by PAUL COLLITS – THIS week, The Beach Boys musician Brian Wilson died – and Vishwash Jumar Ramesh didn’t. Go figure.
A lot of people have been saying that Ramesh should buy a lottery ticket. Most would agree that Brian had probably run out of winning tickets by the time of his passing.
- Demand for seat 11A on 787 planes will probably now go through the roof.
- Will Ramesh get religious, if he’s not already? Or will he merely buy a lottery ticket and shake his head?
- The logic makes sense, but needs faith – abundant faith.
Brian Wilson outlived many of his fellow musicians. Like Tom Petty, Glenn Frey, George Harrison, Roy Orbison and Jimmy Buffett.
Not to mention Jim Morrison, Amy Winehouse, Jim Croce (speaking of plane crashes), Kurt Kobain and Brian Jones. Among many others whose genius-genes God touched.
INSPIRATION
Pope Leo XIV, like all Augustinians, often quotes their inspiration.
St Augustine had a bit to say about God and about understanding His nature, in the famous grains of sand passage:
“In St Augustine’s Confessions, he discusses the futility of intellectual pursuits, like counting stars or grains of sand, in finding God. He writes that the proud, even those skilled in such calculations, cannot find God, who is only found by those with a humble heart. Specifically, he states: ‘Only to those whose hearts are crushed do you draw close. You will not let yourself be found by the proud, nor even by those who in their inquisitive skill count stars or grains of sand, or measure the expanses of heaven, or trace the paths of the planets’…”
Yes, that was concocted by AI. Our local parish priest said today that AI is good for many things (maybe) but not for leading to an understanding of God. Indeed.
So, it is not unsurprising that we cannot understand God’s purposes.
We all know, or think we might know, from the Torah or Sunday School or the New Testament or the Catechism, that God is love, and that he created the universe and its inhabitants with a purpose.
It wasn’t just a random idea on a lazy Sunday arvo. And that He made humans in His image, though in many cases (in our eyes), the image seems largely hidden. And that He has invited us into His inner life. And that he has plans for each one of us.
What are His plans for Benjamin Netanyahu this week, I wonder?
The leader of His chosen people faces a quandary. Be destroyed, or be destroyed. Is Bibi a modern-day Moses leading God’s people to the Promised Land of freedom from annihilation? Or to Armageddon?
In which we all might be playing an ultimate, unscripted, undesired part. Spectators in the end times.
Regarding God’s plans for each of us, the devil is in the detail (no pun intended), as they say. And one of the details is our allocated life span.
Ramesh was the sole survivor of a yet to be explained plane crash in Ahmedabad this week.
As I said, one of the (utterly expected) responses to his miraculous survival when every other passenger on flight AI 171 died was, “buy a lottery ticket”.
The other like outcome is, demand for seat 11A on 787 planes will probably now go through the roof.
For Ramesh, no doubt confused about the mechanics of his ludicrously improbable escape, he might also be wondering about God’s plans for him.
If it was a God-plan, lottery tickets don’t begin to cover the issues he now faces. An interview with Ramesh in a decade or so would be an interesting exercise.
Will his life change? In what ways? Why? Will he get religious, if he’s not already? Or will he merely buy a lottery ticket, and shake his head?
I’ve no idea what I would do.
Death can seem pretty random. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Freakish circs. Stepping on to the road just as a truck appears from nowhere. Stepping on a landmine in Iraq. Being conscripted to Vietnam. Or not. Now that was a lottery! Being in the World Trade Centre on 9/11, or calling in sick that day.
My uncle Frank who, with a few under his belt, stepped into the path of a Sydney tram in the 1940s. Smoking and drinking heavily and living to be 90 or so. Who knew? Lazarus, too, got lucky, in the choice of his friends!
There are only two choices. It is either all random or it is all part of God’s plan. There isn’t a third option.
MYSTERY
It is perhaps life’s greatest mystery.
Much is to be left to the theologians, and they, ultimately, know squat. Call it the Seat 11A dilemma.
As a recently member of the bereaved class, I can only quote my much holier namesake, St Paul: “Through our Lord Jesus Christ, by faith we are judged righteous and at peace with God, since it is by faith and through Jesus that we have entered this state of grace in which we can boast about looking forward to God’s glory.
“But that is not all we can boast about; we can boast about our sufferings. These sufferings bring patience, as we know, and patience brings perseverance, and perseverance brings hope, and this hope is not deceptive, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given us.”
The logic makes sense, but needs faith – abundant faith. The meaning of suffering is one of those other imponderables, of course. It is probably the thing that, more than anything else, keeps man from God.
What is our immediate fate, as a race? And where do geopolitics figure in God’s plan, especially when they are in the hands of flawed, malevolent bad actors?
I don’t know much about all these things, but I do know this. I didn’t vote for Netanyahu or whoever the current Ayatollah is. Yet I – we – might be implicated in their end game.
St Paul (again) said that there are three great gifts of grace. Faith, hope and love.
And, he concluded, the greatest of these is love. And there isn’t much love currently on display in Tehran and Tel Aviv.
It’s a dog’s life, isn’t it? PC