Contemplating Randomness

Nancy took this picture of me amongst the ruins of Lindisfarne Abbey on Holy Island. It was actually a fun and adventurous day, but in this photo I look like a sad old tourist, surrounded by stoney reminders of an abandoned religion on a gray British day.
Today's promise of fun and adventure ended, "not with a bang but a whimper", when, just south of Detroit,  I gave up trying to drive to Alabama and turned back for home. The heat in my car had stopped working, and the prospect of driving 800 miles in temps close to zero was too grim a prospect, especially since the interstate was still snow-covered in places and cars were spinning out every few miles.
   The fan that blows hot (or cold) air into the interior of our 2003 Buick Rendezvous has quit running sporadically since the summer of 2010, but has always resumed operation within a few minutes, especially if one pounds authoritatively on the dashboard a few times, or drives over a bump in the road. Not this time. I stopped to fill the gas tank, hoping it would work after having turned the engine off: no luck. I drove south on I-75, past 8 Mile and into the city, but still no rush of hot hair flowing onto the windshield or onto my frozen feet. As I drove over the River Rouge steel plant, I accepted the fact that the blower might not come on, and that I had to decide whether to turn back, or continue on heatless.      

  And so I drive along the snow-covered highway, my feet frozen into solid lumps, listening to the silence of no air blowing, and feeling the cold of no heat forthcoming. Well, not exactly NO heat, because there was a soft whisper of warm air issuing from the defroster vents. Our Rendezvous also comes equipped with heated seats, without which I would have decided to turn back for home by the time I reached the turn off for Oakland Mall! I pull off the road at Southgate and into a MacDonald's, where I turn off the engine and go inside to drink hot coffee and change into my insulated boots. "If the heat doesn't work when I start the engine, it will be a sign that I need to turn back." Is this an example of "putting God to the test?" Do these various obstacles mean that God wants me to stay home in Michigan? If that is the case, why did God wait to tell me until I had spent $128 on Alabama Non Resident Hunting License?
    There are things that happen that have a major impact on our lives. That's what will happen if I lose control on one of these slick overpasses and go spinning through the traffic like some of my fellow-travelers today. That's what happens when you have to stop your life to get a hip replaced, or somebody in the family gets seriously ill, or lies are told that undermine trust in what we thought was real, or your identity gets stolen. ALL those things have happened to us lately, or to someone in our inner circle. We have already been impacted. That is why I wanted to go sit in the woods.   
     It seems like an exercise in non-ultimacy, this helpless listening for a random mechanical event to occur/ not occur.The flood of randomness seems just that, a meaningless jostling of events, connected  only by their varying degrees of unpleasantness. This abortive hunting trip has had no impact: it just sucks.
      In Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men there is a sequence in which the main character enters into a period of profound depression, where he does almost nothing but sleep for many months. This episode comes after a disappointing love affair and other disillusioning events, all examples of what Robert Penn Warren's character labeled as "The Great Twitch."
     The Great Twitch, as I interpret it, stood for all the randomness, the meaningless suffering, the accidental non-events that dish out reality to distracted human beings while they are looking the other way.The Great Twitch is the loose wire in the blower motor, the emptiness of an inhospitable world, the hunting trip that never happened, the non-event that never occurred. Having no real existence of its own, it hitchhikes on the coattails of random events, exaggerates the effects of any illness, and thrives when weather turns bitter cold.
      About now I would like to renounce the power of the Great Twitch, and exorcise all the petty little twitchlings that serve as its acolytes, but words like "Renounce" and "Exorcize" seem too grandiose. The randomness of the world is not something that can be charmed and tamed like in a circus act. Rather they must be loved, and sung about, and gently teased. In All the King's Men the Great Twitch is never "cured", but rather reassigned, deprived of power to define the world. This demotion is accomplished by another seemingly random event, but one marked and motivated by love.
     Therefore, let us take whatever opportunity we have to love: love the opportunity to contemplate random events, love the warmth that exists despite the cold, love the friends who call to offer you the use of a heated car, love the hunting trips that never occurred. Most of all, let us love those who are close at hand, the ones making noises in the kitchen as they cook, the ones at whom the dog is barking, the ones you will not see or hunt with down the road, the One who, even now, is hunting you, and whom you cannot see.