Fat Chance vs The Magic Christian

Earl Fowler

My mother-in-law was the lone congregant, single parishioner, unique supplicant in a religion of one.

She was an adherent — the adherent — of a solipsistic faith community she forged in the smithy of her soul out of the reality of a cloistered upbringing and a complicated adulthood.

Her Abrahamic monotheism was a mixture of the Christianity she shared with her husband, the Judaism of her mother, the Hinduism of her father and the Indian animism that predated all. So maybe not strictly monotheistic after all.

If perplexed, depressed or under stress, she derived comfort from monotonically delivering a rote recitation of the Nicene Creed, sub rosa. As her sense of hearing dwindled, she didn’t realize others could sometimes hear the incantation:

We believe in one God, the Father, the almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen. We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father.

In Mummy’s version, however, the references to “we” in the 1,700-year-old affirmation of faith were amended to “I.”

She would have agreed, we think, with American poet Adrienne Rich: “The problem was that we did not know whom we meant when we said ‘we’.” The meaning of “I”, on the other hand, was as limpid as an unmuddied lake, as clear as an azure sky of deepest summer.

In the first-person experience to which only she was privy, Mummy was forever incandescent in the floodlights … even while her toes were curling inward on the ledge of the 102nd storey of the Empire State Building. Life was a bit of a balancing act.

Ecce mulier.

Mummy refused to eat shellfish out of a professed allegiance to Jewish dietary laws. And anyway, it freaked her out. Any type of food with which she wasn’t familiar freaked her out.

We took her to a trendy Mexican restaurant once and in one of those out-of-nowhere weird interlocutions of hers, without meaning to be rude, she suddenly asked the waitress: “What portion of this is edible?”

Mummy — everybody called her that — engaged in a daily prayer before a reproduction of a famous painting by 19th-century Austrian artist Gabriel Max known as “St. Veronica’s Handkerchief.”

If you stared at the lithograph of Jesus for a few seconds, its 14 colours (by my count) would produce a remarkable effect: The Saviour’s closed eyes would suddenly appear to open and follow any movements you made while bustling about the room. Meaning it was my turn to be freaked out.

Behold, the eye of the LORD is upon them that fear him, upon them that hope in his mercy.

Mummy’s prayer before this cardboard reredos was in essence a form of puja, a worship ritual performed by Hindus to pay devotional homage to one or more deities. For those who hedge their bets or straddle both religions, adding Jesus to a holy pantheon of hundreds is not much of a stretch.

Mummy had learned the practice from her father, who was born into a Brahmin family and used to perform an early-morning puja each day at a shrine he created in their home.

Her ecumenism arose from the unusual circumstances in which the family found itself as she was growing up with her three brothers and four sisters in the 1930s and ’40s in what is now the state of Madhya Pradesh in central India.

Mummy’s mother had been born into a Jewish family, the Solomons, in what was then Bombay (now Mumbai), more or less at the peak of the British Raj. Direct rule of the Indian subcontinent by the British Crown began in 1858 and ended in 1947, when India gained independence.

The history of Judaism in India dates back to antiquity and has featured several waves of immigration, but Mummy’s forebears seem to have been part of the so-called Baghdadi or Iraqi group that flourished under both the Mughal Empire in the 18th century and under the British in the 19th.

Long story short: The Solomons hired a well-educated Brahmin named Chatterji, a young man from the highest caste or “varna” in Hinduism, to tutor their wilful teenage daughter.

When Miss Solomon — given name Shegula — wound up with child, as they say, via some unsanctioned extracurricular activities with her tutor, given name Niranjan — a scandal erupted and her family was apoplectic.

The couple fled in the wake of death threats against the teacher and wound up finding refuge at an Anglican mission in Damoh, now one of the major cities in Madhya Pradesh. Even then, though most Westerners are unfamiliar with it, it was an important enough place to merit a stopover from Mahatma Gandhi when he was campaigning across the country for independence.

Grateful for their deliverance, the eloping pair converted to Christianity, at least ostensibly, without entirely relinquishing Jewish beliefs and customs or Hindu rites and traditions — which is how Mummy acquired her share. Their conversion and the circumstances of their marriage came at a cost — both hailed from wealthy families and both were cut off without a rupee.

