits alone, right in the front of my Guide to the Mammals of North America, so peculiar that it has more space devoted to it than any other animal in the guide. It has a prehensile tail, like a monkey, that can wrap around things and hold on. When cornered, the opossum often “plays possum” -- feigns dead. Like a kangaroo, it carries its young in a pouch. The technical term for animals like this is "marsupial." It is the only North American marsupial. Opossums bear up to fourteen young at a time. Not to worry, mother opossum is prepared; she has up to 17 milk dispensers in her pouch. At birth the babies weigh but 1/15 of an ounce each. The whole litter of them can fit comfortably in a teaspoon. After making their way to the pouch, the babies remain there for up to two months. When they leave the pouch, the babies will ride on their mother’s back, their prehensile tails gripping the mother’s tail. This is the only time when opossums are photogenic. Opossums are not like bears, or deer, or raccoons, made to get that "ooh" that cuddly looking animals inspire among humans. I suppose that someone has made stuffed-toy opossums, but I would bet they are not among the big sellers. Most people get a shudder out of an opossum, especially if they come upon one unexpectedly. It was a dark and stormy night, on a winding road in St. Louis County, Missouri; a dark and wet autumn night about 9 P.M. An opossum suddenly was in front of my car in the headlights. I was going every bit of the speed limit. I braked hard, but not too hard; there were two cars right behind me. It would be hard to explain to an insurance adjuster that I had been rear-ended trying to save an opossum. It did not seem that there was time for the opossum to get off the road, though she did turn that way. I tried to put the center of the car over her, as I slowed nearly to a stop, glancing back in the rear view mirror to be sure that the cars behind me were slowing too, and fearing that there was an opossum-cidal manic behind me who lived to see opossum squashed all over the road. There was no sickening thump as I went over the spot where she had been. Looking in the rearview mirror into the headlights of the following car, for that brief instant between us, I saw no body in the road. Perhaps that opossum was lucky. Thinking of this morning's reading about opossums, I worried that the opossum had taken advantage of my slowing down to use that prehensile tail to attach herself to the underside of my car, and was now riding under the car to my garage where she intended to take up residence for the winter. It could happen! I am not paranoid. It was of course a chance event. The opossum was crossing the road, possibly to eat fallen persimmon from a tree on the side of the road. I was returning from a meeting. That we both happened, in our separate worlds, to arrive at the same spot, at the same moment, at nine o'clock in the evening, was a random event, happenstance. It was a piece of the chaos of existence, perhaps for the opossum a fatal piece. But then again, why did this random occurrence occur on that particular evening, when I was driving home thinking about what I would say in a sermon on "randomness"? Hurricane Dennis sweeps across the Cuba in July. A tsunami slams into Thailand; a famine strikes Niger, Africa; a vigorous friend is diagnosed with multiple melanoma; someone we love is struck head on by a wrong way driver. All these are the random events of a universe whose ways are not always kind to us. Several years ago Pat Robertson claimed to have turned a hurricane that was headed for his Carolina 700 Club headquarters by prayer. When I was on a three-month pulpit exchange in England, I conducted the funeral for an eighteen-month-old Downs Syndrome child with multiple congenital abnormalities, including a hole in the heart. One of the local town's "Saved" said to the parents by way of consolation, "You must have committed a terrible sin that God gave you a child like that." A friend, a vegetarian was recently diagnosed with a rare and particularly aggressive form of cancer. A fellow Unitarian Universalist informed him that it was because he had used refined sugar rather than organic honey in his diet. Superstition, burying opossum eyes, magical acts, and not a few very devoutly held religious beliefs are all attempts to take the randomness out of the universe, to bring it under control. Science too once held out the hope of bringing order out of the randomness. However, the course of science in history has been to reveal the fundamental randomness of things. Often science is able to tell how something happened -- a disease, a cataclysmic natural disaster -- but to adduce no underlying reason, no why. An engineer of my acquaintance claims that "engineers are scientists who have completed their education." This may say more about the penchant for engineers to think that the randomness may be taken out of any system. In a closed system, it