Randomness and Meaning

I'm sitting here in my office, waiting for yet another patient who seems to have either 1. forgotten his appointment, 2. skipped his appointment, or 3. been eaten by squid. As there are no bodies of water nearby, I'm pretty sure #3 can be ruled out. However, positing infinity - as Roger Zelazny said - anything is possible.

Which brings me to a topic that often occupies my thoughts. That would be the randomness of events, and our ability to find meaning in those events.


I often talk about what I believe and don't believe in terms of religion, particularly Christianity. Looking back over posts from the old blog, I realize that more often than not, I have focused on the latter. I take a decidedly progressive view, and tend to lash out against those who espouse fundamentalist or evangelical beliefs of any religion, but again, particularly Christianity.

Which strikes many people as odd, especially considering the work I do and have grown to love. How could someone who doesn't believe in so much still work in the field of religion? I mentioned, in my long post entitled, What's with The Pirate Chaplain Thing? that I was labeled a maverick by someone after I presented a case study in which I doubted a person's religious experience as being anything other than a natural occurrence of his brain learning to operate under sober conditions. He (the patient, thought it was a message from God. I thought it was something else. No one can prove which of us is right, but the point is that there was shock amongst some present that I would suggest that it possibly wasn't God speaking, but something else going on.

It's not that I don't believe in the Divine, nor is it that I don't believe that we do not have a relationship with the Divine that is interpersonal, even intimate. Rather, I believe that when events such as those described above happen, it is not that these events have meaning in and of themselves. Rather, it is we who provide the meaning to the events.

Or, put differently, it is an issue of randomness vs. determinism. Since I started work as a chaplain in this location, I've met many patients who state that they are here because God wanted them here. This happened because God made it happen, while that happened because Satan did that, and so forth. In the extreme end of this view, a few patients have told me that everything that happens is because God wants it to happen. This includes weather phenomena such as the hurricanes that hit the Gulf Coast, the War in Iraq, murders on the street, and whether or not patients live or die. In this view, God is literally and absolutely in control of everything, and we have no control over what happens in any way, shape, or form.

As an example of this, and how it relates to meaning, let me use as an example something that happened over the last few days. I work with a colleague who is doing some wonderful things with mentally ill patients through the use of mandalas. He has them color patterns in the circles, and then uses the designs as a means to focus their attention, bring them to a meditative state, and to help them pray.

Well, yesterday I happened by Blogickal, a blog written by an urban witch living in Boston, MA. In her Wiccan studies, she has found mandalas to be a wonderful form of meditation and prayer, and pointed out how she learned to create them using Photoshop. Even if you're not into Wicca, I encourage you to take a look, because they are beautifully kaleidoscopic! In a deterministic view, the Divine - and I use that term interchangeably with God, by the way - had me encounter my colleague who was doing that work, relate it to my own work that I've done with mandalas, and then find blogickal's website to find further interest in mandalas. All of this would be to, perhaps, give me a message of one kind or another, either that I need to start making mandalas myself, evangelize to blogickal, or whatever.

However, could it not also be that these events are all separate, and it is simply my brain that is drawing the obvious connection because they all fall under the topics of mandalas and spirituality? Could it not be that I am the one saying, "Wow, it's weird that all of a sudden I'm running into mandalas all over the place!" rather than God tapping me on the shoulder. In my thinking, these events are not connected, and the "Wow!" factor is my doing.

The reason I chafe at the idea of determinism is that human freedom is severely limited, if not outright destroyed, by the hand of an interfering deity. If we live in a deterministic universe, then I have no control, and thus no responsibility, over and for anything that goes on around me. As my patients sometimes seem to suggest, they became addicts because they were forced to by an evil force (Satan), and they are in recovery because they were brought here by the good force (God). Where is their responsibility? I suspect that this thought process is done partly to shield a fragile ego from the overwhelming crush of personal responsibility for their mistakes, problems, and screwed up relationships. For them, at least in the beginning of their recovery process, it is simply to painful for them to accept responsibility, so their lives become part of a larger good versus evil drama.

As I said, though, what I believe is going on is the randomness of the universe. There are simply so many people, doing so many things, that coincidences - such as the mandalas in the example above - are bound to happen. Add to that all the events in the natural world, and what we have is a system in which we live where everything literally affects everything else in seemingly random and wonderful ways. Mind you, I said, "affects" and not "controls" or "dictates." (This is caused Chaos, by the way, and has a famous example in "The Butterfly Effect")The really wonderful part of this reality is that we determine the meaning of these events; the meaning is not forced upon us by an outside force. So in the midst of all these events, we have the ability to decide whether or not they are important. Look at the picture of the pickup truck in my last post with the sign that reads "Jesus Wept" on the back window. It is you who decide if that message has any meaning for you. You, not me, not the owner of the truck, not the original writer of the Gospel of John.

So, does this blog post mean anything? Maybe, maybe not. But it's not up to me to decide, in the grand scheme of things. I just wanted to write about something I did believe in, as opposed to something I did not. Turns out I did both. So in that sense it meant something to me. : )