Mummy was exceedingly proud that her father would go on to become a beloved physician who was himself the object of worship among his mostly Hindu patients, who would reverentially touch the ground where he had passed.

Notwithstanding his involvement in the Anglican Church, he also became politically involved in the Quit India movement to press for Indian independence. When a group of children danced for Gandhi during his 1933 visit, Mummy was among them.

Though she thought of herself as primarily a Christian, Mummy partook in what Joan Didion might have called the “magical thinking” of the society in which she was raised. How could she not?

She hid in her room during solar eclipses because they were believed to be bad omens in Hindu mythology going back to the Vedas. She believed that if you left a slipper or a shoe upside down, you’d soon have a fight with someone. One should never clean the house in the evening because that might bestir evil things that go bump in the night. If you must point at a plant for some reason, do so with a knuckle, not an extended finger, because jabbing a finger would kill it.

She warned me more than once that if I were ever to kill a cobra — hey, one never knows — I must immediately gouge out its eyes because otherwise its mate would stare into them to register my reflection and come after me to seek revenge.

Mostly because it meant she could attend religious services without dressing up or leaving the house, Mummy was also a devotee of the World Wrestling Federation/Ultimate Fighting Championship/Trump White House/Jaycees Pancake Breakfast/Shriners Motorcycle Parade/The Sixties Never Happened style of over-the-top spirituality practised by a series of avaricious televangelists through the years: Oral Roberts, Garner Ted Armstrong, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Pat Robertson, Robert Schuller and Joel Osteen.

If you find that bit about the cobra ridiculous, you tell me which tradition — superstitions of the East or the mercury-mouthed sermons of the West in these missionary times — is more risible or minacious. We both know which one solicits donations with high-pressure sales techniques. Dunno about Jesus or Elvis, but simony lives.

#supercalifragilisticexploitodiousness

The key part of Mummy’s belief system, however — not so different from the pitch of the proselytizing Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons who still occasionally show up at the other end of our doorbells here in Canada — was that God had a plan for her and that everything that happened in her life was for a reason.

#isn’titprettytothinkso?

It just was never very clear what that plan was, despite her lifelong hierophantic endeavour to interpret sacred mysteries and esoteric messages shrouded from rational thinking. If you probed too deeply into this campaign, obdurate taciturnity — a sworn silence of ethereal omertà — would end the discussion. As Ludwig Wittgenstein concluded in his pompously titled Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Having already showily invoked the name of the late Joan Didion, I’m reminded of what she had to say in her essay “The White Album” à propos de Linda Kasabian, the star witness for the prosecution in the Manson Trial about the 1969 murders at Sharon Tate Polanski’s house on Cielo Drive in Los Angeles.

Kasabian, a “ranch girl” who was present at the murders of five people, including Tate, received legal immunity in exchange for her testimony against other cult members. No pur et dur Squeaky Fromme was she. And like Mummy, she held an unwavering conviction that, as she told the superb essayist, “Everything was to teach me something.”

Writes Didion:

Linda did not believe that chance was without pattern. Linda operated on what I later recognized as dice theory, and so, during the years I am talking about (1966-71), did I.

I don’t know dice theory from the rules of Yahtzee. But I did hear Mummy say repeatedly that whatever happened in her life — living through the horrors of Partition when India and Pakistan threw off the yoke of British rule in 1947, her fondly recalled college days and brief teaching career, the thrill of her marriage (against her mother’s will) a few years later to a second-generation Christian whose Hindu forebears had been Rajputs descended from the warrior Kshatriya caste, the birth of her four children in the 1950s, their move to Regina in 1971 and the beginning of a vita nuova in her early forties, her depressed elder son’s shattering suicide when he was 27, the death of her husband early this century and all the other events leading to her final shunting in her nineties into a dismal assisted-living facility in a Vancouver suburb — all of these events had didactic purposes laid out for her by God.

The last stop, she said, “was to teach me about Canadian food,” bland nursing home fare that she couldn’t bear (except when leavened with takeout A&W chicken wings) and stopped eating altogether after developing the stomach cancer that eventually killed her. When she passed away, all that was missing was a royal personage or maybe a bishop breaking a bottle of champagne across the sweet bow of Destiny.

