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There is a little game that I play as I am driving in my car (insert ad for SUBARU),

or using the Internet (insert ad for INTERNET ISP). In the process of travelling to some destination, I evaluate the relative ease or difficulty of the journey in a broader, almost metaphysical manner. This evaluation is based on vague spiritual notions and concepts such as fate, karma, kismet, the will of god, and goes somewhat like this: If traffic is bad or I get stuck behind Grandma or Mr. Cement Truck, and if I hit what seems to be an improbable number of red lights (insert ad for RED LIGHT DISTRICT ADULT PLAYGROUND), I will often make the assumption that some forces from the beyond are hindering me from arriving at my destination. I thus conclude that I am not supposed to be going there, for if such forces are benevolent, then such hindrances could be interpreted as caution signs.

On the flip side, if the journey is easy and quick and smooth, with green lights and clear, straight roads, I will often assume that the aforementioned forces from the beyond approve of the trip, and it is pleasing to them/it.

I do the same with Internet traffic. (i.e. busy signals = 15 car pile up with no detours, waiting for pages to load = red lights, this program has performed an illegal function and will close = out of petrol.) Get my drift?

I do this because I do not believe in chance happenings.

I do this because I believe in the divine, the other, the spiritual, God.

I do this because I believe that the spiritual is not separate nor distinct from the physical, or the emotional, or the social, or the digital, or the electrical, but that heaven-and -earth are intertwined and interconnected in the most dazzling complexity of a network that it would destroy a person to get a conceptual glimpse of such a structure. this if nothing else is the face of god one cannot look upon lest he be destroyed.

Yin and yang, heaven and hell, God and the Satan, angel and demons, there is good and bad and we live in the middle, struggling to make sense of the world, struggling for survival, struggling to hear the voice of the divine.

Back to traffic lights. Frederick Buechner shares in Now and Then, that (if) God speaks to us at all other than through such official channels as the (insert religious text here) and the (insert religious institution here), then I think he speaks to us largely through what happens to us...a word spelled out not alphabetically, in syllables, but enigmatically, in events, even in the books we read and the movies we see.

I agree with him. I believe that the divine is present and interactive in our lives, even in something as mundane as traffic on the road or the Internet access lines (although I might question my interpretation) if for no other reason than that in my very personal, very subjective, very postmodern context, I have seen and experienced the presence of Other in the world. You can argue, rationalise and attempt to refute what I have known through experience, but you can’t convince me that what I have seen isn’t truth (insert dull tome to reason here). The world I know has been created by me, through experience, (such as the reasonable fact of gravity) and is truth to me. I have seen God on the Internet, and on the highway. The jouney has been beautiful (and terrestrial) thus far.

Copyright © 1999 Darren C. Anderson