is true, randomness can be stopped: in a system where everything is controlled, where one keeps all outside influences out, under those circumstances randomness can be stopped for a moment -- though no system can stay closed long. Life is not a closed system. It is worth noting that it was an engineer who came up with Murphy's Law: "If anything can go wrong, it will!" And of course, O'Toole's corollary: "Murphy was an optimist." These are affirmations of the power of randomness. The sciences have been for some time talking about the chaos at the heart of the universe. Cosmology and nuclear physics reveal a fundamental disorder at the heart of reality. They conceptualize "The Beginning" as being like shooting craps. Einstein, who famously said, “God does not play dice with the universe”, could never accept this point of view, but continued to search to the end of his life for the principle which would pull it all together. What science tells me of the world beyond us; I have felt inside, chaos. So have parishioners, to judge by those who have made it to my office. Our internal universes are often filled with ambiguity, uneasiness, and randomness. " But wait," you say, "this is not all random. If you speed down San Francisco hills the odds are greater that you will have an 'incident.' If you smoke cigarettes the chances are greater that you will contract emphysema." (There would be almost none if there were no smoking, though by far not all smokers get it). You say, "There is cause and effect operating in this world." Yes, there is. Ah, that is the tricky part. That is what makes it so random. If there were just disorder, total randomness, then the chaos would itself, be a kind of order. Something that could be understood, counted on, as simply meaningless. However, the way things are, we know this in our hearts, there is both randomness and order. That is what makes the randomness so damn random -- that the order and chaos are all mixed up. The Old Testament book of Job is one of the finest spiritual explorations of randomness there is. Job does the good, all the right things. In an orderly universe, he should get rewarded for having done right. Yet all he gets is disaster. I have felt that way from time to time in my life, although I will admit to enough failings to have also harbored the suspicion that it might be deserved. The Biblical story explains Job's predicament by asserting that the randomness is the result of a bet between God and the Devil that had nothing to do with Job. Come to think of it, it did have to do with Job. He was chosen for the test just because he was such a good man. I wonder, has anyone taken this as an excuse for doing no good -- so that God won't pick on you? "Who'd bet on the likes of me?" What the Biblical story is saying is that there is a bigger picture. A picture that is bigger than the whole of Job's life, that creation is more than the sum of its parts, that randomness is both the pattern and a part of the pattern. Curiously enough, science has been backing around to the same point of view. It has arrived at this theory: Chaos is now conceived to be another side of order. The universe could not exist if either total order, or total randomness, were the nature of things. Only both orderliness and randomness at the same time make the universe possible. Science discerns in the universe strikingly elegant patterns in a chaotic system, a system whose underlying order nonetheless cannot be deduced from its parts but only inferred as a property of the whole. Our world is inherently equivocal and contradictory, an incarnation of the cosmic ambiguity, and also a rough equilibrium. Our world is both/and -- not either/or. Our world is not good or evil; it is both good and evil, and more. Abraham Maslow, who spoke here many years ago, noted in his writings that "...most humans think atomistically, in terms of either/or, ... all in or all out, of mutual exclusiveness...." He believed that to really understand the world and our experience of it, one needs a "holistic [both/and] attitude." If things were simple, we could simply add up the pieces, find the sum of the parts. Our lives would be easy to figure out. We could know why these things happen to us. That was the old reductionism that held sway for the last two hundred years. We were so confident in it, that we thought that paradise could be built here, on earth. Many of us still hope for it in our private lives, something safe and comfortable. The new view proposes to the contrary that a system, a thing, an entity, a person, the universe, is not merely the sum, but a more. Society is more than the sum of the individuals that make it up. I have noticed something else. There is randomness in you. You are not some sum that I can add up and have all that you are. My wife and children, have their own randomness too. In my heart of hearts I plot to control them, to keep them doing what I want them to do, doing the things