We never discussed Shakespeare — Mummy had quit reading in her later years because it bothered her eyes and, anyway, The Weather Channel was on 24-7. But the woman I knew would have been completely on board with Hamlet’s credo that everything unfolds according to an inscrutable, immutable game plan way above our pay scale:

Not a whit, we defy augury: there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.

Not quite all. There are also the arcane signs to descry and the lessons to draw as fate ineluctably proceeds toward that final morsel of tasteless mashed potatoes with bacon bits. Since no man knows aught of what he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes?

There are, of course, certain epistemological problems with the theory that everything that happens to us is preordained and intended to be instructive or edifying. Come, Watson! How much room is left for free will if everything has been determined with a shake of the Yahtzee cup from the moment the game is afoot?

But there’s more wiggle room here than afforded by your basic biblical prophecy.

Maybe God waits to see what choices we make and then reacts accordingly by setting up the next learning module. Must keep the Supreme Being hopping, though, given that there are 8.2 billion people on the planet and a googolplex of other matters to deal with throughout billions of other galaxies with trillions and trillions and trillions of stars and planetary systems every microsecond of eternity.

He sees you when you’re sleepin’. He knows when you’re awake.

Another option for the narcissistic, egocentric, self-involved daydream believer is to come to the conclusion that one has a special relationship with the cosmos as the only person with free will — God’s other anointed christos — while everyone else is some kind of automaton or prop.

And here I am. The only living boy in New York.

If you read Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday back in the day (my well-thumbed first edition is from 1973), you might recognize this deluded, self-aggrandizing ontological positioning as rampant Dwayne Hooverism. The protagonist of the novel interprets a short story by obscure science fiction writer Kilgore Trout as a communiqué to him from the Creator of the Universe revealing that all other people are robots. (Spoiler alert: Hoover partly bites off one of Trout’s fingers and is taken away by the men in white coats near the end; Trout is last seen calling to the author of the novel, the creator of his universe: “Make me young, make me young, make me young!”)

The 1998 movie The Truman Show kind of riffs on this idea, with the eponymous character (Truman Burbank) played by Jim Carrey living his life on a colossal sound stage where the other people he encounters — including family and friends — are actors whose job it is to sustain the illusion. We all suspect as much about our own situations from time to time, I guess, which is why the actual Creator of the Universe created fermentation.

Even though it features a guardian angel who has been dead for 200 years, a more realistic movie — to my way of thinking — is a cherished staple of the holiday season: It’s A Wonderful Life.

The central butterfly-effect message of the 1946 movie is that tiny occurrences of no particular import at the time can result in vast, unpredictable changes in how history unfolds. This is illustrated by wingless Angel Second Class Clarence Odbody’s replaying of the history of the American town of Bedford Falls in the absence of George Bailey, the lead character played by Jimmy Stewart.

You know the drill. Thanks to Bailey’s basic decency and willingness to sacrifice himself for the greater good through his work with the precarious building and loan association he reluctantly takes over after the death of his father, Bedford Falls becomes a living, breathing Norman Rockwell canvas.

In director Frank Capra’s harrowing 10-minute scene outlining an alternate reality in which George was never born, what the late, great palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould characterized as “small and apparently insignificant changes, George’s absence among others, lead to cascades of accumulating difference.”

Everything in the replay without George makes perfect sense in terms of personality and economic forces, but this alternative world is bleak and cynical, even cruel, while George, by his own apparently insignificant life, has imbued his surroundings with kindness and attendant success for his beneficiaries. Bedford Falls, his idyllic piece of small-town America, is now filled with bars, pool halls, and gambling joints; it has been renamed Potterville, because the Bailey Building and Loan failed in George’s absence and his unscrupulous rival took over the property and changed the town’s name.

A graveyard now occupies the community of small homes that George had financed at low interest and with endless forgiveness of debts. George’s uncle, in despair at bankruptcy, is in an insane asylum; his mother, hard and cold, runs a poor boarding house; his wife is an aging spinster working in the town library; a hundred men lay dead on a sunken transport, because his brother drowned without George to rescue him, and never grew up to save the ship and win the Medal of Honor.

The wily angel, clinching his case, then pronounces the doctrine of contingency: “Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives, and when he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he? … You see, George, you really had a wonderful life.”

