This Ignatian Life

Authored by guest blogger Pat Malone, S.J.

I wrote in a reflection booklet last year that it is more than a bit mind-numbing to ponder the unlikelihood of our existence. Somewhere along the many plagues, wars, diseases, inhospitable climates, hungry animals, and random acts of violence that occurred within the 3.8 billion years of our exhausted ancestors, they stayed alive long enough to continue their fragile lineage. As Bill Bryson writes in A Short History of Nearly Everything, they were “attractive enough to mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of our pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected.”

While they were just doing what they could to survive, possible with a few festivals along the way, they were adding their own quirks to the gene pool that would one day give us life. Pondering the improbability of our being here gives us a small, teasing glimpse of a bigger, more tangled truth: either we were meant to be here, or we are very, very lucky. If we eventually are not in awe of the improbability of own existence, we are not paying sufficient attention.

Science agrees. The further cosmology can look out into this expanding universe, or the smaller and smaller that quantum physics is able to probe, from atom to quark, the more we sense that there is no end point. Gregg Easterbrook wrote in Beside Still Waters: Searching for Meaning in an Age of Doubt that if the ratio of energy to matter were different by one-quadrillionth of one percent, there would be no life; the universe would collapse back into itself. The odds against of us being here are at, at minimum, staggering, and apparently more than just randomness. Stephen Hawking sums up this improbability of randomness as the explanation for human life when he wrote, “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for us to describe?” The most rational explanation would be the one most difficult to understand: the Breather of fire wants us here.
It is daunting and hard–at least for the non-scientists–to get our heads around these improbabilities. It is hard until we have our own unlikely survival stories. It is the close call of an accident that amazingly did not happen. It is the small child we let out of our site for a second who somehow missed getting scraped. Death had its rightful claim, and somehow, here we are to try to tell accounts of near-misses that we know we cannot fully absorb, much less repeat to others.

The further I move from the harrowing moments of my health journey, the more I learn that my words and demeanor beg of being in awe at the improbability of being here. That truth may be more evident for those with dramatic health journeys, but the truth is universal: there are moments in our lives when we know the people and experiences of our lives did not come to us by accident. It is often in hindsight that we learn of their significance. They have compelled us to grow, to be grateful, and to finally be accountable. And in a very beautiful way, they compel us to a sense of being overwhelmed by God.

Photo: “Eclipse 1999” by Leslie Chatfield from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)

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