Good Shepherd
Providence and the Conspiracy of Accidents
In the Bible, God himself is represented as the shepherd of his people. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” (Psalm 23:1). “He is our God and we are his people whom he shepherds” (Psalm 95:7). The future Messiah is also described with the image of the shepherd: “Like a shepherd he feeds his flock; in his arms he gathers the lambs, carrying them in his bosom, and leading the ewes with care” (Isaiah 40:11). The good shepherd provides for the needs of his flocks. There is the meaning of the Divine providence. St John of the Cross said “the language of God is the experience God writes inside our lives.” James Mackey suggests that divine providence is “a conspiracy of accidents” through which God speaks.
Today such a concept of divine providence is not very popular. Our age tends to see this as too-connected to an unhealthy fatalism (“It’s all in God’s hands, I needn’t take all the necessary measures!”), an unhealthy fundamentalism (“God sent AIDS into the world as a punishment for sexual promiscuity!”), or an unhealthy theology of God (“God sends us natural and personal disasters to bring us back to our senses!”).
It’s good that our age rejects these false notions of providence because God does not start fires, floods, wars, AIDS, or anything else to punish us. Nature, chance, freedom, and brute contingency do. Sometimes, admittedly, sin is involved, but that’s not the point. God doesn’t send catastrophes to wake us up.
But to say that God doesn’t initiate or cause these things is not the same thing as saying that God doesn’t speak through them. God speaks through chance events, accidents, both good and bad. Past generations more easily grasped this.
My parents, for example, had a finely-tuned and theologically-correct sense of divine providence: They were farmers and, for them, like Abraham and Sarah of old, there were no accidents, only providence and the finger of God. If they had a good harvest, God was blessing them. If they had a poor one, well, they concluded that God wanted them to live on less for a while and for a good reason. And they would always in the end figure out that reason. Jesus called this “reading the signs of the times”. How do we do this? We do it by becoming meteorologists of soul who read the inner movements of the spirit in the outer weather of history.
In the conspiracy of accidents that make up the ordinary events of our everyday lives, the finger of God is writing and writing large. We are children of Israel, children of God, and children of our mothers and fathers in the faith. We need therefore, like them, to look at each and every event in our lives and ask ourselves the question: “What is God saying to us in this?” The language of God is the experience that God writes inside our lives. Reading that language, is an important form of prayer, one that takes us beyond simply saying prayers to more healthily living out the words: “Pray always”.