Gould’s engaging 1989 book on the evolution of Cambrian fauna — as revealed by 505-million-year-old fossils found high in the Rockies in B.C.’s Yoho National Park, near the Alberta border on the western slopes of the Great Divide — is titled Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History in a nod to Capra’s nostalgic rendering of the American Dream.

And like Gould, like Clarence Odbody in quest of his wings, like anyone who cheers for an underdog sports team, I’m a firm believer in the doctrine of contingency.

Yes, there are causes. And yes, there are effects. But pace Hamlet, pace Mummy, pace Manson Family fantasists, I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason. Not a teleological one as part of a discernible grand purpose anyway. Nature is not purposeful in the way that humans are and regularly imagine it to be.

We learn from experience, of course, but the notion that the universe was created for the express purpose of teaching human beings lessons (mostly about how big the Creator is and how small we are) is fetched pretty far. As 19th-century geologists were beginning to grasp the implications of the staggering age of the Earth, the extraordinary Mark Twain, as was his wont, cut to the chase:

If the Eiffel Tower were now representing the world’s age, the skin of the paint on the pinnacle knob at its summit would represent man’s share of that age; and anybody would perceive that the skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno.

(Lord Kelvin’s then current estimate of a hundred million years for the age of the Earth fell well short of today’s 4.5 billion. But I reckon the update — no pun intended — further underscores Twain’s point, I dunno.)

In 1985’s Back to the Future, Marty McFly (played by Michael J. Fox) risks erasing his own existence when he is transported back in time to the high school attended by his parents and inadvertently messes with the past. He has an uncomfortable Oedipal complication to resolve when his teenage mom has a crush on him instead of on his father. With the help of a memorable Chuck Berry solo from the yet-to-be-written song “Johnny B Goode,” he succeeds. But that’s just a movie.

You wouldn’t be here if your grandfather hadn’t decided that dark and stormy night to go out for a smoke and bumped into your grandmother by chance. Had it been another day he might have looked the other way and he’d have never been aware but as it was he dreamed of her that night.

“History,” as American historian Henry Steele Commager has said, “is a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises and absurdities.” Confidentially, it stinks.

Still, we don’t have to accept Macbeth’s verdict that “life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Life signifies whatever we want it to signify, imbued with whatever meaning we decide to confer upon it.

Properly reconstructed decades after their discovery, fossils dislodged in the Burgess Shale in 1909 revealed the existence half a billion years ago of long-vanished marine critters featuring what Gould refers to as “transcendent strangeness”: Opabinia, with five eyes and frontal nozzle; Anomalocaris, the largest animal of its time, a fearsome predator with a circular jaw; Hallucigenia, sporting an anatomy (tubular, with rigid conical spines and up to 10 pairs of legs) to match its name.

Gould seems to have gone too far in insisting that these disparate animal forms and evolutionary experiments cannot be classed as belonging to recognized animal phyla, but that’s irrelevant here. What matters is his argument — which I find thoroughly persuasive — that the proficient possibilities for wildly different forms of life and body shapes accentuate “the controlling power of contingency in setting the pattern of life’s history and current composition.”

Finally, if you will accept my argument that contingency is not only resolvable and important, but also fascinating in a special sort of way, then the Burgess not only reverses our general ideas about the source of pattern — it also fills us with a new kind of amazement (also for a frisson for the improbability of the event) at the fact that humans ever evolved at all. We came this close (put your thumb about a millimetre away from your index finger), thousands and thousands of times, to erasure by the veering of history down another sensible channel. Replay the tape a million times from a Burgess beginning, and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again. It is, indeed, a wonderful life.

Wonderfully contingent, that is, in which chance plays an outsized role, along with natural selection and the constraints imposed by rules of body construction and good design.

So far as scientists can tell, there had been five mass extinctions of life on Earth due to tectonic pileups and volcanism, intense climate swings, ocean acidification and collisions with giant space rocks prior to the sixth one we’re in the midst of now due to human recklessness, ignorance and greed.

If the asteroid that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs and three-quarters of the Earth’s plant and animal species 65 million years ago had slammed into the moon instead, maybe mammals would never have evolved beyond burrowing detritus eaters. Perhaps a plodding, venal, dunderheaded Diplodocus would be sitting in the Oval Office today. Plus ça change.