that makes me feel happy, secure, taken care of. And, you know, they don't do it! They go on acting free and independent, not ordered but random. We are more than the sum of our arms and legs and bones and viscera and brain, more than our upbringing, more than our traumas. You always knew that, despite what our reductionism tried to say. The sciences now point this way. There is a trap here. The danger is that we will think, "Ah, randomness! Both/and! Now we've got it all figured out." Or, in other words, “Now we've got it all under our thumbs. We only have to get hold of the whole." In reality the truth is that randomness, in the end, will always rule. That is to say, we won't! But how we wish it were to the contrary. You have come this morning perhaps stung by the randomness in your life. I have felt its pain. The ideas that became this sermon began when a friend was diagnosed with a life fatal illness. She came from a fundamentalist background. Discussing with her husband what had befallen her, she said over and over, countering the old proposition that this was God's will, "It's totally random, isn't it?" Yes, it is! The randomness of love lost, of death, of defeat, of age, and illness, of hopes dashed, of dreams withered and dried, of promises broken, of expectations eviscerated, of tragedy and cataclysm, all these. It was random for that opossum, too. This congregation too has known among its members, randomness. Death and disease, errant genes and accident, have brought grief and heartache to people here this year. There is, so far as I know, only one answer to the randomness in you and in me, the randomness in the world we live in, the randomness in the universe whose endless time and space, that randomness has given us, these days, this life, this home. That answer is intimacy. Oh, we can seek safety from randomness; try to make it go away, in the coldness; escape from the world, from people, into the distant empty place. But that is not living at all. That is hell, the deepest hell there is. Intimacy, as I know it, comes only with the kind of honesty that stops trying to run this life -- honesty that sees and accepts our lives, and the contingency of our own power. Intimacy requires more than just honesty: it requires presence; you have got to be here, there. We need to show up. Many people trying to flee randomness are anywhere else -- booze, drugs, work, television. Intimacy requires openness, a willingness to see and accept what really is -- the hope among the loss, the both/and. Intimacy calls forth love -- not romance, but that deeper love that does not deal in illusions, does not deal in wishes. Love does not really work if we insist on being in control, getting things "my" way, fitting the world to our order, always being satisfied, getting taken care of. In fact, these make love impossible. To decide for love means that we are prepared for the inevitably of being broken and defeated, for that is the inexorable price for fastening one’s love upon other persons, or upon this world, or even upon the power behind the world (as Jesus’ words from the cross tell), the power of the universe itself. Love is opening oneself to the randomness of other people, to the power of the universe itself. Yet randomness is not all pain. It is also all the unexpected wonder of life, the joy that comes unbidden (the only real joy there is), the beauty that steals upon us, and the flowering of the spirit in life's darkest moments. It is in uncalled-for acts of kindness, in kindness kindled. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote once: "One must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star." Sometimes it feels like a whole constellation of dancing stars is birthing. Yet, if I read the great painters, poets, and composers correctly, every work of art, every symphony, every piece of great literature comes out of the unknown self, out of the randomness and chaos within. It comes by courting what we do not control. Alfred North Whitehead once said that God first appears to us as a void (empty of significance), then as an enemy (who disappoints us), and finally as a companion (beyond our control but with us). The ancient Jews said that we never quite see God. Moses, who begs, is permitted to see only God’s backside. Perhaps that is what we see in randomness. In loving this universe, and its creatures, our companions on this planet, we find God hidden in the randomness. Loving the randomness is tasting its freedom. Randomness is what frees us from the lockstep of a cold, ordered, mechanical universe. Randomness makes life, reality, open-ended. We cannot resist the motions of randomness. What we can do is bless and love our fellows, and this lovely world. We can welcome the meaning that is beyond the chaos, the meaning that we cannot know or control. We can see that the opossum has an appointment with our sermon. May we, loving powerfully, practice resurrection. Amen, and amen. |
