I caught a play on Radio 4 a few weeks ago. I can’t remember what I was doing, but it was on in the background and in that half listening state found myself being drawn into it. It was about a letter that was lost in the post - I think it had been bricked up in a post box for 50 years, though how that happened was not explained. It was discovered and the job of delivering it fell to a young postie who had to track down whether the intended recipient was still alive, let alone still living at the address.

As the play developed it turned out that the letter was for a woman and contained a ticket for a ferry crossing. It was from her lover and if she had received it when it was posted 50 years ago she would have gone away with him. But she didn’t and assumed, wrongly, that she had been dumped. Life therefore took a different course and now 50 years later she was presented with the almost torture of what could have been if chance had played a different hand! The film Sliding Doors follows a similar theme of how life can be changed by something as simple as catching or not catching a particular train which then puts you in one place rather than another at a key time and all that follows from that.

This notion of the missed prospect of a different life being held out in front of someone reminds us that there are key moments when the direction we take changes the course of our life quite dramatically. Marriage does this. The death of a dearly loved fiancé can mean that what could have been didn’t materialise and I have met a number of women whose ‘life’s love’ was killed in a war and they never married as a result. Some are choices we make and live with the consequences, and some are the result of outside forces impacting on our lives and which change us just as dramatically.

This is in my thoughts at the moment because it is just 10 years ago that I knelt in Canterbury Cathedral and entered the ranks of the ordained ministry of the Church. Not only my life, but Susan’s and James’ and Michael’s lives have been changed by that. We now live in our third house and place. We have given up some things, some with very strong emotional ties, and have gained many more as well. Sacrifice and blessing have gone hand in hand.

There were a number of points on the way when different lives were held open in front of us: the decision to offer for ordination, that being confirmed by the selection process and in turn the decision to leave paid employments to embark on the training; the decision at each point to accept certain appointments or turn others down. I don’t believe in fate and so I find myself marvelling at how life is truly a work in progress, written afresh almost each day.

One possible response to this is to dwell on the ‘what could have beens’. Certainly there have been times when pressures have been hard when I have wondered. We could all drive ourselves demented with “if only I’d decided to…” or “if only this had happened…” and ‘if onlys’ can be dangerous and destructive things.

Another possible response is to stand drawing in the sand and reflect on the course we have navigated - or in my case sit on a stone on top of a hill overlooking Lindisfarne and allow the reflecting to buzz around inside, as I did on retreat the other week. As we reflect we can celebrate the loving presence of God who has been with us and who redeems, who is the one who some how makes it work out.

Our first reading from Ezekiel (2:1-5) contained a sentence that has something profound to say to this kind of reflection. We were given the image of heaven being opened and from this vision the call to be sent, a call that draws us all on. It is in this vision of heaven being opened that sense can be made of the choices, for good or ill, the journey that we chart, the life that we do live rather than the ones that we don’t. With the eyes of faith and a deep hope in our hearts we can see in this what one writer has called God’s ‘providential chance’.

This phrase, ‘providential chance’, holds two almost contradictory great themes together and appeals to me because it can help counter two other traps. One is that we see the almost arbitrary nature of how things can happen by chance and become drawn into cynicism and grow despondent. The other is that we can start seeing the availability of parking spaces as God’s hand guiding our lives as if God is going to be concerned with parking spaces and not care about a 14 year old girl being murdered! That kind of thought just calls for a mother to shout, “Stop messing around with cars and start watching out for the more serious stuff”! The cynical and twee twaddle are equal dangers for our thoughts.

However, if we combine the two, and see God’s presence even in a world of chance, God’s call to follow in and through a world that can throw up all sorts of seemingly arbitrary things, then we can see ourselves being held in all its changes and chances. We can find purpose and the prospect of fulfilment to come. We can be transformed in the vision of heaven being opened and this being held out before us.

I don’t believe in fate. That turns us into robots. But I do believe in chance, sometimes arbitrary chance, and that real choices make real changes. I also believe that God has all of this in his loving care and that we are always held in his loving purposes. In this we find the mystery that is life itself and the mystery that is God’s creating and redeeming love. Providence and chance are held together.

All of us have the prospect of different lives at different times, but we only live one of them. We do that in a great hope that holds and guides through the changes and chances that come our way.

© Ian Black 2003

Home