Gould, only 60 when an aggressive cancer killed him in 2002, was raised in a secular Jewish home and did not formally practise any religion. Though he didn’t believe in God, he always preferred to describe himself as an agnostic on the eminently sensible ground that we just don’t know enough to rule in or rule out the existence of a Supreme Being.

On being asked by Napoléon where God fit into his mathematical model of the universe, French polymath Pierre-Simon Laplace is said to have replied: “Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.”

But the fact that we can come with ways to explain the cosmos that exclude cette hypothèse-là doesn’t falsify it. As Michael Pollan reports in his 2018 book How to Change Your Mind, many people he interviewed before they participated in psilocybin trials “started out stone-cold materialists or atheists … and yet had ‘mystical experiences’ that left them with the unshakable conviction that there was something more than we know — a ‘beyond’ of some kind that transcended the physical universe.”

Such testimonials, needless to say, fall far short of demonstrating that the participants’ new convictions are more reliable than their former ones. Mais qui sait? In the legendary words of one Sgt. Hans Georg Shultz, channelling Guy de Maupassant, channelling Michel de Montaigne, channelling Socrates, channelling the sound of one hand clapping, channelling your Grade 10 trigonometry experience: “I hear nothing, I see nothing, I know nothing.”

Gould’s take in his book Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life was that science has a magisterium: the nature of the universe and how it works. And so does religion: questions of meaning, morality and human values.

The less they have to say about each other’s domains, the better, so far as he was concerned.

Not that it matters more than the square root of Sweet Francis Ann, but my take on religion goes like this:

If there are riders and workarounds and schedules and amendments and annexations and adjuncts limiting the scope and applicability of Thou Shalt Not Kill, then friends, the warranty has expired. What remains is an empty Manila envelope sealed with a sick, white, clerical tongue.

But that’s just me. Mostly, I simply don’t want to hear any more about how everything happens for a reason or with an eye to teaching somebody some trite, hackneyed moral.

Linda Kasabian’s faith in her own significance as a member of the Manson cult notwithstanding, you have to wonder what invaluable teaching was absorbed by Sharon Tate — 26 and eight-and-a-half months pregnant at the time — while she was being hanged with a rope and stabbed 16 times.

In the versions of his story told in the Ketuvim and the Bible and the Quran, Job learns the value of biting his tongue and submitting to God’s will through a series of horrendous disasters. All’s well that ends well as he is ultimately rewarded with the restoration of his health, wealth and a beautiful new family.

Any thoughts on what his seven original children learned while suffering calamitous deaths?

Let’s not always see the same hands.

For people in single-member faith communities where everything is set up and maintained for their own education and edification, axiomatically, theirs is the only perspective that counts. Humble or vain — an irrelevant consideration, for their conceit is of an entirely different order — they are quite literally stuck on themselves.

Mummy never reached gaga Dwayne Hoover proportions in her narcissism, but as she aged, other people and the outer world partook of less and less relevance except as they related to her inner thoughts and deranged tarot card reading.

Not tarot cards you could see or touch. More like cosmic cryptograms embedded in quotidian mysteries only she could decipher with a sloe-eyed concentration so intense as to appear (from my perspective in the driver’s seat or across the room) as a type of rapture.

In one of my last lucid conversations with her, however, she admitted to being utterly flummoxed as to what God’s plan had been for her life. No one can fully access another’s experience, of course, but this uncharacteristic descent into a weary, placatory otherworldliness — a scrubby, desolate why-hast-Thou-forsaken-me territory — filled me with empathy. And sadness. And wonder at what had been the wonderful life of this beautiful woman.

What is your substance, whereof are you made that millions of strange shadows on you tend?

Normally, she could close the door to what was happening outside her mind and blissfully wander around inside it, in a virtual state of narcosis, until dinner. But even virtuoso solipsists get hungry. Maybe the à la carte special — drab, soggy Canadian nursing home slop — was a plastic spoon too far. The final paper straw.

In the end, Ed McMahon never did arrive with the big gold key to the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes. Cardboard Jesus never spoke to her directly from the lithograph.

What’s it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?

A few years before she died, we took Mummy on a jaunt around the city to look at Christmas light displays. The rocking motion of the car quickly put her to sleep, as it does with small children. When we got home, I asked her how she had enjoyed the ride.

“It was dark,” she said.