I set two atheists up on a date. It was a few years ago, when the Covid-era restrictions had convinced us that we would never again meet a new person. Unless it was online. And we’d had enough of that.
The two atheists, both friends of mine, met for a drink along the canal. They spent the evening discussing God. There is no greater power they both agreed.
P, my closer friend of the two, believes that life and love are dictated by chance. Your soul mate might board the 7.15am train from Connolly to Pearse Street every morning. You board the later one. Maybe one day, you get the early one and meet them and start chatting. Or maybe they are sick and stayed home that day. You never meet.
It’s all down to chance.
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P’s date, on the other hand, believes in serendipity. Although serendipity is really just the romantic version of chance. So, take the above scenario, where in the latter instance this pair do not meet on the train. But a minor accident aboard the Dart lands one of the soul mates in the doctor’s office, where she meets the other, who was kept out of work with illness. In the waiting room, he overhears her telling the receptionist about the incident and intrigued, he starts a conversation with his soul mate.
[ I told my boyfriend about my soulmate, without registering his reactionOpens in new window ]
The rest, as they say, is history.
In the instance of my two atheist friends, the fairy-tale would become resigned to a brief historical footnote. If the opening scenes sounded like the beginning of a noughties romcom, starring Bill Murray and Kate Hudson, it wasn’t meant to be. God had different plans in store. Or maybe one of them simply forgot to text back. Who knows.
Anyway, this friend, P, and I lived together for a brief period and spent much of that time discussing existence, and much more of our time discussing love (to the extent that P politely suggested at one point, we could perhaps talk a little less of love). These are the topics reserved for people with whom you spend copious amounts of time, where the mundane need not eclipse the existential. Friends you see so often that conversations are conversations, and not catch ups.
Believing in chance was a comfort, P told me; it removes control from your hands. Her admission reminded me of the “humbling and character-building experience of astronomy” of which Carl Sagan speaks in his celebrated book, Pale Blue Dot. The insignificance of our individual experience is reassuring to many, while for others (me!) it is anxiety-inducing. “Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged” Sagan writes, when we witness the diminutiveness of our home planet.
Without the structure of a formal belief system, we have the freedom to create our own understanding of life. There is no doctrine to tell us how and what to believe; that might guide us or challenge our instincts and guttural value system. This freedom, however, can be intimidating.
Choice is a scary thing.
I often wish, when it came to migraine, that I had a formal belief system to look to. One that could categorically assure that “God does not give you more than you can handle”, “it will all make sense in time” or even the more kitsch, “everything happens for a reason”. If everything does not happen for a reason, then why does it happen? Randomness feels a cruel instructor of fate.
It was almost 20 years ago now that I received in my local church the blessing of the sick. It was not without hope that I walked up the aisle with my hands across my chest. Embarrassed by the jittery shimmer of hope I held that this teenage girl was destined for a miracle.
That same year, an experimental doctor promised he would have my migraine cured by Easter time. Innocently and naively, I shared this news on my Facebook status with comparison to Christ’s resurrection. (it didn’t come to pass)
More recently, a therapist asked me to outline my belief system. I began rather coyly but stopped abruptly when he began to interrogate. I didn’t like his questions. I didn’t want to lose this comfort to logic. My therapist, who enjoyed playing devil’s advocate and readily contested anything I said, simply nodded and changed the subject.
Perhaps he understood that, for pain without reason, the rational brings little comfort.
